Australia: Election slogans spark wave of disgust

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Australia: Election slogans spark wave of disgust
21 July 2010

Less than a week into the Australian federal election campaign, the hollowed out
and atrophied character of the entire system of bourgeois parliamentary
democracy is being increasingly exposed.

According to liberal theory, elections are the means by which “the people”,
having heard and considered the policies of the various parties and their
leaders, get to make their decision on the next government and its program. This
mythology of “popular sovereignty” had already suffered a body blow with the
June 23-24 political coup that deposed the elected Prime Minister Kevin Rudd,
before he had completed even his first term in office. Now it is being further
undermined by the election campaign itself.

The most significant event of the campaign’s opening days has been, not the
announcement by the major parties of their policies and program, much less the
clash of ideas and argument, but the wave of boredom, revulsion and, in some
cases, outright anger that has greeted the endless series of empty slogans
trotted out by the party leaders.

Launching the federal election campaign last Saturday, Prime Minister Julia
Gillard used the phrase “moving forward” at least 39 times in a press conference
lasting 31 minutes.

Questioned about her repeated use of the mantra in a television interview on
Monday, Gillard could only respond with another series of hackneyed phrases,
declaring that “moving forward” expressed her optimism about the future and
reflected her view that the best days of Australia lay in front of it, not behind.

Such widespread popular hostility to the campaign is symptomatic of deeper
processes, and it is raising concerns within sections of the corporate media
about the stability of the two-party system itself. In an editorial published
last Saturday, before the campaign had officially begun, the Sydney Morning
Herald dubbed Gillard the “hollow woman”. It followed this up with an editorial
on Monday, entitled “The hollow woman beats a hollow drum”, warning that young
people were becoming alienated from the entire parliamentary establishment.

“Anecdotal evidence from campuses and other centres of youth suggests that
Australia’s young are turning off both Labor and the Coalition, towards the
Greens if anything.” While noting that the Greens’ election deals with Labor
meant such opposition was being channeled back into the framework of the
two-party system, the editorial writers were clearly expressing fears that
oppositional sentiments could soon assume a more overt form.

These themes were also voiced in an editorial in the Australian on Monday which
noted that “Australia goes to the polls arguably more jaundiced towards its
political class than at any time in recent history” and that “there is scarcely
a centimetre between the parties on many issues.”

In an interview with the Labor government’s treasurer Wayne Swan, veteran
journalist Laurie Oakes contrasted the present campaign with that conducted by
the Labor Party under Gough Whitlam in 1972. Describing Labor’s “It’s time”
slogan as the “best ever”, he added: “But Gough Whitlam didn’t sit there in
every speech and say ‘it’s time’, ‘it’s time’, it’s time’, he actually treated
us as intelligent human beings who could understand sentences and policies.”

Today’s election campaign is characterised by what one commentator aptly
described as “dog training” techniques.

The source of the difference lies in objective conditions. In 1972, at the
tail-end of the post-war economic boom, Whitlam and the Labor Party advanced a
program of social reforms. None of these measures even remotely challenged the
foundations of the profit system, nor were they intended to, but they did
represent certain, albeit limited, advances for the broad mass of the working class.

As the global economic crisis of 1974-75 took hold and the post-war boom came to
an abrupt end, the Whitlam government, after failing to halt the unprecedented
upsurge of the working class that followed the Liberal government’s ousting in
1972, was itself thrown out in 1975 in a CIA-backed coup, carried out by the
governor-general. The economic and political landscape then underwent a series
of profound changes.

Far from pursuing a program of reform, the Hawke-Keating Labor government, which
came to power in 1983, began a program of “economic restructuring” and attacks
on the social conditions of the working class in line with policies initiated
internationally under President Reagan in the US and Tory Prime Minister
Thatcher in Great Britain. No party has championed a social reformist program
since then.

In fact, over the past three decades the very concept of “reform” has undergone
a kind of Orwellian transformation. Previously, “reform” referred to policies
that raised the living standards of the general population—a universal health
care system and free university education, for example, were two key policies
initiated by Whitlam. Today, like Orwell’s “war is peace” slogan, economic
reform signifies the ever-greater subordination of social life to the dictates
of the capitalist market—resulting in the scrapping of social advances,
privatisation, and instituting the principle of “user pays” for what were once
guaranteed social services.

Continuous free market “reforms” over the past two and half decades have been
responsible for creating myriad social and economic problems. The response of
both Labor and the Liberal-National coalition has been two-fold: to try to
divert social anger into hostility against immigrants and refugees, under the
banner of “border protection”, while, at the same time, reducing the level of
political discussion in the campaign to meaningless platitudes.

There is a definite political purpose to this campaign. Under conditions of a
deepening global crisis of the capitalist system, with the financial markets and
institutions demanding ever more savage austerity measures, neither of the major
parties can discuss their real economic and political agenda. As for the Greens,
they have pledged to provide “stability” to the next government, whether Labor
or Coalition.

The fact, however, that the campaign has produced such popular revulsion is
indicative of other, no less significant, political processes. Empty
sloganeering and determination to stay “on message” was not pioneered by
Gillard—it was the central feature, after all, of Kevin Rudd’s Labor campaign in
2007. But at that time, it was subsumed under the movement to oust the Howard
government.

The three years since then have delivered a series of shocks to popular
consciousness. Notwithstanding all the efforts to promote the doctrine of
Australian exceptionalism, the global capitalist crisis has begun to reveal to
millions of people that their jobs, their livelihoods, their democratic rights
and the future of their children are being threatened by forces over which they
have no control. They understand that these problems cannot be addressed by the
endless repetition of vacuous slogans.

The answers they seek will not be found in the bankrupt official political
establishment but only in the global analysis of the International Committee of
the Fourth International and the program of socialist internationalism being
advanced by the Socialist Equality Party in the Australian election campaign.

Nick Beams

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/jul2010/pers-j21.shtml

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