David Elliott is a member of ISA Australia.
The election brought a shock to the two-party system in Australia, but one that has been coming for a long time. 1 in 3 voters rejected the major parties as their first preference, the highest proportion in history, up from 1 in 4 at the previous election. Younger people and women played a decisive role in bringing down the conservative Morrison government.
Globally, the last decade has seen a collapse in support for traditional parties, driven by ongoing economic crises. The shift away from the major parties in Australia has been focused on the cities, which are at the centre of a seemingly endless housing crisis. People are dealing with rising costs of living and stagnant wages, and are increasingly distrustful of politicians.
For years, we have seen right-wing governments around the world come to power and appear to get away with outrageous behaviour. They have done this by appealing to people’s dissatisfaction. In this election, that strategy failed. Instead, the widespread dissatisfaction ended 9 years of increasingly right-wing Coalition government, and very clearly rejected the ‘alternatives’ on the far right.
The Morrison government’s downfall
The Morrison government was seen as a government of bullies and thugs. They used the courts and the state to pursue political opponents, whistleblowers and activists. Rape, sexual assault and victim-blaming at Parliament House were met by mass protests in March last year, and Morrison famously said that the protestors should consider themselves lucky to be protesting in a country where they wouldn’t be shot for it.
On top of everything else, their failures in response to the bushfires, pandemic and floods shaped the lives of most Australians over the last two years. The bushfires and floods highlighted the Coalition’s failure to act on climate change.
The Labor Party has won the 76 lower house seats needed to form government, while the Liberal-National Coalition is on track to end up with less than 60 seats, mainly due to the loss of Liberal Party seats in the cities. While the swing against the Liberals was massive, Labor’s first preference vote was also the lowest it has ever been. There was no great enthusiasm for Labor, which has moved a long way from genuinely representing workers.
They lost support to the Greens in the cities. Flood-affected Queensland saw significant victories for the Greens. The seat of Brisbane was won by a young openly gay retail worker and RAFFWU member, Stephen Bates.
Last election, 1 in 4 gave their first preference vote to candidates outside of the major parties. While the vote against the major parties increased, the Greens did not increase their vote. They didn’t appeal to the anti-establishment, anti-politician mood in 2019.
This election, the situation changed, and the Greens received the largest first-preference vote they have ever had on a federal level. They have won at least 4 seats in the lower house, and now hold 12 in the Senate.
A key factor in the downfall of the Coalition was a vote for the “teal” independents (the colour they used, combining blue for conservative and green). These are a group of conservative independents who campaigned on climate change and the treatment of women. The Liberal Party lost a number of seats to the teals. One of those who lost their seat was treasurer Josh Frydenberg, running in the affluent seat of Kooyong in Melbourne. Frydenberg was considered a contender for the next leader of the Liberal Party, and the party is now left with the widely hated Peter Dutton in charge.
Rejection of the ‘culture wars’
Six months ago, there were large anti-vaccination mandate protests around the country, led by right-wing figures who believed their political moment had come. But attempts to turn this movement into a vote for the far right in the Australian election have failed.
In November, we wrote that it was important not to overstate the influence of the anti-vaccination mandate movement. They did not represent a majority of people. The far right could not even be fully honest about their real politics within that movement.
The anti-mandate movement drew in people who were disenfranchised and alienated. Trust in capitalist institutions, from parliament, to the banking system, to journalism has been in decline for a long time.
The election of Trump in the US was partly a rejection of establishment politics. Billionaire Clive Palmer, former Liberal MP Craig Kelly and figures like Pauline Hanson thought they could recreate what he had done, using the United Australia Party and One Nation.
UAP did not win a single lower house seat, despite Clive Palmer spending $100 million of his own money on the UAP campaign. All he achieved was a slight increase to their primary vote in the Senate (at time of writing not all Senate seats have been confirmed).
One Nation saw a swing towards them, but only because they ran in three times as many seats as in the last election — their support per seat actually weakened. Their vote in Queensland fell by as much as 6%, and Hanson herself only narrowly managed to keep her Senate seat.
Palmer, Hanson and the others like them cynically tried to take advantage of increasing polarisation in society. This polarisation is being driven by distrust of the establishment, not by any broad genuine attraction to far right ideas.
The Liberal Party misjudged people in a similar way. They tried to run a campaign on “culture war” politics: Morrison personally endorsed candidate Katherine Deves, who ran on a platform of bigotry against trans people. Deves was defeated by Zali Steggal, a teal incumbent. Steggal had won the seat in 2019 from Tony Abbott, who built a reputation of opposition to women’s and LGBTIQ rights.
At the last minute, as people were voting, the Liberal Party in NSW sent a mass text-out announcing the interception of a boat of refugees from Sri Lanka. In 2001, the Howard government was re-elected after whipping up racist sentiments around a Norwegian boat, the Tampa, that tried to land in Australia carrying refugees who they had rescued at sea. This became known as the “Tampa election,” and both Labor and Liberal have used propaganda over refugee arrivals to fight elections ever since. The mass text was a farcical attempt to make history repeat, and it did not save them.
Albanese government already shows that voting out Coalition is not enough
In contrast, the incoming government made a pre-election promise to allow the Nadesalingam family to return to Biloela. They originally came here as refugees, have raised their children here, and were accepted into the community in Queensland. The Coalition then removed the family from their home four years ago in a pre-dawn raid, and placed them into detention. Their treatment has been emblematic of the cruel refugee policies maintained by the Australian government, and Labor’s promise to allow them to return was quite popular.
But Labor has not changed its approach toward other refugees, and continues to support mandatory detention. One of the first acts of the Albanese government was to direct the Australian Border Force to turn back the Sri Lankan refugee boat intercepted on the day of the election.
As Labor comes to power, we are facing a worsening cost of living and housing crisis. Labor’s policies for the housing crisis are all primarily focused on home-buyers, but a third of workers rent. Not only are the current schemes capped at 10,000 places per year, but increasing numbers of younger workers face renting for life, and will never be among the target group for these kinds of policies. Schemes addressing home-buyers don’t do anything for the majority of people.
More than 119,000 people are on waiting lists for public housing that last for years. 78% of the people on the Victorian priority waiting list at the moment were placed on the list before the pandemic, and for the last few years the list has only gotten longer. Labor has plans to address this by building limited numbers of “affordable” houses — federal Labor plans to build 30,000 over five years.
They specify “affordable” as this is not public housing, but an attempt to introduce stock into the private housing market, in some cases as “social housing” (privately owned charity housing). The fact that housing is a private, for-profit market is the reason for the housing crisis to begin with.
Rising cost of living
The cost of living crisis is being driven by flat wages and by inflation growing at its fastest pace in 20 years (ABC News, 8/5/2022). Prices on groceries are predicted to rise between 5% and 50% in the next six months, and lines at food banks are growing.
Labor and the Coalition together are the architects of the wage stagnation that we face today. The Labor party weakened the union movement during the 1980s and 90s, introducing bans on striking and limiting worker’s pay increases. They reinforced these policies under the Rudd-Gillard government with the Fair Work Act.
Strikes and organisation by workers themselves are the best way to win higher wages and better conditions. But Labor has no intention of removing the strict limits on strike action that they have introduced in the past. The Albanese government also ruled out substantially increasing welfare while in opposition.
They have made a submission to Fair Work Australia to support a 5.1% rise in the minimum wage, but when this policy was announced, businesses immediately began threatening to raise prices to negate the effect.
Richard Deniss of the Australia Institute has commented: “Inflation in Australia is more at risk from a profit grab than it is from a wage breakout, and it’s irresponsible that so many firms would be using small wage increases to justify big increases in their profit margin.”
This highlights the fact that capitalism itself is the problem — wages and profits contradict each other. We need a party of, by and for workers, which does not accept the legitimacy of capitalist profits, and focuses instead on ensuring everyone can meet their basic needs.
The incoming treasurer, Jim Chalmers, has spent some time managing expectations around the budget. Before the election, he told journalists: “We do not pretend that a new government can click its fingers and clean up all of the mess that this [the Morrison] government’s created,” and this will be something we can expect to hear a lot from the Albanese government.
There is more than enough wealth in society to address the rising cost of living, to properly fund health, education and welfare, to build high-quality public housing and to transition to an environmentally sustainable economy. But this wealth is taken as profit by big business, and Labor does not intend to touch it. That is the real reason that any change will be limited.
Action on climate change at last?
Despite the limits of Labor, and the low enthusiasm for them before the election, the results have given people some hope. One of the biggest stories of the election is the rising generation of young people voting for action on climate change.
This will be a boost to a lot of people, after so many years of inaction on climate. One of the reasons for this inaction has been the refusal of parties to go up against the capitalist system. For action on climate, we need massive, immediate public construction of renewable energy infrastructure, investment in public transport, and agricultural reform.
The whole problem is that we have no control over the decisions of capitalist investors in the energy industry. We need to take energy and mining under public control, otherwise the decisions are all in the hands of profiteers. We cannot control what we don’t own.
The Albanese government doesn’t have solid plans to build the infrastructure necessary, or to nationalise any part of the energy industry. Labor’s climate policies are based on market mechanisms. While the Greens have more ambitious plans on paper, in the past they have watered down their demands to support more market-based approaches to climate.
We may see the right-wing try to use this to turn climate into a wedge issue again, especially if the Greens, teals and Labor propose that working-class people shoulder the cost of a transition to lower carbon emissions.
Already, privatised energy retailers are pushing up the costs of gas and electricity, with price rises of 40% projected over the next two years. As the incoming government fails to deal with cost of living issues, millions of people will be placed under extreme stress.
The cost of living needs to be directly addressed, and only an approach that comes up against the capitalist system can do this. We need to build mass movements to fight for solutions that challenge the system, instead of trying to compromise with it. This means organising independently of capitalist politicians.
We need to rebuild movements against climate change, for women’s and LGBTIQ rights, against racism and for Aboriginal rights. We need to recreate a fighting union movement that stands independently of every capitalist party.
We need a party of, by, and for ordinary working-class people. Capitalism doesn’t have solutions to our problems — we need to fight for democratic control over the economy, and for a socialist world.
