Owen Richards
Providing a graphic analogy of the party's plummeting fortunes, Australian Democrats leader Senator Andrew Bartlett went for a bungy jump at Surfers Paradise on the Gold Coast on September 15. The attention-seeking election stunt was the latest attempt by the Democrats to revive their political fortunes.
Once seen as an alternative to the two-party merry-go-round of Australian parliamentary politics, voter support for the Democrats is now so low that electoral analysts predict they will lose three of the seven Senate seats they currently hold to the Greens in the October 9 election. (The other four Democrat senators' terms of office do not expire until June 30, 2008.)
Formed as a result of a split from the Liberal Party in 1977, the Democrats have portrayed themselves as mediators between the Coalition parties and Labor, in order to "keep the bastards honest". Their political philosophy was in theory opposed to both "big government and big unions".
After opposing the rightward "economic rationalist" drift of both Labor and the Coalition parties in the 1980s, in the 1990s the Democrats sought to prove themselves "responsible" holders of he balance-of-power in the Senate. Since 1996, this has led them to accommodate themselves to key parts of the Howard government's pro-big business political agenda.
Among the Democrats' greatest "achievements" have been their 1996 passing of the draconian anti-union Workplace Relations Act (WRA) and their 1999 agreement to introduce the Goods and Services Tax (GST). They are also remembered for passing legislation that introduced entry-fee bonds for nursing homes and for initially attempting to amend the Howard government's native title legislation rather than opposing it outright.
Most recently, the Democrats agreed to support government legislation that would increase the powers of the Building Industry Taskforce and to triple all penalties in the WRA.
The Democrats right-wing shift has become even more obvious through their preferencing policy. The Democrats outraged the Greens by preferencing the right-wing Family First and Fred Nile's Christian Democratic parties before the Greens on the NSW Senate ballot.
Family First, a conservative homophobic party with connections to the Pentecostal Assemblies of God church, is running on a campaign of "family values" against the extremism of the Greens. The AOG is a bigoted anti-gay and anti-abortion church that claims 160,000 members nationally. The AOG connection runs deep despite the party's recent attempts to obscure the relationship. Former AOG president Andrew Evans is a South Australian MP for Family First. Andrea Mason, the party's leader, is also a member of the AOG.
The Democrats' record over the last decade demonstrates that they are far more committed to being seen as able to work with Coalition and Labor governments - what Bartlett calls "relevance" - than to any progressive ideals.
[The author is a member of the Socialist Alliance.]
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, September 29, 2004.
Visit the