Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly's PIP HINMAN interviewed PETER BOYLE, the Democratic Socialists' national campaign director, about their results in the March 2 federal election.
Question: What is your assessment of the Democratic Socialist campaign?
We either held or improved our vote in the 12 seats we contested, attracting about 9000 first preferences to an explicitly socialist campaign. We distributed nearly 100,000 copies of the People Before Profits platform and spoke to many people at our elections stumps and through doorknocking. We pioneered some new territory and also helped introduce Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly to a wider audience. So we judge our campaign a success.
We fielded a candidate in the Northern Territory for the first time and received 3.2% of the vote and considerable publicity. Together with the Greens (who won 6.1%), we picked up the swing from the ALP. The Country Liberal Party didn't gain much. It was the first time in well over a decade that a socialist stood in the NT, and many old lefties gave us their support. So we used it to say the red flag is still flying in the top end.
Our vote improved significantly in Wollongong and Adelaide. It held at 1.8% in Melbourne, and in Sydney and Brisbane where there were several "alternative" candidates, we received a respectable share of the vote. It means something when 500 or so people in these electorates choose to give a socialist their first preference over Greens, AWP, NAN and relatively well-known independents, like left academic Bob Leach who stood in Brisbane. Leach collected only about 150 more votes than our candidate, Zanny Begg.
Question: Shouldn't the Greens, the Australian Women's Party and community issue groups like the No Aircraft Noise Party combine for elections so as not to split the progressive vote?
We're strongly for working together with anyone to oppose the profits-first politics of the Liberal and Labor parties. We've also entered broad electoral alliances, such as the Green Alliance campaign in the Brisbane City Council elections in 1989. Such alliances were not on the cards in the March 2 election, but we are open to future alliances, not just for elections but in the mass campaigns that will have to be waged against attacks by the Howard government on unions, welfare and the environment.
The elections showed that Green parties can't rely on their name alone to win a significantly bigger hearing. They need to build a real activist base, and to do this they will have to include the left.
Question: Most of the Australian Greens leadership seems to think that the organised left is more an electoral liability than an asset.
If they think that the way to build a real alternative to Liberal-Labor political hegemony is by being "respectable", they are mistaken.
That's the road the Democrats have chosen, and perhaps they think their 10% of the vote vindicates this choice. But that's not a vote to change the system. It's a vote to "keep the bastards honest", whatever that means in the corrupt, sell-everything-to-the-highest-bidder 1990s.
If Bob Brown is serious about wanting to change the system, then he has to think about who is going to do it. It's not going to be enough just to mobilise the "enlightened middle classes" in the polling booths. It's going to have to involve getting the working class mobilised and democratically organised to act in its own interest and the interest of society.
The environment is going to be destroyed by capitalism if the working class is not won to a project of changing the system. The radical green project is lost unless it combines with a socialist project. Serious greens will come to realise this if they persevere.
The Democratic Socialists are serious, non-sectarian and nationally organised. We'll be around after the purely electoral "alternative" outfits slip off into the night.
We'll still be out there fighting for democratic, independent and militant unions and building campaigns to defend the environment, democratic rights and the rights of all oppressed groups. We are already campaigning against the planned opening of new uranium mines, the privatisation of Telstra, the cuts to welfare, the attacks on unions and the legitimising of racism under the guise of opposition to "political correctness".
Electioneering is not our primary focus, but we treat it seriously as one forum of struggle. So when Jeff Kennett announced an early Victorian election (March 30), we were ready to go to the printers with our campaign material for our campaign in the seats of Melbourne and Richmond.
We will also be working on our People Before Profits platform, bringing it up to date and making it more accessible. It was the only clear alternative presented to the Liberal-Labor economic rationalist agenda in the federal elections.
Both of those parties say that there is no choice but to join the global orgy of austerity, privatisation and deregulation because anonymous "markets" demand it. We reject this. We think that it is ridiculous that life has to get harder for the majority of people in this age of unprecedented technological advance. We are being asked to pay for the social irrationality of the capitalist system, which the capitalists try to sell us as "economic rationalism".
Question: Life doesn't look like it really is going to be "comfortable and relaxed" for most of us now that John Howard is in the saddle. Do you expect the ALP to lead an opposition to the impending cuts and attacks on unions and the environment?
No, we don't expect Labor to move dramatically to the left in opposition. That's not what happened when British Labour or the Swedish social democrats were pushed into opposition. They still want to be seen as the more effective managers of neo-liberal restructuring. The ALP's line to the bosses is: we can do the job and keep the unions quiet.
They will put some token effort into campaigns against cuts and attacks on union rights — as the ALP did in Victoria in response to Kennett's blitzkrieg. But their main message to workers will be: vote us back in at the next elections.
We'll be arguing against putting faith in Labor. We saw, over the last 13 years, the price of the union movement sacrificing its independence to the Labor government: rising inequality, lower living standards, higher unemployment and the putting of profit ahead of social and environmental needs. The unions helped deliver this pestilence, and a large section of the working class deserted unions in droves and punished Labor by voting in the Howard government.