{Spam?} The international significance of the political coup in Australia

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The international significance of the political coup in Australia
7 July 2010

The sudden ousting of former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in a political
coup last month has punctured the myth, promoted around the world and at home,
of Australia as a land of social stability and political quiescence. Julia
Gillard’s anti-democratic installation is symptomatic of escalating global
economic and political turbulence and stands as a warning to the working class
about the turn by the ruling elite to new and repressive mechanisms of rule.

The manner of Gillard’s elevation is without precedent in Australian politics.
Previously, leadership changes within Labor governments have involved open
challenges to the incumbent, protracted lobbying, both publicly and behind the
scenes, by the various contenders, discussion and votes within caucus (made up
of all the party’s parliamentary representatives) and generally lengthy
transition periods from one prime minister to the next. Rudd’s political
execution, on the contrary, was conducted without notice, and without any
parliamentarian raising a single public criticism of Rudd, on any issue, before
it was carried out. Instead, a handful of faceless factional leaders, acting at
the direct behest of the major transnational mining corporations and other
sections of business and finance capital, simply installed Gillard in a matter
of 24 hours.

The Labor caucus, let alone the party’s general membership, played no role in
the process. Even Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner—who alongside Rudd, Gillard,
and Treasurer Wayne Swan, was one of the government’s supposedly all-powerful
“Gang of Four”—watched the leadership challenge unfold on television, without
any prior knowledge of what was happening. The next morning, no-one, including
Rudd himself, made any protest as Gillard was crowned leader. Not even a caucus
vote was held.

One of the key factors in these extraordinary events was hostility, on the part
of multi-national mining companies, to Rudd’s proposed Resource Super Profits
Tax. The Labor Party apparatus is bound to the resource giants by a thousand
threads, including campaign donations, personal connections, and employee
exchanges. Within a week of Rudd’s ousting, Gillard had met the mining magnates’
deadline for a back down on the new tax, by awarding them a multi-billion dollar
windfall through various concessions.

These sordid manoeuvres shed light on where political power really resides
within so-called capitalist democracy. Economic and political policies are
determined not by the people, expressing their will through democratically
elected and accountable representatives, but by powerful corporate and financial
interests which act ruthlessly, behind-the-scenes, to impose their demands.
Behind the facade of bourgeois parliamentary democracy stands the dictatorship
of capital, backed, as Friedrich Engels once explained, by the state—detachments
of “armed men and also material adjuncts, prisons, and institutions of coercion
of all kinds”.

In the final analysis, the political coup in Australia was driven by the rapidly
deepening crisis of global capitalism.

While the mining tax was intended to benefit other sections of business and
finance through a lower corporate tax rate, and the boosting of giant
superannuation funds, Rudd proved incapable of rallying them behind his
government and against the miners’ campaign. Powerful sections of the ruling
elite, including the Murdoch media empire, had concluded that he was no longer
able to deliver what they required—a major assault on the social position of the
working class. Gillard’s installation signals the refashioning of a new Labor
government, one more responsive to the demands of finance capital. Her task is
to implement a new wave of pro-market “deregulation”, privatisation and
“economic reform” to drive up productivity. This will entail eliminating the
massive budget deficit and ramming through a series of austerity measures,
slashing public spending in areas including welfare, public sector jobs and
wages, health, education, and social infrastructure.

Such an agenda cannot be implemented in a democratic manner. In Australia and
throughout the world, the needs of the ruling elite stand in direct opposition
to the interests and sentiments of the vast majority of the population.
Moreover, social inequality has escalated over the past three decades to
unprecedented levels, which are ultimately incompatible with democratic forms of
rule. This is what lies behind the global move towards new forms of
authoritarian and dictatorial rule. Fundamental contradictions within the world
capitalist economy itself, which have been developing for a protracted period,
are now erupting to the surface of political life, creating a series of
convulsions across Europe, Asia, and North America. At the same time, under
conditions of a historic decline in the global position of the US, relations
between the major powers are becoming ever more fractious.

In 1929, Leon Trotsky explained that the rise of dictatorial and fascist
tendencies within Europe reflected the fact that bourgeois democratic forms of
rule could not withstand the pressure of heightened class tensions domestically
and clashes between rival nation-states. “By analogy with electrical
engineering,” he wrote, “democracy might be defined as a system of safety
switches and circuit breakers for protection against currents overloaded by the
national or social struggle. No period of human history has been—even
remotely—so overcharged with antagonisms such as ours. The overloading of lines
occurs more and more frequently at different points in the European power grid.
Under the impact of class and international contradictions that are too highly
charged, the safety switches of democracy either burn out or explode. That is
what the short circuit of dictatorship represents.”

Australian political and economic life has always been acutely sensitive to
shifts in the geo-strategic balance of power.

In 1975, during a period of acute international turmoil, the Whitlam Labor
government was sacked by the governor-general after the bourgeoisie lost
confidence in its ability to suppress the movement of the working class. The
Canberra Coup involved the highest levels of the state apparatus, as well as
international intelligence agencies including the CIA and MI5. Whether similar
forces were involved in the coup against Rudd remains, as yet, unclear. What is
beyond doubt, however, is that Gillard would not have been installed without a
thorough vetting by Washington, with her carefully cultivated pro-Israel and
pro-US alliance stance being approved within the highest circles.

The decision by Whitlam and the Labor Party as a whole to accept their ousting
had far-reaching ramifications. It sent a signal to the ruling classes
internationally that they could attack the working class with impunity. Within a
few short years a series of right-wing governments had come to power, launching,
in the name of anti-Keynesian monetarism, a sustained offensive against the
working class.

In the 35 years since the Canberra Coup, the Labor Party, like its social
democratic counterparts in every country, has undergone a qualitative
transformation. No longer enjoying any genuine and active support from the
working class, it cannot be regarded as a political party in the popularly
understood sense of the term. The Labor Party, together with the trade unions,
functions as a corrupt and bureaucratic network of rival cliques, representing
different sections of the corporate elite. Rudd’s ousting confirms that there is
nothing that this putrefied apparatus is not prepared to do on behalf of its
political and economic masters.

The working class internationally must draw definite conclusions. There is no
constituency within the bourgeoisie of any country for upholding fundamental
democratic rights. These can be defended only on the basis of an independent and
unified struggle of the international working class for socialism. Genuine
democracy can only exist on the basis of genuine social equality. And this
requires the development of a rationally planned global economy, aimed at
satisfying the social needs of the majority, not the accumulation of private
profit by a tiny minority.

Patrick O’Connor

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/jul2010/pers-j07.shtml

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