Attention left wing voters: Labor disowns civil disobedience and demands you defect to the Greens!
NSW police minister Michael Costa is first off the blocks in the counter-attack against the Greens, and it’s beautiful. Civil disobedience is an outrage. The Party founded on civil disobedience now thinks the picket line is an obscenity. All you Labor MPs who joined the wharfies picket against Patricks, get lost. Free speech is no longer allowed in Parliament House if Costa doesn’t like what might be said. He’d have no sympathy with Henry Lawson’s ode to the Labour movement, Freedom on the Wallaby, written during the great Shearer’s strike of 1891 which triggered the formation of the ALP:
Australia’s a big country
An’ Freedom’s humping bluey,
An’ Freedom’s on the wallaby
Oh! don’t you hear ‘er cooey?
She’s just begun to boomerang,
She’ll knock the tyrants silly,
She’s goin’ to light another fire
And boil another billy.
Our fathers toiled for bitter bread
While loafers thrived beside ’em,
But food to eat and clothes to wear,
Their native land denied ’em.
An’ so they left their native land
In spite of their devotion,
An’ so they came, or if they stole,
Were sent across the ocean.
Then Freedom couldn’t stand the glare
O’ Royalty’s regalia,
She left the loafers where they were,
An’ came out to Australia.
But now across the mighty main
The chains have come ter bind her
She little thought to see again
The wrongs she left behind her.
Our parents toil’d to make a home
Hard grubbin ’twas an’ clearin’
They wasn’t crowded much with lords
When they was pioneering.
But now that we have made the land
A garden full of promise,
Old Greed must crook ‘is dirty hand
And come ter take it from us.
So we must fly a rebel flag,
As others did before us,
And we must sing a rebel song
And join in rebel chorus.
We’ll make the tyrants feel the sting
O’ those that they would throttle;
They needn’t say the fault is ours
If blood should stain the wattle!
***
The trigger for Costa’s invitation to the left to consider the Greens their natural home was an open, public conference in NSW parliament house next week organised by Greens Upper house MP Lee Rhiannon. A summary is on her website:
November 8 – CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
NSW Parliament House, Jubillee Room
Friday November 8, 2002, 2pm-6pm
A Debate with academic papers on the following topics:
Philosophy of civil disobedience
Traditions of civil disobedience
Civil disobedience and the media
The law and civil disobedience
Organised by the Research Initiative in International Activism, internationalactivism, with support from Lee Rhiannon’s office and the Greens. More Info: 9514 2714
Details: In the week prior to the protests against the World Trade Organisation in Sydney, the Research Initiative in International Activism is holding a seminar on civil disobedience at the NSW Parliament House. The seminar is intended to inform debate on the role of civil disobedience, amongst the media and policy-makers, as well as amongst protest groups.
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Costa blew his stack in Parliament yesterday, then roped in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph to turbo-charge outrage to the Greens’ outrageous forum – oh so unfortunately cleared by the president of the Upper House, left-wing Labor MP Meredith Burgmann.
Page one screamed EXCLUSIVE: Guess where the people who protest like this are holding their next training session… – Pic of police on horses in front of people peacefully blockading the Stock Exchange in Sydney on May day – IN YOUR HOUSE
Costa reckons some people attending the forum will protest at the WTO meeting in Homebush Bay the next week. Shock! Horror! As usual, many protesters against economic globalisation in its present form will be unionists, and ALP members. And yes, many will engage in civil disobedience. Michael Costa’s successor as head of the NSW Labor Council, John Robertson, will address the protest.
Michael Costa has lost the plot. As the post-Cunningham Labor frenzy intensifies, it’s becoming increasingly clear that NSW Labor is not Labor at all. A bloke called Col Markham is the Labor member for the State seat of Wollongong. The Right planned to disendorse him for refusing to cross a union picket line at parliament house protesting Labor’s workers compensation reforms. Since Cunningham, Labor has dropped the plan. Costa hasn’t joined the dots.
Costa has nonchalantly alienated an already fractious left wing core constituency, and also doesn’t seem have cottoned on to the fact that the broader community has also been radicalised. In Wollongong, residents stood in front of bulldozers to stop the Sandon Point development. On the conservatively inclined south coast, a united community, including the council and the chamber of commerce, opposed a Labor-approved charcoal plant. Many – across party lines – attended a non-violent action workshop to learn civil disobedience techniques to stop the plant. To see just how radical the Australian grassroots is becoming on overdevelopment, see the Save our Suburbs website at sos.
Who knows where Costa is coming from, but wherever it is, the Greens love it. Labor, for the moment, appears to have gone crazy. The Daily Telegraph is toeing Costa’s line with glee, and adding that it’s absolutely disgusting that attendees of the forum don’t have to pay for the privilege. Federal and state Parliaments host forums all the time. They’re always free. It’s called the right to access the sites of democracy. And voters everywhere are increasingly exercising their right to be heard inside those sites.
Here’s Costa’s statement in Parliament yesterday:
Ms LEE RHIANNON: I direct my question to the Minister for Police. Will the Minister, as a responsible Minister, ensure that police on duty at the protest planned against the world trade organisation to be held in Sydney next month do not perpetrate violence against protesters, as we witnessed by some police at the S11 Melbourne protest in 2000 and some M1 protests in Sydney? Will the Minister ensure that police exercise their duty of care to protesters in such a way that protesters who infringe any law are arrested and not brutalised by police using their horses, batons or wedge chargers?
The Hon. MICHAEL COSTA: This has to be the most hypocritical question that has ever been asked in this House. The Hon. Lee Rhiannon has not told us that she has booked a room in this Parliament to host a forum on civil disobedience. I assume that forum is associated with the World Trade Organisation protest. I ask the member whether that is right. It is an absolute disgrace. The member is using the resources of this Parliament to teach people how to cause problems for our police and members of the community as they go about their business.
This is an absolute disgrace. As everybody in this House knows, because I have made some comments on this publicly, some of the people associated with the WTO – not all of them, of course; people do have a right to protest peacefully – have been engaging in activities that lead us all to conclude that a number of them are coming here to create violent disturbances; they are coming here to have a violent confrontation with the police. I do not know if any of these people are going to the forum on civil disobedience that Ms Lee Rhiannon is organising in this Parliament; I would hope that is not the case. I hope she will be able to explain to the public why she intends to use parliamentary resources for this purpose. It is an absolute disgrace.
We saw what these people did on 1 May: They threw marbles under the hooves of police horses to bring them down and cause deliberate injury to the horses, to police officers, and to other people there. These are the people who have a web site that canvasses where people can purchase metal baseball bats and other equipment that can be used in demonstrations to cause damage not only to property but also to humans.
The Hon. John Della Bosca: How can you use a metal baseball bat in a peaceful protest?
The Hon. MICHAEL COSTA: I know how you can use a metal baseball bat in a peaceful protest. Lee Rhiannon would be better off telling the House why she supports people who are likely to be involved in violent confrontation with the police. She has asked an absolutely hypocritical question. I would ask Lee Rhiannon to come clean about this forum on civil disobedience she is holding in the Parliament, which 60 people will attend. That is an absolute disgrace. I believe that every member of this House, other than Lee Rhiannon and maybe a couple of the nutters that support her on the cross benches, would be appalled by this move by Lee Rhiannon. She speaks very sanctimoniously in the House about things that other members of the House do, yet she is blatantly involved in a process that could lead to violence at the WTO meeting. It is a disgrace. She ought to resign.
Ms LEE RHIANNON: I ask a supplementary question: Minister, will you confirm that, if any protester breaks the law at the WTO meeting in Sydney, they will be arrested and the police will not use inappropriate and illegal tactics?
The Hon. MICHAEL COSTA: Again, the height of hypocrisy! I have just said that the WTO has a website on which it posts information about using violence at a demonstration. Let us be clear: People are coming here to have a violent confrontation with the police. Let me say to you: The police will be prepared and I will back the police in what they do.
***
To listen to Costa and Alan Jones froth at the mouth together on radio today, go to smh
***
The Australian Financial Review mounted a much more thoughtful counter-attack to the Greens in an editorial this week.
Red alert over Greens threat, 31/10/2002
The Greens are on a roll. Not content with mugging the bewildered NSW Labor Party in the by-election for the federal seat of Cunningham, the environmentalists are now setting their sights on no fewer than four Lower House seats plus an Upper House spot in the upcoming Victorian election.
The Bracks Labor government, which is holding office in Victoria by the skin of its teeth, and the Coalition are neck and neck, as this week’s Newspoll shows. As the Greens are polling 7 per cent overall and probably higher in the inner city, and Labor is on the nose with old-style unionists, it is not inconceivable that the Greens might end up with the balance of power in Victoria.
This changes the meaning of voting Green. Many sensible people have done so in the past out of a vague feeling that they would like to save trees and animals and give smug major party politicians a kick in the pants at the same time. It seemed a pretty harmless indulgence but now that there is a chance however slim of the Greens holding the balance of power in the second largest state in the land, would-be Green voters need to think again. For behind the reassuring stuff about sustainability and old growth forests lurks a comprehensive manifesto of soft socialism that would take us back to the 1970s, the undisputed low point of postwar economic performance.
The Greens’ Whitlam-era policies on tax, jobs, foreign investment, trade and state ownership loom like weapons of mass destruction trained on our major industries, our national prosperity and our way of life. Those of us who always knew the Greens had these policies never dreamed they might actually be used. Now we can’t be entirely sure.
Most of us accept we have to do things better, especially in agriculture and water use, but not that we should risk everything in a headlong rush to sustainability, especially while there is still little consensus on what it means.
The Greens make no such concessions. In their misguided utopia, the pursuit of economic growth must give way to a socially responsible society where people contribute according to their ability and are rewarded with a “guaranteed adequate income” and an “endowment of environmental and social resources”. It would not be necessary to seek work to qualify for generous income support, and the focus would be on “people working together for common goals” in other words, on co-operation and mutual benefit rather than competition and “control by minorities”.
Implementing this flawed vision would require a huge increase in taxation. The Greens are quite explicit about this, saying “the revenue share of GDP must increase” at the same time as the GST is abolished. They aim to do thisby lifting the company tax rate to “at least 49 per cent” and the marginal rate on incomes above $100,000 to more than 50 per cent, while imposing carbon and resource taxes on our most successful export industries. Of course, this would all end in tears because these measures would undermine investment, economic activity and tax revenue and would also spark a boom in tax minimisation and skilled emigration.
With profitability and global competitiveness jettisoned as policy objectives, the Greens would like to bring back centralised wage-fixing, dictate hours of work (“a four-day working week based on a seven- to eight-hour working day”) and reimpose controls on trade and foreign investment (only socially useful and environmentally benign proposals please). The Greens grudgingly concede that there are some benefits from trade such as raising standards of living in some Asian countries beyond their wildest dreams but can easily come up with at least twice as many drawbacks.
And on they go ad nauseam. It may seem cruel to hold these hopeless policies up to ridicule but the voters of Melbourne’s inner suburbs must know what they’re playing with the sacrifice of two decades of hard-won economic gains by a young, trade-dependent, capital-importing country that saw its terms of trade slashed in the 1980s. It’s too much to risk.
Labor can’t comfort itself that the Cunningham result, where the Greens and union-backed candidates cut off the Labor vote, was a one-off, because some of the same conditions apply in the inner Melbourne seats the Greens are contesting. The moderate Bracks government has outraged left-of-centre voters in these electorates by opting to build the athletes’ village for the 2006 Commonwealth Games on the site of the old Royal Park psychiatric hospital, even though the decision makes perfect sense and the campaign against it by the Greens and local activists is typically disingenuous.
A vote for the Greens may no longer be the annoying but essentially harmless gesture it once was. It is to be hoped it won’t come to this.
***
To me, the AFR is making the same mistake we all made when the Hanson phenomenon took off.
When One Nation threatened to grab a share of political power in parliament, everyone tried to cut her down by dismantling the logic of her policies. We made the fundamental mistake of basing our attacks on what her policies could do to the nation if implemented in full – which they never would or could be – rather than focussing on what voters were trying to say to those who rule us through this protest vote.
The political establishment got the message eventually. Howard threw money at the bush for structural adjustment, leadership programs, retraining, innovative ways to delivery new technology, compensation for deregulation and the like. Voters wanted to belong to the new era, not be left behind to die from it. Looking back, one Hanson impact was to take the edge off the dominance of the economic rationalist ideology, which has now begun to consider wider measures of cost and benefit, and to provide transitional arrangements for those disproportionately adversely effected by reforms.
The media should turn the angle of vision around. Instead of standing on the inside looking out, we should get out on the ground so we can stand on the outside looking in. The aim would be to find out what is behind the protest vote, and how the majors could constructively adjust to the angst. In this way, protest votes can – as protest voters want – enrich and enhance the stability of the system, not destroy it.
As the Greens have extended their support base from environmentalists to supporters of social justice, human rights and public ownership of certain assets, vigorous debates on the priorities in and trade-offs between elements of their Utopian vision has already started. The biggest so far has been the decision not to agree to sell Telstra if the Government agreed to save old-growth forests. Bob Brown was keen. The Party decided both policies were bottom line. These debates will intensify if the Greens’ momentum continues. And the debates will be public. Labor was once famous for fierce and passionate policy debates on the floor of its conferences, before the spinners and the manipulators and the image makers closed all that down.
If the impossible happened and the Greens did get balance of power in Victoria, then if they demanded everything in return for support on the floor of the house both parties would say no and Victoria would go to another election. If the Greens provided support on the floor to one party in exchange for, say, stopping logging of old growth forests, but then made so many demands after that that government became too unstable or the economy suffered, they’d be one term wonders. It’s an open question whether the Greens would cope with significant power. It’s another, far more pressing concern, to find out what people see in the Greens that they like.
Several right wing commentators have said the Greens won’t do any good in the State elections because they’ve got a “religious” flavour to them. I say this proves that these commentators are out of touch. The surge in support for the Greens shows that people want some vision and belief back in politics.
The AFR identified as a negative the Greens’ view that “the focus would be on ‘people working together for common goals’ – in other words, on co-operation and mutual benefit rather than competition and “control by minorities’.”
In my view, this focus is extremely attractive to voters tired of the self-interested individualism, cut-throat philosophy, and the binary ‘you win, I lose” dynamic of economic rationalism. They are looking to find some genuine consensus reached in good faith by people who care about our future and not just about how much money they can stuff in their back pockets. These voters have lost trust that our majors consider the overall public interest as their bottom-line concern. Instead, they fear the majors are playing the game of awarding the goodies to the highest bidder. The public is also growing more concerned that the medium and longer term effects of decisions are not being put in the equation, and that their children will pay for this breach of trust. We’ve seen what happens when short termism takes over company management – obscene executive greed, disregard of customers’ needs, and damage to or destruction of invaluable company assets like staff loyalty, trust, and commitment to the brand. The same is happening in big-brand political parties.
If Labor cannot learn that lesson from Cunningham – and Costa’s performance suggests it can’t – it could lose government in NSW and take ages to get it back federally. And when it did, it may have taken so long to heed the message that it would be able to govern only in coalition with the Greens.