恐怕在前頭加個聲明比較保險:
雖然我同意本文對澳洲綠黨的譴責,不過本文不影響我對台灣綠黨的支持.
至少就我個人對台灣綠黨人士的認識,台灣綠黨人士對社運的理想都算是
頗為真誠的,跟那個看到民眾一對工黨-綠黨執政的州政府所主導的公共支出
刪減案,學費上漲,以及實施的一連串的累退稅(收入越低的階層負擔越大)發
動抗爭,就跳出來指責自由黨地方領導人"煽動群眾"的布朗先生我相信是完全
不同的.(這代表同志參政權受到保障,甚至成為政黨的招牌是可喜的,不過不
是同志政治人物就一定比較進步.)
我也很難想像台灣綠黨人士的反出兵海外的理由會是"阿富汗戰爭拖長是
布希捅出來的簍子,我們應該要求美國多加派人力,讓我們把軍隊撤回維
持地區穩定" ---也就是用來維護澳洲在東帝汶與南太平洋間的新殖民主
義霸權,這種完全看不到人道關懷的說法.
Australia: Greens manoeuvre for de facto coalition with Labor
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/aug2010/gree-a06.shtml
By Patrick O'Connor, SEP candidate for Senate in Victoria
6 August 2010
The Greens 2010 election campaign has been dominated by preparations for a de
facto, if not direct and explicit, ruling coalition with the Labor Party. As
Labor and Liberal lurch ever further to the right, in bipartisan agreement on
virtually every significant issue, the Greens are playing a key role as a
safety valve for the official parliamentary apparatus—winning support from
those hostile to the major parties, especially young people, while at the
same time striving to keep them trapped within the official political
establishment and the current social order.
With their standing in opinion polls at record highs—between 12 and 16
percent—the Greens hope to win their first House of Representatives seat,
the electorate of Melbourne, and hold the balance of power in the Senate,
giving them unprecedented influence over the next government's legislation.
These calculations were given a boost in the opening moments of the official
campaign, when officials from the Greens and the Labor Party stitched up a
sordid preference swap deal. Greens’leader Bob Brown immediately insisted
that he had nothing to do with the arrangement and that he remained entirely
opposed to preference deals.
Brown's attempt to maintain a “clean hands” image as his party engages in
various backroom manoeuvres with Labor is utterly bogus, and reflects the
two-faced character of the Greens’campaign. On the one hand, they make a
certain appeal to the widespread opposition towards the war in Afghanistan,
neglect of the environment and inaction on climate change, and various social
issues, while on the other, they assure the Australian ruling elite that they
will do whatever necessary to uphold its interests—in alliance with the two
major parties.
When asked how the Greens would act if they held the balance of power in the
senate, Brown invariably replies: “responsibly”, and insists that they will
not function as an oppositional fraction against the next government. At the
party's official campaign launch, Brown declared, “We will never just say
no [to voting on government legislation]... The Greens’ record in the senate
demonstrates our ability to negotiate and deliver outcomes for the community
when the [opposition] coalition has said no.”
Part of this record, over the three years of Rudd/Gillard Labor, was the
Greens’ support for Labor's fiscal stimulus measures, aimed at bolstering
consumer spending and boosting corporate profits in the aftermath of the 2008
financial crisis. In an address to the National Press Club on July 14, for
example, the Greens’ leader boasted that the “Rudd-Swan-Brown package” had
“saved this nation from recession”.
In reality, all over the world, including in Australia, governments are now
being directed by global financial markets to make the working class pay the
price for the multi-billion dollar sums expended to bail-out the banks and
financial institutions, which are now on government books as debt, through
the implementation of savage austerity measures. Both Prime Minister Julia
Gillard and opposition leader Tony Abbott have committed themselves to
eliminating the budget deficit within three years while at the same time
cutting the corporate tax rate. Such measures can only be carried out through
the slashing of public spending, including for health, education, welfare,
social infrastructure, and public sector jobs and wages.
Brown's emphasis on the Greens’“responsible”record is aimed at sending
a clear signal to corporate Australia—the Greens are ready and willing to
impose this agenda in collaboration with the next government.
Bob Brown and the Greens’deputy leader Christine Milne have a definite
track record in this regard. During the last major economic recession,
between 1989 and 1992, both Brown and Milne led the Tasmanian Greens in an
Accord partnership with a minority state Labor government. In 1990, the
Labor-Greens government gutted total government discretionary spending by a
record 6.7 percent. The budget was described by the Hobart Mercury as “the
worst since the 1930s Depression.” Approximately 8 percent of the public
sector workforce was laid off, affecting more than 2,000 workers. A raft of
regressive taxes was also imposed, together with increased TAFE fees, higher
public transport charges, and new charges for school bus services in rural
areas.
The Greens backed every one of these savage, anti-working class measures,
insisting that Tasmania (that is, the corporate elite) had to be saved from
pending bankruptcy. When a series of militant strikes and protests, involving
public sector workers, teachers, farmers, and miners, erupted against the
cutbacks, Bob Brown moved a parliamentary censure motion against the state
Liberal leader, accusing his party of “inciting various community groups to
resist the budgetary cuts”. Christine Milne addressed one rally and
provocatively urged protestors not to oppose a government education review,
which had recommended 1,000 job cuts and 47 school closures—because “
parents and teachers had warned about waste in the education bureaucracy for
years and should welcome the devolution of decision-making responsibility to
local communities”.
Brown and Milne have repeatedly referred with pride to their Accord
partnership with Tasmanian Labor, using it to demonstrate their bone fides to
the ruling class and tout their dependability at the federal level.
During the 2004 federal election campaign, for example, Brown was asked if
the Greens would negotiate rather than obstruct legislation in the senate. He
replied: “I was in the Labor Green accord in Tasmania ... There were savage
budget cuts. We had Greens’ supporters protesting outside our offices. We
went to some very angry public meetings, but we Greens held the line.”
Likewise, in October 2008, at the height of the US financial meltdown, Milne
delivered a speech at the Sydney Institute. She said: “The most fiscally
responsible periods of government in Tasmania have been during minority
governments. The majority Liberal government of Robin Gray had driven the
state into a parlous economic situation and the Labor-Green Accord had to
turn it around. It was a difficult period of protests and unrest as the
public service was slashed and public spending was cut. The Greens never
wavered from the task.”
The message is that the Greens “will not waver” from pressing through a new
wave of austerity measures against the working class, in tandem with a
federal government—whether Labor or Liberal.
During the past decade, the Greens have become ever-more integrated into the
official political establishment. In Western Australia, they have “
responsibly” held the balance of power in the state's upper house for most
of the past ten years. In the Australian Capital Territory, a Greens-backed
minority Labor government has been in power since October 2008, while in
Tasmania, the Greens have entered government for the first time anywhere in
the country. State leader Nick McKim and fellow Green MP Cassie O’Connor are
cabinet members in the Labor-Green coalition government that was formed last
April.
Brown played a key role in establishing the partnership, having initially
urged the formation of a tripartite coalition government uniting Labor,
Liberal, and Green. At the time, he left no doubt that he would support a
similar governing line up at the federal level.
Fake “left-wing” credentials
None of the Australian Greens’parliamentary leaders has ever identified
themselves as left-wing. The party's reputation among layers of youth as
being in some way “anti-establishment”, derives in no small part from its
enthusiastic promotion by the various pseudo-left groups, such as Socialist
Alliance and Socialist Alternative, who seek to use the Greens as a means of
keeping students and youth within the safe channels of parliament, amid
escalating alienation from Labor. In the current election campaign, for
example, Peter Boyle explained in the Green Left Weekly: “Socialist Alliance
members are campaigning not only for our own candidates but also for the
Greens and other progressive candidates... If the Greens have greater numbers
in the Senate, they may be able to slow down some of the bad laws the next
government, ALP or Coalition, will introduce.”
Greens’leader Brown is very conscious of the role of the ex-lefts. In a
recent interview on the ABC's “Lateline”, he took care to repeatedly
identify Socialist Alliance among several parties to which Greens’ voters
could direct their preferences.
Sections of the trade union bureaucracy are also backing the Greens,
including the Victorian branch of the Electrical Trades Union (ETU). With the
ETU membership recently voting to disaffiliate from the Labor Party, saving
about $100,000 in annual fees, state secretary Dean Mighell has transferred
the same amount of money into the Greens’senate campaign, together with
tens of thousands more for their Melbourne electorate fund. Like the
ex-lefts, the ETU and other self-styled “left” unions that back the Greens,
aim to pre-empt the emergence of any independent political movement of the
working class against Labor. The unions are also hoping to use the Greens as
a means of pressuring the Gillard government to use them more directly as it
implements its post-election austerity agenda.
Far from being a “progressive” alternative, the Greens is a bourgeois
party, organically hostile to the needs, interests and aspirations of the
working class. Its membership base, which has steadily grown over the last
decade to an estimated 9,000, predominantly comprises upper-middle class
inner-city dwellers. Its major preoccupation is the “lifestyle”
predilections of the upper middle class, not the deepening social and
economic crisis that confronts workers and youth. A September 2003 survey of
the party's membership in New South Wales found that Green members’average
age was 47; 67 percent had university degrees, compared to 29 percent of the
general public; of those with university degrees, 40 percent had Masters or
PhD qualifications; 59 percent worked in professional occupations, with the
next highest occupational category being managers and administrators at 10
percent; and just 9 percent spoke a language other than English at home,
compared to 24 percent throughout NSW.
Internationally, Greens parties have a similar social composition and class
orientation. Once in office, they have proven to be among the most vicious
proponents of big business interests. In Germany, for example, the Greens
joined the social democrats in office between 1998 and 2005, playing a key
role in legitimising the deployment of German troops outside Germany, for the
first time since World War II, and supporting the bombing of Serbia in 1999.
At home, they attacked the conditions of welfare recipients through the
draconian Hartz IV legislation. In Ireland the current Fianna Fail and Greens
coalition government has rammed through unprecedented cutbacks in public
spending, as part of one of the severest austerity programs imposed in Europe.
The Greens’reputation as an anti-war party, committed to defending the
environment, is just as undeserved as their “anti-establishment”
credentials.
The Greens call for the withdrawal of Australian troops from Afghanistan, but
on a purely nationalist and tactical basis. Their position has nothing to do
with a principled opposition to imperialist violence. Brown has repeatedly
urged, for instance, that more US troops should be sent to Iraq and
Afghanistan to replace the Australian forces, which he wants to be used to
strengthen Canberra's neo-colonial operations in East Timor and the South
Pacific. In April 2007, Brown declared: “The 300 [additional SAS troops then
sent to Afghanistan] should remain in our region where instability is rife
and our defence forces are already stretched. The current Afghanistan mire
comes out of the Bush administration’s mistake in withdrawing from
Afghanistan and invading Iraq. It should be President Bush dispatching the
extra contingent to Afghanistan, not Australia.”
On refugees, the Greens call for “compassion” and compliance with
international law. However, they accept the entire framework of so-called
border security—that is, they support the Australian government's “right”
to restrict the entry of refugees into the country. Brown has repeatedly
demanded that any asylum seeker deemed not to have a “legitimate” claim be
deported to their country of origin. Because of the very narrowly framed
official definition of what constitutes a refugee, this means that men,
women, and children suffering abject poverty and extreme physical insecurity
in their home countries are routinely rejected. The Greens also line up with
Labor and Liberal in demanding stricter restrictions on immigration,
promoting the bogus and reactionary line that protecting the Australian “way
of life” and physical environment requires the exclusion of people from
other countries.
On the environment and climate change the Greens have no viable solution,
given their defence of the profit system. They support, in principle, the
establishment of a carbon emissions trading scheme (ETS)—the bogus “free
market” fix for the ecological crisis generated by the operations of the
capitalist market itself. Their proposal for an interim “carbon tax” would
do nothing to resolve the mounting global warming crisis, while immediately
triggering a massive hike in the cost of living borne by working people.
The only genuine solution to climate change, militarism war and the assault
on social conditions and democratic rights is the development of an
independent political movement of the working class, aimed at the abolition
of the capitalist profit system, and its replacement with a rationally
planned global economy, geared towards the satisfaction of the social,
intellectual and cultural needs of all humanity. That is the socialist and
internationalist perspective for which the Socialist Equality Party is
fighting in the 2010 federal elections.
Click here for full coverage of the SEP 2010 election campaign
http://www.wsws.org/category/SEP_Australia_Election_Campaign.shtml
Authorised by N. Beams, 307 Macquarie St, Liverpool, NSW 2170
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