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WSWS : News & Analysis : Australia & South Pacific

Extreme right-wing gains in Queensland election

A critical turning point in Australian politics

By the Editorial Board
24 June 1998

The results of the June 13 election in the Australian state of Queensland raise serious political questions for the working class. For the first time, a party of the extreme right -- the racist and anti-immigrant One Nation, headed by federal MP Pauline Hanson -- has achieved substantial backing in an Australian election, winning 11 seats in the 89-seat parliament.

Some 23 percent or nearly one in four voters cast a ballot for Hanson's party. While the support was concentrated in country areas and regional towns, One Nation received significant backing in a number of seats in the state capital of Brisbane, hard hit by unemployment and the destruction of social services.

The makeup of the next Queensland government is still in doubt, with no party holding a parliamentary majority. One Nation cut into the support base of all major parties, particularly the traditional conservatives -- the Liberal and National parties, which also hold power federally. The Liberals have been reduced to a rump of nine MPs, and the Nationals to 23.

Nationally these parties are now scrambling to shore up support prior to federal elections, due at any time within the next nine months. The One Nation vote has brought to the surface long-simmering tensions within the ruling federal coalition. While some Liberals have lately attacked One Nation policies, sections of the National Party are openly adopting aspects of Hanson's program, setting the stage for defections or splits.

National, Liberal and Labor bear direct responsibility for creating the social and political conditions in which an ignorant, bigoted individual has been able to exploit the widespread alienation and anger generated by a decade and a half of mass unemployment and deepening social dislocation.

One Nation represents the emergence of an incipient fascist organisation. Elements from militia groupings, the long established anti-semitic League of Rights, and other extreme right-wing groupings have connections with Hanson's organisation. Their presence finds its reflection in bizarre conspiracy theories involving the UN and other international bodies, and populist economic notions contained in One Nation speeches and policies.

For all its rhetoric about representing the ordinary voters, One Nation directs its central fire against the working class. Behind Hanson's cynical appeal to "equality" are policies which would strip away what remains of the limited rights and social benefits available to the most vulnerable sections of workers -- Aborigines, immigrants and welfare recipients.

Hanson's anti-working class program is a major factor in the unprecedented media coverage afforded her by the Packer and Murdoch conglomerates since the emergence of this previously unknown local politician during the 1996 elections. Her policies dovetail with the repeated demands of big business for all governments to accelerate the dismantling of the welfare state in line with policies being implemented internationally.

Hanson's emergence is part of an international phenomenon. Over the past decade, extreme right-wing populist and neo-fascist parties have re-emerged around the world, from Le Pen's National Front in France to the militia groupings in the United States.

In the 1930s, the working class suffered devastating blows as a result of the rise to power of the fascists in Italy, Germany, Spain and Portugal in the aftermath of bitter defeats and betrayals at the hands of the major workers' parties. Fascism was the means by which big business politically mobilised disoriented and impoverished layers of the middle class to smash all the organisations and gains of the working class.

One Nation is by no means a fully formed fascist party -- it is, at present, a disparate and highly unstable organisation. But the working class faces great dangers unless it begins to develop its own independent class response to the social and economic crisis created by the capitalist profit system. For workers, young people, and intellectuals, the first question which must be answered is how and why One Nation has been able to emerge.

The rise of extreme right-wing groupings globally is rooted in the social, political and economic processes brought about by profound changes in world economy over the last two decades. From the mid-1970s, driven by declining rates of profit, the major corporations began to internationalise production, using developments in computer and communication technologies to exploit sources of cheap labour in Asia, Latin America and elsewhere.

The globalisation of production has confronted governments internationally with new economic and political imperatives. In order to attract foreign investment and to make local industries "internationally competitive," all barriers to the free flow of capital across national boundaries have to be removed.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Australia was one of the most highly regulated economies in the world. All the major parties based their programs on high tariff barriers and tight controls on foreign investment, exchange and banking, in order to foster and protect industries limited to the small Australian market.

In rural areas, the National Party, previously the Country Party, championed what was jokingly referred to as "agrarian socialism" -- a raft of economic subsidies, marketing boards and other measures designed to bolster the incomes of farmers and the country towns which depended on them.

The ability of successive governments to maintain such controls and subsidies as well as to make certain concessions to the working class in the form of the welfare state depended, first, on the regulated character of world economy and, second, on high prices for exports of primary products. As the saying went, Australia rode on the back of the sheep, then later the miner.

But as the mechanisms for international economic regulation began to break down in the 1970s, and commodity prices fell sharply in the 1980s, the demands of the banks and the major corporations for the complete deregulation of the Australian economy became more insistent. The Labor Party won the 1983 elections and set about imposing the big business policies which the previous Liberal government had failed to implement.

During their 13 years in office, the Laborites floated the Australian dollar, chopped tariff rates, deregulated the banking system and carried out a systematic assault on the wages, conditions and living standards of the working class. Working in tandem with the state governments, the federal Labor began the process of undermining the welfare state in order to hand out substantial tax breaks and financial benefits to private investors.

While the major companies and financial institutions reaped huge profits, countless small and medium sized businesses went to the wall, factories were closed, and thousands of farmers were driven off the land. Unemployment and poverty became a permanent feature of society. The Howard government, which came to power in 1996, only continued and deepened the same big business agenda.

Over the past two decades, the gulf between rich and poor has grown dramatically. A relatively thin social stratum -- fund managers, financial brokers, top corporate executives, business advisers and others -- have enriched themselves through the very restructuring processes which have had such devastating consequences for the working class and large sections of the middle class.

Around 30 percent of the population, including many families with wage earners, now struggle to survive on incomes below the official poverty line. The carve-up of public services such as health, education, welfare, housing and child care has placed many in a desperate situation leading to a growing incidence of suicide, petty crime, family breakdown, psychiatric disorders and other social ills.

As a result of this social polarisation, the base of support for both Labor and the coalition parties has shrunk dramatically. Broad layers of the population have become profoundly alienated from the entire framework of official politics as their concerns over jobs and falling living standards, and their fears for their children's future, have been completely ignored in the political arena.

What began as outrage and distrust has since hardened into a deep-seated and abiding hostility to the official parties, the mass media and state bureaucracies, as all the attempts to pressure governments to alter course have failed. In the 1980s, workers and sections of the middle class switched parties, backed independents, voted informal or supported the Democrats and Greens, all in the vain hope that the government would be forced to moderate its policies. Now voters have concluded that all the main parties are tarred with the same brush.

One Nation has been able to exploit these sentiments, particularly among layers of small farmers, hard-pressed businessmen, contractors, and more backward layers of the working class. By a process of trial and error, Hanson and her advisers have cobbled together an eclectic nationalist program which appeals to the unexamined prejudices and half truths which passed for political commonsense in the past. The careful cultivation of her image as an uncompromising rebel strikes a chord with those disgusted with official politics.

The core of One Nation's program is a return to the policies of economic nationalism including tight restrictions on foreign investment and preferences for Australian companies and corporations. Its outlook reflects those business interests which have been unable to compete on the new globalised markets and face extinction. But these policies find a certain appeal among older people who crave the relative security of the post-war boom when a steady job, an adequate wage and access to public education and health care were within the reach of many working class families.

It was certainly not inevitable that the present social crisis would strengthen extreme right-wing formations like One Nation. The crucial question is why falling living standards and political alienation have not given rise to a broad anti-capitalist movement, particularly among more conscious layers of the working class, towards a socialist alternative.

The chief responsibility rests with the old bureaucratic leaderships of the working class -- the Labor and trade union apparatus -- which have ruthlessly imposed the program of big business, and suppressed and sabotaged every strike and protest in opposition, from the protracted struggle of sacked SEQEB electricity linesmen in Queensland in 1985 to the latest lockout of Patrick's stevedores on the docks.

The Labor and union bureaucrats have created, not only the social conditions, but also the political climate which One Nation now exploits. In one way or another, all of the elements of Hanson's program -- her national chauvinism, her law-and-order demagogy and her attacks on immigrants, the unemployed, Aborigines and welfare recipients have deep roots within the ALP itself, which was founded on the platform of White Australia racism. The very name "One Nation" is taken from the title of the Keating government's economic program. Former Labor MP Graeme Campbell, who now heads the Australia First Party, an organisation as right-wing as Hanson's One Nation, openly campaigned on racist policies for years before finally quitting the ALP in 1996.

Throughout its term of office, the Labor government carried out a sustained and vicious assault on the basic rights of refugees and immigrant workers in a campaign aimed at scapegoating them for the lack of jobs and social services the ALP's policies were creating. With the support of the Liberals, the Labor government imprisoned hundreds of mainly Asian refugees for years in concentration camp style conditions, stripped them of all legal rights and forcibly deported them. Federal police and immigration officials, operating with the backing of the unions, rounded up and deported thousands of so-called illegal immigrants in factory raids. Moreover, it was the Labor government which first axed welfare benefits for newly arrived immigrants, after the NSW Labor Council leadership insisted on such a measure.

At the same time, Labor systematically promoted multiculturalism and the ideology of "identity", which defines and divides people on the basis of race, skin colour, language, and ethnicity. The large sums of government money provided to institutions such as the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission and conservative ethnic organisations did not advance the welfare or living standards of Aboriginal or immigrant workers one iota. It was used to cultivate privileged middle class elites to promote identity politics and thus undermine the development of class consciousness, aimed at unifying all workers in a common struggle against the profit system.

All capitalist politicians now base themselves on one form of racial politics or another. The protests of various Labor, Liberal and National politicians against Hanson's racism are based on entirely pragmatic and self-interested calculations that One Nation's prominence will damage economic and trade ties with the Asian-Pacific region.

While there is deep hostility in the working class to the Labor and trade union bureaucracy, workers have yet to come to terms with the program of Laborism and turn to an alternative, socialist perspective.

There is no way out of the economic and social crisis facing millions of working people within the framework of the capitalist system. The response of the banks and big business to the intensifying economic breakdown centred in Asia will be to demand an ever-deepening assault on jobs and conditions, and the further dismantling of the welfare state.

The problem is not globalisation and the integration of world economy. These are fundamentally progressive developments, associated with far-reaching technological achievements, which have the potential to provide plenty for all the world's people.

The issue is that these vast resources remain in the grip of the inherently exploitative private profit system, increasingly dominated by competing transnational conglomerates. Against the global operations of big business, workers can only advance their interests through a unified struggle, across national lines, guided by their own international strategy.

Australian workers are part of an international class. Economic hardship, declining living standards and mass unemployment affect workers in every part of the world, regardless of race, ethnic origin or nationality. Transnational corporations are constantly seeking to exploit divisions in the working class in order to lower costs and undercut their rivals. Inevitably a defeat for workers in one country or region becomes the basis for a fresh assault on workers elsewhere.

Workers must reject all forms of racism and nationalism and give their unstinting support to their class brothers and sisters engaged in struggles around the world. All immigration controls and discriminatory regulations must be abolished so that all workers have the right to live, work and study in whatever country they choose with full citizenship rights, including full and immediate access to social benefits and democratic rights.

To achieve genuine social equality requires a massive redistribution of social wealth from the capitalist class to those whose labour produces it -- the masses of working people. This will require the complete reorganisation of society from top to bottom on the basis of social need, instead of private profit. To fight for such a perspective, the working class needs a new mass workers party, fighting to establish a workers' government, and reorganise society totally on socialist and internationalist foundations.

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See Also:
Germany: state elections in Saxony-Anhalt
Increased vote for the extreme right
[9 May 1998]
Ten months of the Jospin government in France
Why are the fascists gaining influence?
[28 April 1998]
Presidential elections in Austria
Preparing to bring the neo-fascists into government
[25 April 1998]