The Australian election crisis: The political issues facing the working class

The ISSE is holding public meetings to discuss the unprecedented crisis that has resulted from the August 21 federal election and the vital political issues now confronting the working class and students.

Not since 1931 has a first-term government failed to return to office with a majority of the vote, and not since 1940 has there been a hung parliament. Under conditions of the greatest global economic crisis since the Great Depression, the Labor/Liberal two-party system that has defined parliamentary rule in Australia since World War II has broken down in the face of mass alienation from parties that serve only the interests of a wealthy financial and corporate elite.

Two months ago, the political coup that ousted Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd cast a revealing light on the forces that exercise real power behind the facade of so-called parliamentary democracy. Through the sordid horse-trading between Prime Minister Gillard and opposition leader Abbott with the independents and Greens, these same corpo- rate and financial elites, along with the state apparatus itself, are determining the composition of the next government and dictating its agenda of austerity and escalating militarism.

There is no way forward for ordinary working people, students and youth through the moribund parliamentary set-up. The perspective of trying to pressure Labor and Liberal to implement reforms, or of protesting against them by voting for the Greens, has led to a complete dead-end. The working class must strike out on a new road to fight for its own, independent class interests.

This conception formed the axis of the Socialist Equality Party’s election campaign. The SEP candidates insisted that only on the basis of an internationalist and socialist program, aimed at the unity of workers of all countries in a common struggle to abolish the capitalist profit system, and the establishment of a workers’ government, aimed at refashioning society in the interests of the vast majority, could the working class avert the ever-growing threat of war, defend its fundamental social interests and democratic rights, and resolve the crisis of climate change.

We invite students to attend these meetings and take part in a discussion around the building of a new revolutionary party of the working class.