Personal – The Boomer Hut

Saturday night, I watched the entire live count of the votes for the federal election on the ABC. At the beginning, exit polls had Labor winning 52-48 on the two-party preferred, which had Penny Wong looking quietly confident and Arthur Sinodinos preparing for a night of analysing six years of turmoil. As the count went on, and Sinodinos’ phone kept beeping with good news for Coalition supporters, the dynamic flipped — the Zali Steggall victory only providing a small cathartic effect for anti-Coalition viewers. Wong became visibly dejected, Sinodinos began digging into the Labor campaign and Bill Shorten, Leigh Sales moved on from grilling Sinodinos to grilling Wong, and the jubilant celebrations at the Liberal Party reception contrasted with the sombre pain of Shorten’s concession speech at the Labor event.

The media began spinning the result as the “unloseable election” on the night. Many criticisms have been levelled at polling companies, Bill Shorten and the Labor campaign, Queenslanders, Liberal voters in Victoria, Stop Adani and Bob Brown, the Greens, racists, Clive Palmer, Pauline Hanson, fake news, the coal mining industry and its workers, even the Victorian state election. Because the polls were wrong, no-one in the mainstream media can point to one reason why Labor lost, as if there is one easy fix they can make to destroy the Liberals once and for all. Unfortunately, there is no easy fix for the issues that bedevil the ALP.

Voting tallies as of Thursday have the national two-party preferred swing to the Coalition at 0.91%, which is piddling. The ALP had a 3% swing towards it in 2016, the Coalition gained 3.6% in 2013 and 2.5% in 2010, the ALP swept to power with a swing over 5% in 2007. The electi0n, and three years leading up to Saturday, resulted in the needle wobbling. So, with all the turmoil, angst and polarisation that has occurred since 2016, and arguably since Malcolm Turnbull knifed Tony Abbott, what did change?

Nationally, the Coalition and Labor first preference votes both went down. People are still deserting the major parties. The United Australia Party gained 3.57% of the House of Representatives vote, and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation increased theirs by over 1% despite not running everywhere. The Greens dropped some HoR votes nationwide, but ran close in some inner-city Melbourne seats despite a 1.89% swing against it in Victoria, and increased their Senate first preference votes nationally. Fraser Anning’s party hoovered up some hardline racist votes. Micro parties did as micro parties do, with Help End Marijuana Prohibition doing well in Senate races — something there for the majors to think about.

This indicates that people were just as unhappy with the government and opposition as last time. More votes came for non-Labor and non-Coalition parties because people are disengaging further from the team sport and voting for parties which connect more closely with them.

Preferences from the UAP and One Nation delivered a big swing to the Coalition in Queensland. George Christensen’s big win in Dawson came off a 0.77% increase in his own vote, a 12.9% increase in the One Nation vote, 4.9% to the UAP and 1.9% for Fraser Anning’s CNP. Michelle Landry recorded a big swing in Capricornia on the back of a 20% increase in votes for One Nation, UAP and CNP. while she only increased her vote by 0.5%. Cathy O’Toole lost her seat on a swing where preferences from the UAP and Katter’s Australian Party gave Phillip Thompson the seat — although his own swing of 1.44% would have given him the seat. Peter Dutton kept Dickson on the back of a small swing to himself, with previous Family First votes going to One Nation as well. Ken O’Dowd lost votes in Flynn, yet gained a 6% swing on increased One Nation and UAP votes.

The relentless campaign by Clive Palmer, which switched to an anti-Labor campaign once it was clear he wasn’t getting a Senate seat, and the increasing support for One Nation gave Scott Morrison the election, off the back of a protest vote that ate into the Labor vote and defied the increase in Senate votes for the Greens. It played much better in Queensland than the “hope and change and fiscal responsibility” campaign Labor employed, which had mixed results in other states.

The truth of why the ALP campaign fell flat was well-covered by Ben Hillier in Red Flag. Their tax revenue policies weren’t ostensibly aimed the “top end of town” as they stated — their tax cut cancellations, franking credits reform and negative gearing changes were aimed at middle class workers and retirees living off super and residual income. They failed to frame their campaign as an attack on big capital, as it really wasn’t. Following that, their plans for low and middle income workers would have left them worse off than they are now, in real terms, according to Australian National University modelling. No wonder the Liberal scare campaign about Labor taxing everything more came off.

What is mostly overlooked though, is that social media discussions about politics change more minds than the TV and radio campaigns today. One pollster who thought that Morrison would win, Professor Bela Stantic from Griffith University, said in a piece on ABC News:

“I am able to assess the opinions of people through their social media … other polling has a much smaller sample. I must [just] be careful of fake news.”

Social media is the new doorknocking. Facebook ads and comment battles influence the people who read them, and the platforms, including Twitter, Youtube and Instagram, encourage reactionary behaviour. From my own anecdotal evidence looking at Facebook, Bill Shortonbrains and Bull Shitten was never a chance to win, yet Pauline Hanson was a real person (Mum, you’re very wrong) and Fraser Anning wasn’t racist, just a real Australian who cared about the country. The death tax that the Labor Party was bringing in was going to steal all your wealth — this kind of discourse on the feeds of the most popular platform for Australians to engage with politics on was everywhere. In Queensland especially, the ALP has little foothold on social media — lots of pro-One Nation and anti-left material is shared around. US and UK conservative political material cross-pollinates debate. Algorithms on Youtube and Facebook are known to push conservative posts over progressive and socialist content because it gets more clicks, longer views, more engagement. This favours the Coalition.

The results in the wake of these transformative forces on political discourse in Australia, shows that the ALP has lost its connection with Queensland workers. The union movement is a shadow of itself. Its Change The Rules campaign did jack all. Labor’s state and local swings came in areas that could be linked to higher education and incomes, although some of the poorest electorates swung to them as well — the trend went towards the Coalition in 2PP terms. The neoliberal-social democratic platform Hawke and Keating embedded in the federal party has created a fatal schism with the people who want it to act in their class interests, who decided to go with the parties that promised a patriotic realignment of economic interests in their favour — One Nation, Clive Palmer, Fraser Anning, Bob Katter.

The most emblematic issue of that schism is the climate action debate. The Stop Adani convoy would hardly have made a difference at the polls, indicated in the stability of the Greens vote in non-southeast Queensland, because the emptiness of the climate change policies Labor put out had already been laid bare. Central and North Queensland have high unemployment alongside big earnings in mining, yet Shorten and Labor failed to talk about the benefits of a just transition that would benefit those voters in any way. The state Labor government amplified that disillusionment over the last couple of years with the war on farmers through the land clearing laws, and their dithering on Adani. I touched on the failure of political discourse in coal mining communities relating to the Hunter Valley in my last blog, and lo and behold — One Nation got their best result in Hunter!

If Labor want to take back the regions where mining and manufacturing reigns over farming, and the Greens want to get in these places, there is a space for them to sell aspiration and a green, abundant future. They need to drop their anti-worker ideologies around small government, private industry over the public good and their focus on neoliberal orthodoxy melded with social democratic sensibility — the Hawke-Keating legacy. The outer suburbs and regional towns will come back to the left when they can walk or ride to work instead of driving for an hour, when they reconnect with wider society, instead of being stuck in our atomised modernity. The material reality of modern Australia is that improving your life only lies in being the winner, not in acting collectively to improve society as a whole, and the conservative parties have connected better to people on that basis.

The opening is there for the socialist left movements too. We should harness the disillusionment, and work hard to raise class consciousness in struggling areas. These movements need to be brave, in talking to people that hold polar opposite views to what we espouse, and link our ideas to their concerns. Immigrants moving here aren’t threatening us, big capital and offshoring is. We aren’t destroying the environment, rich capitalists are and they’re denying responsibility. There isn’t a shortage of electricity, renewable energy or public transport investment — big capital is holding our salvation back from us for their own financial interests. Socialist movements need to take direct action to ally the material conditions we can observe, to the solutions that will allay the fears of Australians who have lost out and will continue to lose out under the status quo.

I’ve come around to the view that electoralism is not the way for a socialist movement to take power. It will merely serve as a platform for the demands and views of the movement to be broadcast to people who may never hear its agenda, which is what the Victorian Socialists are focussed on doing. The results of relentless campaigning in northern Melbourne by the VicSocs is reflected in the healthy vote totals in Calwell, Wills and Cooper, where they gained 4-5% of the vote without a supporting Senate campaign. A huge doorknocking effort gave them this result, which shows that getting into one-on-one conversations with people about socialism can change minds and win supporters, despite the dirty connotations of the word.

Somehow, Ipswich is still a Labor seat. I’ll be spending the next three years talking to people and building a movement out here to try and reverse the trend of reactionary politics that has existed here since Pauline Hanson’s first victory in Oxley back in 1996. I hope we can follow the example of the Victorian Socialists and Socialist Alternative in building a new socialist force in Australia, that begins a swell of revolutionary fervour against the neoliberal consensus that atomises and commodifies all of us.

Hello, and welcome to Red Said Fred. This blog is my way of expressing the churning ideas and opinions that float around in my head all day, working a full time job and raising a couple of beautiful daughters with my wife.

I came to left of centre politics about ten or so years ago. At the time, climate change denialism was prominent in the Australian polity and mass media, where purveyors like Lord Monckton received free platforms wherever they went to dispute what was already the overwhelming evidence of man made climate change. While I was indulging in a period of 4chan-fed libertarian shitposting, the rebuke of the Rudd government’s sop to climate action by the Australian Greens caught my attention. Here was a band of crossbenchers standing up for humanity, backed by scientific research demonstrating that the proposed scheme would be useless, putting their seats on the line and risking the prospect of no action on climate change at all. It was bold, principled, and as the continual stream of dire scientific observations and predictions have demonstrated since, was necessary to get action that would work, the Clean Energy Act.

Combined with the ALP capitulation to business interests in setting up the Fair Work Act to restrict workers’ ability to get increases in wages and better conditions, the major party support for the racist, fascistic Intervention in the Northern Territory and its successor in Stronger Futures, and the constant attacks on, and ignorance of the plight of people on welfare payments, I was driven to find a better worldview, a better idea for reforming society to look after the most vulnerable among us. That search led me to believe in the necessity of the ideal eco-friendly society. I became vocally supportive of the Greens in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, my country of birth.

Over the years, the limitations of the Greens came to light. The rise of the centrist and liberal figures in the federal party led to less radical policies, and a more amenable commitment to compromising ideals in favour of small victories. In one case, the Greens joined with the Liberals to pass a funding package for education funding that fell short of the original plans under the Gillard Labor government—the opposite tactics to which Bob Brown used against Rudd, in the name of securing what they could best get. Another time saw the federal Greens join with the Liberals to remove group voting tickets in Senate elections, to be replaced with optional preferential voting—a naked attempt to shore up Greens seats over any good attempt at proportional representation. The name of the game became focusing on electoral matters and picking off the odd lower house seat, rather than the direct action and advocacy the earlier Greens were empowered by.

Despite the radical proposals for climate change action and environmental preservation, the increasingly moderate proposition of the rest of the Australian Greens platform, its inability to explain how modifying our capitalist systems would benefit those who suffer under it without side effects, and the increasingly strong tendency of its party officials to attack the anti-capitalists within the membership and parliamentary caucuses, led me to the conclusion that the Greens would never connect to the working class.

Eighteen months ago, I began a journey into the sea of socialist prose that exists out in the world. Marx was no longer a swear word; I read The Communist Manifesto and marveled at the accuracy of Marx’s analysis of the broad contradictions between class and capitalism, already prominent in the middle of the 19th century. Since then, I have been influenced by anarchist writers such as Peter Kropotkin and Murray Bookchin, using their material analyses to try and contextualise the observations of society and capitalism that emanate from all corners of modern discourse.

I now use Marxism as the basic scientific method for understanding our world as we know it. The ecological destruction wrought by the imperialist stage of capitalism, as defined by Lenin, will end humanity unless the contradictions of our modern international society are addressed, and the neoliberal consensus is resisted and overthrown. This will necessitate the reorganisation of the international proletariat, subjecting the labour aristocracy to its true interests, to overthrow the bourgeois states which exploit and disempower the workers which create economic value. I believe that once the revolutionary process achieves the overthrow of the state or states, the tendency of the dictatorship of the proletariat to set up an immovable bureaucracy that stands in the way of true democratic control of the means of production must be suppressed or avoided, and control handed immediately to the proletariat, as envisaged by Kropotkin. The experiments of revolutionary Marxism so far must be looked to, for a safe path to the stateless communism alluded to by Marx, which I propose must be transitioned to as quickly as possible.

So, how did I get here, writing a blog?

Well, the thoughts that have lived in my head need an outlet. Analysis of the modern Australian perspective of our reality is scant, apart from the good few outlets like Red Flag and Green Left Weekly. However, I don’t belong to either party that runs them, so this is the best I can do.

Young families and anti-capitalist activism are hard to balance, normally resulting in all family and no anti-capitalism activism. Therefore, this is where I shall throw my efforts—attempting to digest current events and offer an analysis to others that allows these events to be seen through a scientific socialist lens, which looks at the material reality of the events, what causes them, the underlying ideology, and explains the dialectics that exist within those events.

I shall post blogs in an adhoc fashion initially, until I’m good at this.

Talk soon, comrades.

Category: Personal

Introduction — who am I, and what am I about?