PARTISAN!

Mila Volkova opines on the 2024 Australian Capital Territory general election

You’d be forgiven for despairing as to the choices on offer this election.

The Liberals demonstrate the neoliberal habit of forgetting how to do maths, campaigning for more hospital spaces and more police as well as tax cuts. More hospital spaces would certainly be welcome, as Canberran hospitals are known for long wait times, but don’t trust them not to pull some paperwork trickery rather than actually deliver. More cops on the beat won’t reduce crime rates, which are a result of poverty and inequality rather than moral degradation. It also won’t solve the more concerning habit of territory federal police systematically covering up for sexual crimes and hate crimes by coercing victims into dropping their accusations. So much for the party of rapists, property owners, and culture war profiteering racists.

Trusting anything that comes out of the Labor party would be a mistake too. They’re the ruling party in the ACT and have had three years to tackle the cost of living crisis, which they’ve spent arguing with the Liberals over a stadium. While rent has been kept low relative to other states and territories due to the rental cap, the poorer sections of the working class in the ACT that work in minimum or close-to-minimum wage service work are nonetheless struggling with high rents and higher increases in consumer prices. If you’re anything less than an executive level public servant in this city, forget about owning your own home, as house prices continue their meteoric rise.

In the ACT, Labor is not a party of the working class. Its basis is in the public service workers union and construction union bureaucracies, who act in their own interests that are loosely aligned with that of workers. I have experience with the efforts of these bureaucrats who, hoping to obtain Labor parliamentary or staffer positions for their loyalty, ignored and sidelined unionists who demanded annual pay rises indexed at inflation +1% in addition to the three year pay increase, unlimited sick leave, and paid gender transition leave.

At best, Labor has delivered at a federal level for the wealthiest public service workers, bringing in industrial bargaining for the entire public service that led to a large negotiated percentage pay rise across the service over three years. While efforts are being made towards an equalisation in pay between federal departments, you are still getting little out of this pay rise if you are a lower ranking public servant, who are predominantly female and non-white. Of course, this pay rise remains under inflation and doesn’t make up for more than a decade of wage stagnation.

At its worst, Labor presides over an industrial dictatorship that stifles militant workers demanding better conditions. To restore construction sector profits, they have used the excuse of organised crime links with the CFMEU bureaucracy in Victoria to shatter the entire union in every state. The system of enterprise bargaining, which Labor invented and allowed Liberal party reform to, undermines union organisation across entire sectors. Sectoral bargaining is necessary to organise the sorts of workers that are the poorest in Canberra, hospitality and retail workers, who face common enemies yet remain isolated in hundreds of small businesses or franchises.

The kinds of downwardly mobile university-educated middle class that I refer to tend to find their home in the Greens party, who struggle to appeal to less educated workers. The Greens make ambitious election promises, some of which would be echoed by a communist party electoral platform, but expecting them to deliver is a lost cause. Ignore them when they tell you “we just need a couple more seats, then Labor will have to listen to us!” If they’ve been in coalition for so long and achieved nothing resembling their ambitions to ‘end homelessness’, how will a few more seats help them?

Feeling alienated yet?

The makeup of the Legislative Assembly after this or that election isn’t a result of the clash of opinions in the marketplace of ideas, or of people voting with their best conscience for the greater good. Politics is about class.

The Greens can’t win a majority in the ACT because they sneer on the working class. Their basis in the anti-Labor dissenting middle class gives them notions of white-collar success that make them allergic to mass collective politics – the politics of the working class. While the middle class are certainly working class, in the sense that they have nothing to sell but their bodies and earn wages, they have short-sighted interests. Rather than developing political consciousness as workers and agitating for revolution, they act as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. They want to escape, not liberate.

To act as servants of the working class is conformism to the Greens. They find donations from collectives like unions embarrassing, as corrupting the moral independence of their politicians. The Greens will never win a majority in the ACT because they have no interest in getting into the dirty politics of the public service and union bureaucracies and winning them away from Labor.

While the Liberals represent property owners and the interests of private business, Labor represents a similarly dangerous enemy – the union bureaucrats that collaborate with capital against the interests of the workers.

This is the source of the alienation you feel. None of these are parties of the workers! The only workers’ party is the Communist Party, so we need to make one. The only party that won’t lie to you.

The politics of the Greens and Labor are dead ends for the working class. The Greens have some good policies, but they cannot enact them without a working class basis. They want to turn the dial towards workers, make some things easier, but this is a distraction from our destiny! We must organise into a party that is actually ours, take power for ourselves, abolish the parasitic racist property owners and rapist bosses, and create a society where everyone is provided for. This is an impossibility under the boot of capitalism and these parties that pretend to serve us, who keep us in this state of ignorance.