By Lisa Macdonald
Nine years after its formation, the Victorian-based Rainbow Alliance has launched a discussion which will determine a new set of aims, a new structure and name, and possibly even its future existence.
Over recent years, many organisations and individual activists on the left have agonised over the way forward for progressive politics in the face of a strengthening push by the economic rationalist brigade, the sell-outs of the trade union bureaucracy, the decline of the social movements and the election of Liberal and National Party governments.
There have been as many different responses to this "crisis" as there are shades of red in progressive politics. For many individual activists, focusing their energy and resources on one single-issue campaign seems the best way to have an impact. Some have decided to return to the ALP fold, including many in the former Communist Party of Australia, which dissolved itself in 1990. Others, like the Australian Greens, have grown in size and organisational strength but narrowed their strategic perspective, throwing their lot into the electoral arena as an alternative force for progressive reform. Still others, like the Democratic Socialists, have maintained the vision of fundamentally transforming society through mass action and thrown their resources into the building of independent, anti-capitalist movements and campaigns.
Rainbow Alliance is now confronting the same questions. In one of a number of articles printed in the May edition of the Alliance's Victoria newsletter on the question "where to now?", Michael Langley comments, "Since the 1992 election the RA has drifted, unable to find its way ... we, like other groups in Victoria, lacked the energy and know-how to effectively challenge the government."
Commenting on the alliance's decision to contest the last federal election, Langley says, "A failure to attract more votes than the informal vote can in no way be argued as being a success. Such a poor vote is unlikely to halt our decreasing membership and move us out from the political margins."
Langley identifies as a source of the alliance's failure the inability of people within and beyond the alliance to understand the concept of a "political movement", as opposed to a political party, for example. He also refers to the differences that emerged in the organisation over electoral work, which resulted in the majority of Queensland alliance members joining the Greens in the early 1990s.
Founder and spokesperson Joe Camilleri argues that the alliance should not be closed down but rather given a new lease of life by embarking on "a major program to stimulate serious thinking and discussion about the present and future state of Australian politics". To this end, he proposes a series of discussion forums and a range of new publications, but advocates abandoning formal policy development (an area of work the alliance often presented as its major contribution to the left), mass campaigns and electoral intervention.
These tasks, says Camilleri, "should be left to other groups", freeing the alliance to "sharpen our analysis of the situation, identify the major forces at work, both nationally and internationally, and get a clearer sense of the options and strategies available to us."