Posted by John, March 21st, 2010 - under Labor Party, South Australia, Tasmania, The Liberals.

Tags: ALP, Australian Labor Party, Australian politics

There was enough in the voting in Tasmania and South Australia for all the conservative parties to claim a victory of sorts.

The Greens in Tasmania polled 21 percent of the vote. They may hold the balance of power, assuming Labor and the Liberals don’t shut them out with some shady deal.

The Greens’ 21 percent, as their leader Nick McKim said, is the largest vote for the Greens in any State or Territory in Australia. It is, he said, a vote for the new believers. Well, maybe, but believers in what?

A mixed economy where production for profit is the touchstone which determines what can and can’t be done?

A vote for the Greens is not a vote for the Left. Much of the support for the Greens comes from (former) Liberal voters.

As the Greens move closer to power they move to the right. This will create tensions in their cross class alliance between the new believers and the Green left over the way forward. Like the Democrats there is a real possibility they will wallow in mainstream mediocrity.

McKim stressed to business that the Greens were a safe pair of hands. While I suspect Gunns won’t think so, the rest of business in Tasmania can breathe easy.

Labor in Tasmania has lost Government in their own right, but could govern with the support of the Greens in a deal similar to that in the ACT.

Here in Canberra we Territorians have a minority Labor Government which rules with the support of the Greens. Nothing much has changed politically since October 2008 – still the same old conservative offerings from all sides.

Certainly the ACT Greens have imposed absolutely no radical program on Canberra’s local ALP Government and it looks as if they will let Labor get away with large public service wage and jobs cuts.

Even worse, in Tasmania there is a chance the Liberals will do some sort of Faustian deal with one of the other parties and govern with the support of either Labor or the Greens.

The Greens have not ruled out a governing coalition with the Liberals.

In South Australia, despite the fruitcake faction of the bourgeoisie centred around The Australian having wet dreams about the Liberals winning, it looks as if Labor will govern with a majority of one or three.

Labor across Australia will claim this as evidence the ALP is not on the nose, or as South Australian Labor leader Mike Rann put it, the sweetest victory of all. Yet the swing against Labor was over seven percent, and the ALP did not win the majority of votes on a two party preferred basis. The Liberals did.

So Labor has scraped back into power in South Australia with the support of less than half the population. This appears a victory to them because for the ALP and other bourgeois politicians the key is the reins of power in a capitalist parliament, not what the majority want.

In Tasmania the evidence against Labor – a twelve percent swing – is a little more inconvenient for the Rudd Government.

So what we have from Federal Labor and their apologists is spin about state issues deciding the results and that these two State Governments were old. True, but not relevant.

The important issue is how many rejected Labor at the state level because of what it stands for – nothing but making life easy for the profiteers. If so then the ALP federally will also have a problem because that is its philosophy too.

Indeed Rudd has modelled his Government on Rann’s ‘do nothing to upset the bosses’ approach.

The levels of unemployment in both States are low by historical standards. Yet there were big swings against both State Labor Governments.

The Rudd Labor Government may be starting to have a few nightmares that substantial swings like those in South Australia and Tasmania could happen against a Government who ‘saved’ the country from the Global Financial Crisis yet has done little for health, education or wages. A 7 percent swing would destroy Rudd Labor.

The Liberals will sprout rubbish about the level of the swings and themselves spin about spin. They will say the tide has turned.

Yet this is not a seismic change. This is the battle between various factions of conservatism.

There is no sizeable political left in Australia capable of acting as a magnet for change.

There won’t be till the more organised and militant section of the working class revives and begins the process of setting up a radical alternative to Labor, one that challenges the very rule of capital.

Until that time the conservative yo-yoing between Labor and the Liberals will continue, and the lack of a left wing alternative allows the Greens to take that mantle for the moment.

The task before the Left is immense. But our steady work will and must continue to lay the foundations in the future for a mass revolutionary party of the working class.

Readers might also like to look at ‘We need a left alternative to Labor and the Greens’ by Andrew Cheeseman in Socialist Alternative.