[Marxism] The Aussie elections

[Philip Ferguson]

While Bob Gould and a few others gush and fantasise about the Labor
Party's victory in the Australian elections, the reality is that the
ruling class was perfectly happy about the Labor win.  In fact a chunk
of Rupert Murdoch's press in Australia openly supported Labor in the
run-up to the elections. 

The reality is that Howard and the Liberals were politically exhausted
and it was time to bring on the alternative management of Australian
Capital Ltd, the Labor Party.

Below are some comments from the Aussie bourgeois press:



Sydney Morning Herald: Taste the difference

Mark Latham, emerged from self-imposed exile to recycle the line that
Kohut had used in 2000 - it's "a Seinfeld election, a show about
nothing".

"No matter which party wins, Australia will still have a conservative
economic policy and a decentralised, productivity-based industrial
relations system," Latham wrote in The Australian Financial Review.

"No matter which party wins, Australia will still have a conservative
foreign policy dominated by the US and its mismanagement of the
so-called 'war on terror'.

"No matter which party wins, Australia will still have conservative
social policies: overfunded elite private schools, huge subsidies for
private health insurance and bucket loads of middle-class welfare."
...
And would a re-elected Howard-Costello government really "take Work
Choices even further"? It may secretly fantasise about a more laissez
faire labour market, but if it survives its disastrous experiment with
Work Choices it is simply implausible that the same people, bloodied and
tattered, would be so stupid as to risk another near-death experience
with a much-reduced majority. And how would it get its aggressive new
proposal through the new Senate? No, Labor's scare campaign, like the
Coalition's, is just not credible.
---------

Forbes: Australia's new leader set to win over big business

By revamping itself behind a fiscal conservative, Australia's Labor
Party has overcome big business fears that its election victory could
set back the country's economic boom, analysts said.  Australian
Business Council head Greg Bailey said Sunday, a day after Labor leader
Kevin Rudd swept conservative prime minister John Howard from power
after 11 years, that he had few concerns about the future government.
....
'There's an awful lot of alignment between where the business council is
coming from and where that government we believe will come from.'
.....
CommSec chief equities economist Craig James:
'In terms of economic policy, nothing really changes too much,' James
said. 'I don't foresee any great changes in terms of the currency or the
share market over the election.'
---------

The Age: Business Chamber positive about economy

The NSW Business Chamber has congratulated Prime Minister-elect Kevin
Rudd and says Labor's national dominance paves the way for economic
reform.  CEO of the NSW Business Chamber Kevin MacDonald said...
"The absence of any elections and the historic precedent of wall to wall
Labor allow the new government to undertake major reforms similar in
scale to that undertaken by the Hawke government in 1983."
----------

Sydney Morning Herald: Labor win will not impact market: expert
The election of a Labor government posed no immediate risk to
Australia's economy and is expected to have little impact on local stock
and currency markets, when trading resumes this week.
....But CommSec chief equities economist Craig James said...
"The new government has indicated that it would basically follow the
same sort of line in a big-picture sense.
----------


Welcoming the Labor win and talking it up as if Labor is some kind of
left party is particularly daft when you consider that Rudd is even to
the right of the leaders of the last era of Labor government in Oz
(Hawke and Keating) - not a happy time for the working class.

The Socialist Alliance may not be the way forward but at least it isn't
misleading people about the nature of the Labor Party and creating
illusions in Aussie capital's B team.

Philip Ferguson