BY LESLIE RICHMOND
ADELAIDE — Despite an (unofficial) election campaign that had dragged on for nearly six months, on the night before polling day in the South Australian elections, 10% of voters had not decided who they would vote for. This was just one indication of the lack of real choice available in the February 9 poll.
Despite the elections being overshadowed by protesting refugees at the Woomera detention centre, both the Liberals and the ALP were committed to maintaining mandatory detention.
The corporate media writers have made much of the number of independent candidates in the elections — resulting in the biggest ever ballot paper for the SA Legislative Council.
The majority of the independents, however, were right-wing candidates, who did not challenge the basic framework of SA politics. They ranged from homophobic, law-and-order tub-thumpers to opportunist left-overs from the wreckage of One Nation.
The Australian Democrats, who had high hopes for getting a lower house seat, suffered a 9% fall in their state-wide vote. Many have attributed this to the Democrats' failure to appear "different" to the major parties.
The real alternatives were offered by a handful of progressive parties — the Socialist Alliance, Help End Marijuana Prohibition, SA Nuclear Free Future, and the Australian Greens. These parties were mostly ignored or dismissed by the corporate media.
The Greens ran their biggest-ever election campaign in SA. According to Greens Legislative Council candidate Brian Noone, their average vote in the seats they contested was twice that of the last election. This success can be attributed to their recent support for refugees' rights campaigns, and opposition to the US-led war drive.
The Greens pitch to the left was evidenced at an Adelaide public meeting in January at which Senator Bob Brown said capitalism "has got right out of control". The new struggle, he argued, would be between capitalism and democracy. In the meeting, Brown also argued that election campaigns were not just about winning seats.
The Socialist Alliance's Tom Bertuliet contested the seat of Adelaide, although the alliance is not registered in SA, and its name did not appear on ballot papers. Although the vote received — 0.3% — was small, alliance convenor John McGill regards the campaign as worthwhile.
"The Socialist Alliance is committed to fighting for social justice through grass-roots struggle", McGill told Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly. "We used the campaign to build solidarity with refugees, and get more people involved in the Adelaide Refugee Action Collective. For us, with the crisis in the refugee centres, this was a high priority."
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, February 20, 2002.
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