Editor’s Note: For more coverage, see – John Howard, Carbon Criminal #2, taken Down by Angry Democracy
After 11 long years, Australia has finally kicked out John Howard, premier climate sceptic and warmonger. Last night and today across the nation people are celebrating, coming together across traditional rivalries, because we did it – we have finally succeeded in getting rid of John Howard. In a landslide victory, which saw ex-Prime Minister John Howard’s party the Liberal/Nationals Coalition loose 24 seats with a 6% swing against, Australia will now have a Labor Party Federal Government. While Labor is far from perfect and certainly not great on Climate Change, they are miles ahead of the Coalition. We might now get a semi-decent renewable energy industry in this country, recognize climate refugees and stop wasting time talking about nuclear power.
As one of our election slogans said “Dumping Howard is just the Beginning”! We have a long way to go to seriously tackle climate change in this country, but there’s time enough to think about that tomorrow, today is for celebration and rejuvenation.
Congrats to ASEN, AYCC, GetUp.org.au, Climate Action Network Australia and all the grassroots groups who worked over many years to help get Howard Out! I got the email below from my friend Thiago about what happens next in Australia with progressive politics, it’s well worth a read:
Defeating Howard is the Easy Part
For a generation of activists who cut their teeth against the hard
stone of John Howard’s government, that government’s collapse in a
miserable heap is likely to be a bittersweet victory. But it is
without doubt a victory, for a number of reasons.
First, the coalition lost the election partly on the strength of union
organizing about workplace laws. Although this was not the single
reason the liberals are out of government, it was a necessary factor.
The media will never say it, Rudd will hardly mention the U word, but
it’s a fact, it can’t be taken away from the unions and socialist
organizers.
Second, without the Greens preferences, Labour would have scraped into
power. Although the media has been eager to paint a picture of an
Australia without ideology, in actual fact a good deal of the reason
Labour is in power is because Australians have very strong ideas about
what kind of world they would like to live in. As in, one that is
habitable, to begin with. Such was the catastrophic infection of
stupidity promoted by coalition government that even that ended up
being some kind of radical proposition.
Third, although Labour pays only the vaguest lip service to social
democracy and often not even that, vague lip service makes a
difference. The Liberals manipulation of racism, particularly after
they absorbed the Hanson voters, was incredibly toxic and pulled
everyone down to their slimy low level. Having people pretend they
care about unions’ rights is better than having people honestly going
about annihilating unions. If the government has to pretend to be
opposed to the war, that is better than having it be enthusiastic
about contributing to the murder of hundreds of thousands of people.
It is good that the scum are out, then. But it is important to keep
perspective. The ALP is a formidable enemy. It is in some ways a more
difficult enemy to fight, and the harm it can cause is comparable to
the Liberals. But this is the reason this election represents a not
just a victory but potentially an important victory. With Howard’s
distractingly evil, smirking, verminous moral zero-point of regressive
everything out of the way, at last activists will have to cast the
fundamental problems of Australian society in class and structural
terms. The left got way too hung up that sordid little man, way too
much for its own good. Having the back-stabbing ALP in power is a
great opportunity to relearn who really are our enemies.
And make no mistake: the ALP is no friend of the working class, or of
students, or of Aborigines, or of refugees. It is an enthusiastic
footstool for the US empire. ACCORD yielded a decade and a half of
lower real wages and submissive unions. More than anything else, that
decade and a half of nothing much at all alienated membership from the
unions and permitted Howard to get away with it all. HECS was
introduced by Labour, who also allowed AusStudy to slip and started
universities along the not so very long road to the business
management degree factory. Keating’s response to the Mabo decision
was a Native Title Act that stripped property rights from Aborigines
and went a long way towards legislating away the High Court’s
findings. It was Labour which introduced mandatory detention in 1992,
and the party has never disowned this vile, criminal policy. It was
Labour that helped Papua New Guinea blockade Bougainville – leading to
a not trivial ten to fifteen thousand dead, now nearly forgotten – and
who can forget Gareth Evans and Ali Alatas drinking to East Timor’s
despoliation? Or should I ask, who can remember?
All is changed? Not at all: look at the present State and Territory
labour governments. ‘Anti-terror’ bills introduced by the NSW
government are if anything more extreme than those Howard introduced,
they are so extreme that the mainstream media is talking about a
‘police state’. The savagery and sycophancy of the Iemma government
during APEC was truly phenomenal, it alienated even business; Sydney
became something from a post-apocalyptic movie, all giant steel
fences, prohibited persons and forbidden zones, universal surveillance
and random police beatings. Now, South Australia and Western Australia
are discussing the introduction of orders modelled after the failed,
deeply regressive Anti-Social Behaviour Orders in the UK. And half way
through the federal campaign we had the Victorian government trying to
shaft nurses with AWAs.
Is this something worth celebrating? The victory is the defeat of the
liberals, but an ALP government is no victory at all.
Fighting the Liberals is relatively easy, because the ALP is
imaginable as an ally of the unions and social movements. Nobody could
think that of the Liberals without a first dropping a dose of
mescaline. The reality is that ALP faces no parliamentarian threat
from the left, not even the fake left face the ALP sometimes
presented. And after ten years of Howard’s rule backed by the mortgage
belt, the ALP right will certainly feel they can swing along merrily
much farther right than Keating, without fear of alienating those
‘battlers’. It doesn’t help that while unions did the hard legwork of
organizing people against workchoices, Rudd campaigned for banal
median, swore featly to Murdock and was almost indistinguishable from
Howard. It also doesn’t help that the ALP has a huge majority and
holds every state and territory government – they are in a position to
be a very strong government, which is very bad news for activists. For
these reasons, the ALP is highly unlikely to be very responsive to
unions and social movements.
Unionists and activists will say: but it was our activism that got the
ALP elected. There are two points to keep in mind, though. First is
that if your activism gets the ALP elected, and the ALP shafts you
anyway because they can – that’s demoralising and makes activism look
like a waste of time. It isn’t so good to plead ‘but I am a sucker!’.
Unless that activism extends into a strategy for pressuring the ALP,
it’s actually counter-productive. The second point is that while the
left doesn’t have much force over the ALP, the ALP certainly does have
force over the left. This can be an uncomfortable fact, but that
doesn’t stop it being true: to the extent that you and I hate the
Liberals, detest Howard and think nothing is as bad as he is, not even
Rudd, well, to that extent Rudd and the ALP have a degree of leverage
over us that Howard never had. This isn’t particularly hard to grasp,
but the consequences are quite subtle.
One important consequence is that while many people on the left will
swear on the grave of Rosa Luxembourg that they will never compromise
with the Social Democrat traitors, not everyone will feel that they
are compromising when they get invited into the next generation
ACCORD/ NGO waffle fest that is sure to be foisted on us. The memory
of the neat little chamber of horrors the Libs had running all these
years will assuage guilty consciences. The ALP can, and has in the
past effectively coopted the leadership of the unions and social
movements. Getting crumbs from the ALP can be every bit as
debilitating as getting nothing from the Libs, especially because the
price of entry to the ALP policy formulation circus will certainly be
‘industrial peace’ and what is euphemistically termed ‘moderate social
views’ – ie. the ability to tolerate turning oneself into an
accomplice.
Even if there is something to be won through cooperation with the ALP
government, this is itself a great danger. For a person of principle,
interested in the kind of fundamental social change that is necessary
for the survival of the planet, what matters is not just results, but
how one gets them. Activism is about organizing, and organizing in a
way that builds capacity for social movements is in the long run even
more important than winning concessions, if that isn’t leading to
better organizing. If we get marginally less tyrannical treatment of
refugees at the price of vast swathes of the NGO community being
neutralised and opting out of organizing, that’s a small victory at a
great cost, because having people involved in political activity,
having them learn for themselves how to fight, is in the long run more
important. Turning social change into a business of foundation grants
and think tank initiatives is a disaster almost as terrible as the
social ills that might be cured along that road. You can trust the ALP
to figure out a way to fixing Howard’s mess in a way that people end
up even more powerless.
It is important to keep all this in mind because the benefits that
will come from the change of government will be real. We won’t be
faced with abstract questions, but hard choices.
For people who have come to political age with Howard as the
personification of evil, it is hard to remember just what a non-entity
he was before somehow, the office emboldened the man. But really, he
only succeeded in shrinking everything around him to the point people
couldn’t perceive what a waste of space he is. We’ve defeated a
non-entity; now it’s for the hard work of actually winning something.
TO.
This is great news! I was living in Australia in 2004 when Howard was re-elected (a scary prelude to Bush’s re-election a couple months later). It was a sad day for sure, and a very close election. I’m excited to see you’ve succeeded in getting rid of Howard and ushering in a new government.
With Howard – carbon criminal #2, as you aptly name him – gone, the Bush Administration (carbon criminal #1) has one less ally in their attempts to delay real action to stop the climate crisis. This is an important shift, not just for Australia, but for the international climate negotiations.
Congratulations to my friends in Australia!