Die Beerdigung des gerechten Australiens
lala 14 Oct 2004 16:16 GMT (traduit par lala)Die konservative Howard-Regierung Australiens wurde am Samstag, den 9. Oktober mit leicht gestiegener Mehrheit wiedergewählt. Was die Bevölkerung am meisten störte war die gesteigerte Kraft der Konservativen im Senat (dem Oberhaus des Bundesparlaments). Die rechte, christliche Family First Partei wählte einen Senator aus dem Bundeststaat Victoria vor der Labor Partei ins Oberhaus. Er wird die Macht wohl vertragen und viel Unterstützung durch das Reformprogramm der neo-liberalen Regierungs-Koalition (die die AustralierInnen 'ökonomisch rational' nennen) genießen, als eine Art Gegenleistung für die konservativen 'familien-freundlichen'.
Funeral of fair Australia protestNach den falschen Angaben von Interessenraten und der darauf folgenden Abschreck-Kampagne; dem Gequatsche über die Mythen des Terrorismus; dem Verrat von Gewerkschaften; und der allgemeinen vorstädterischen Apathie, gehen die Jahre unter Howard weiter. Trotz der bewährten Unterstützung der Menschenrechtsverletzungen in Ausreisezentren in der ganzen Nation; dem Tod von 15,000 Irakern; der Vernachlässigung von indigenen Menschen; Umweltzerstörung; der Entstellung des Gesundheitswesens, entschlossen sich zwischen 48 % und 52 % der WählerInnen George Bushs "Hilfssheriff" für einige weitere Jahre im Amt zu behalten.
[Indymedia Melbourne | Indymedia Perth | Indymedia Sydney | Indymedia Brisbane Indymedia Adelaide]
Dieses konservative "Mandat" wird höchstwahrscheinlich folgende Gesetze unterstützen: ein zweigleisiges Gesundheitssystem, die Abholzung von altem Wald in Tasmanien, Verstärkung der Diskriminierung gegen Schwule und Lesben, zweigleisige Bildung, unfaire Kündigungsgesetze werden geändert, dass sie nur noch kleine Betriebe betreffen, den Erhalt von Invaliditäts-Renten erschweren und andere soziale Einschnitte, die Toprate der persönlichen Einkommenssteuer senken, das Verwerfen des Industrieprämien-Systems und der Unterstützung indiviueller Verträge, die Restriktionen von Medien-Eignern zu lockern, den Verkauf von Telstra (des Telekommunikations-Unternehmens, das zum Großteil der Regierung gehört), und verschärfte Zensur.
Die Grünen erhielten mehr Stimmen - mit fast einer Million Stimmen erreichten sie fast 7 % der Gesamtstimmen. Sie kührten mit nahezu absoluter Mehrheit einen Senator aus Tasmanien. West Australien wird wahrscheinlich auch einen Grünen-Politiker zum Senator machen und sie sind noch immer im Rennen, den 6. Senator für Queensland und Süd Australien zu wählen.
Während die Debatte darüber weitergeht, was während den Wahlen geschah, wird schon eifrig über die Alternativen zu einem noch unangenehmeren Australien debattiert und es sind ein Konvergenz-Zentrum vor dem Baxter Abschiebelager zu Ostern 2005 und Anti-Kriegs Proteste gegen das System geplant.
Political polarisation without movement for change
fifel 14.Oct.2004 01:16
Australia's been undergoing a long period of political polarization, beginning in the late 1980s when the Accord plus interest rates and union bureaucratisation and mergers gutted the trade union movement.
This lead to the creation of a series right wing movement movements appealing to nationalist workers.
At the same time, social progressives have abandoned the ALP, realising its (moderate) claims to "Whitlamite" reforms are bogus. But they have't built a social or union movement.
Finally, the Greens are emerging as an interesting social force. But they're far too electoralist: their involvement in movements seem to service their electoralism. And their membership isn't active enough--certainly not in unions.
Without a growing, militant union movement like in the 1960s fighting against Penal codes, and the 1970s fighting for social change there's no change of a socially progressive agenda getting up in Australia.
For too long people have put their faith in a centrist party in the senate the "Democrats" to defend their rights. The collapse of the Democrats over the GST despite rank and file revolts shows what happens to a party without an activist base.
Upset?
Curious George 14.Oct.2004 03:06
I would say that if the conservatives have been reelected with an INCREASED majority, that indicates that people are not as upset as the posting indicates. Perhaps people in down under are smart enough to see through the Indymedia/progressive B.S.
Indigenous leader Sam Watson on the Oz elections
Socialist Alliance, Brisbane 15.Oct.2004 17:50
Sam Watson of the SA Indigenous-only senate candidates list
The following is a message from Sam Watson, indigenous activist, writer, film-maker and lead Socialist Alliance Senate candidate in Queensland:
Comrades,
Peace, love and solidarity to all. We fought a great fight and we achieved great things; but the Howard forces lied and intimidated the Australian people and they dominated the ballot box on the day. This nation does not have a heart or soul, Howard and his policies have progressivley stripped this land of every last semblance of compassion and humanity. The Australian electorate no longer has a human spirit, in its place it has an American Express credit card and it is in debit - big time !!
Now that the dust has settled it is time for the SA to step forward and work with the forces of the left and refocus and regroup. I believe that we must call a National Day of Action and send a clear and unambigious message to Howard and his Capitalist masters, that we are still here and we will continue to fight and we will continue to resist. The issues that we based our campaign around are still there and we are the only ones who will champion those causes and give voice to the powerless and the oppressed. There is no more time for Sorry Bizness, this is the time for political bizness and Howard and his new government are our primary target - let's get on with it !
I say a NDA should be called asap.
STRENGTH AND SOLIDARITY
SAM WATSON
PROUD AND DEFIANT SENATE CANDIDATE FOR THE SOCIALIST ALLIANCE
Greens’ gains take edge off Howard’s win
Green Left Weekly 15.Oct.2004 18:36
The current cover page
Greens’ gains take edge off Howard’s win
http://www.GreenLeft.org.au/back/2004/602/
by Peter Boyle
The pollsters and bookies were right after all. The Liberal-National coalition won the election comfortably, increasing its House of Representatives majority. It also has a good chance of controlling the Senate with the help of a new right-wing Christian fundamentalist party, Family First.
Fear and greed did the job for PM John Howard. His campaign played on the interest rate anxieties of folk burdened with huge home mortgages, and he topped it up with some $6 billion worth of bribes, which will most benefit the already very well-off.
Latham promised that a Labor government would stick to the neoliberal script in economic policy, but critical swathes of voters in marginal seats were persuaded not to risk a change in “economic managers” and were blackmailed into trying to placate the corporate gods with yet more tax cuts and profits-first policies on matters such as industrial relations and the Kyoto greenhouse protocols.
But there is good news for the progressive side of politics in the further advance of the Greens who have decisively displaced the Australian Democrats as the third force in federal parliament. The Greens won 716,253 first preference votes in the Senate (with 80% of votes counted) and in several lower house seats won up to 20% of the primary vote. Together with the Socialist Alliance’s 10,263 Senate votes (and 11,683 votes in the lower house), and that of other progressive parties, this made up a decent progressive vote.
The Greens won 8% of the lower house vote across the nation, up 3%, but failed to hold its only lower-house seat, Cunningham, which it won in a by-election in 2002. However the Greens may increase their Senate numbers from two to as many as five.
The Greens have been the only parliamentary party to consistently take progressive positions on key political issues such as the war on Iraq, the environment, health and education.
While Labor leader Mark Latham raised expectations with his promises to bring Australian troops home from Iraq by Christmas, sign the Kyoto Protocol, defend Medicare and to save Tasmania’s old-growth forests, each of these promises was hedged. Only some of the military detachments in Iraq would be withdrawn, the public-health crisis would only be patched and even his much-vaunted forest pledge was to call for another inquiry into the issue.
During the election campaign both Labor and Liberal leaders tried their best to avoid discussing the war on Iraq. Latham was only prepared to speak about increased military intervention “against terrorism” in South East Asia.
Another major moral issue that has polarised Australia — the mandatory and indefinite detention without trial of asylum seekers who enter Australia “illegally” — was also screened out of the election debate. It was left to parties like the Greens and the Socialist Alliance to raise the issues of war and refugees.
If the Coalition ends up controlling the Senate, we can expect the Howard government to go on an offensive on several fronts. Even before Howard claimed victory on election night, Coalition ministers were raising the possiblility of privatising the remaining half of Telstra and the banks were salivating at the prospects of more market deregulation.
Given the escalating war in Iraq, it is possible that Howard may respond positively to a US request for more troops.
Workers also face a new wave of anti-union legislation and a renewed push for individual contracts in the workplace. The High Court has recently sought to make all political and solidarity industrial action illegal, and militant union leaderships like the construction division of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union are likely to come under greater attack.
Howard does not really have a mandate for these attacks because he did his best to keep such issues out of the campaign, focusing on the various election bribes instead.
What this will mean is that resistance to these attacks will now have to be waged outside parliament, in grassroots community campaigns. If people want to stop these attacks — and surveys show that we have clear majorities on our side on all the big issues of war, refugees and the environment — then they will have to take to the streets again to resist.
The networks are there for a people’s resistance to Howard’s agenda. Activists all around the country have been patiently building them up over the last few months. We saw these networks in action at the October 1-3 “End the lies” protests and we will see them at work again over the coming months.
Before these elections, hundreds of thousands of people who disagreed strongly with Howard’s pro-war, anti-social and anti-environment agenda hoped that the job might be done through the ballot box on October 9. They were disappointed.
The electoral system is rigged in favour of the ruling corporate elite. The ALP “opposition” was never a real opposition. It continues to share the Coalition’s neoliberal, corporate-first ideology and agenda. The real opposition over the next period will be made in the streets.
--
Socialist vote `puts us in a better position to fight back’
by Alison Dellit
The Socialist Alliance is likely to receive more than 12,000 votes across the 26 lower house seats it stood in, with slightly less votes in the Senate. It was the first time the alliance contested a federal election campaign with its name on the ballot paper.
With around three-quarters of the ballot counted on October 10, the Socialist Alliance had received 11,723 votes for the lower house, and 10,263 votes in the upper house.
According to Lisa Macdonald, a national coordinator of the alliance and its candidate for Reid, these voters and the large number of progressive people who voted for the Greens, mean that the alliance is better prepared to fight the inevitable attacks of the incoming Coalition government. She said that the Socialist Alliance will be ``aiming to connect as many as possible of these thousands of left voters into grassroots campaigns against unjust wars, detention of refugees and privatisation, and in defence of union and democratic rights”.
The Socialist Alliance’s average vote declined slightly on the party’s 2001 vote, to around three-quarters of a percent. The results varied significantly between seats, with the highest votes in the ACT seat of Fraser (2%) and Perth (1.33%) where the alliance was on top of the ballot. The Fraser candidate, James Vassilopoulos, also scored the alliance’s highest vote in the 2001 federal election.
In the inner Sydney seat of Grayndler, the Socialist Alliance’s Sue Johnson won 1.3% of the vote, a marginal increase on the previous federal election result. David Glanz, running in the Wills electorate in Melbourne, won 1.21% of the vote, and in Sydney’s western suburbs, Macdonald scored 1.08%.
In the Senate, the alliance’s vote increased slightly overall. The raw figure, however, obscures a very different voting pattern. Whereas in the 2001 election, nearly two-thirds of the alliance’s Senate vote came from Brisbane, where the alliance was on the top of the ballot, in 2004, the vote was more evenly distributed. In NSW, for example, the alliance’s Senate vote has tripled, with 25% of the vote not yet counted. In Victoria, it is also likely to be triple that of the previous election.
Other left-wing parties also recorded modest lower-house results. In Newcastle, one of the few seats where the alliance’s vote increased, the Progressive Labour Party’s vote halved from the last election, to 2.49%. The Socialist Equality Party averaged less than 0.4% of a vote in the three seats in which it stood. In Batman, the Indigenous-rights party Your Voice’s candidate won 0.86% of the vote.
In the Senate nationally, the PLP scored 13,823 votes and the HEMP party won 32,926 votes. In Victoria, Your Voice won 5463 votes, while in NSW the Save the ADI Site won 2559 votes, the Nuclear Disarmament Party 1617 votes and the Socialist Equality Party 269.
The far-right Citizens Electoral Council, which ran the largest election campaign it has in years, was soundly beaten by the Socialist Alliance in all but two seats that both parties contested.
Macdonald said that the alliance’s campaigning will increase, rather than decrease, now that the election is over. “With Howard on the offensive again — and the severe limitations of voting as a tool for social change being clear to all — I think we will see a greater preparedness of progressive-minded people to take extra-parliamentary action. And the Socialist Alliance will, as always, be there on the streets, in the workplaces and on campuses helping to organise people into a far more real and powerful opposition than exists in parliament at the moment.”
From Green Left Weekly, October 13, 2004 @
sore losers
anonymous 16.Oct.2004 18:29
Ya know the guy one by a landslide and a loudmouthed few are crying about it, the man was elected democratically, and so was everyone else, how is that unfair?
think about who owns the media in OZ - murdoch & co ...
aussie 19.Oct.2004 01:50
it's big capital who own and misinformes the voters.
democracy? gimme a break, stupid.
especially in australia, where the media is owned by just
3 men: murdoch, packer, fairfax. noone else in the mainstream.
Curious George The No-Talent
Kropotkinist 29.Nov.2004 03:18
I hope the hole in the ozone layer gives you oversized hemorrhoids. You cozening little corporate runt.
As long as we have a king in heaven we shall never be free on earth.
Bakunin