Australian Labor fights back

Roy Green, Director of the Employment Studies Centre, University of Newcastle, Australia, has worked for both the British Labour Party and Australian Labor government. Here he maps out the Australian Labor Party (ALP)'s fightback.

Although the ALP lost October's general election, it still achieved what was thought to be impossible, making up all the ground that it had lost - and more - in its traditional working class heartland. Labor ended up with a higher vote than the conservative coalition, but fell short of a parliamentary majority because it could not make sufficient gains in the handful of key marginal seats in Sydney and Melbourne's suburbs.

By the time of the election campaign, Pauline Hanson's One Nation was no longer the issue. The focus shifted from race to class as a result first of the botched attempt to de-unionise the waterfront and, second, the government's controversial pledge to introduce a goods and services tax (GST). Both were issues where Kim Beazley's ALP could demonstrate what lessons the party had learnt from its previous period in government and how it had begun to reposition itself on the key areas of economic policy and industrial relations.

While Howard's Conservatives have been returned, it is widely recognised - even in the business community - that they have squandered their mandate for further market-based reforms. In the first place, they have little chance of introducing the GST, given the in-built opposition majority in the Senate. Moreover, their proposed "Second Wave" of union reforms - by contrast with the position after the 1983 election in Britain - can claim no endorsement from the Australian electorate. Significantly, the unions are committed to fighting these so-called "reforms" with the full backing of the ALP.

The message of this bitter-sweet election loss for the ALP is that it need not embrace a "Third Way", whatever that may mean, but it must simply build on its largely successful policy realignment, communicate it to the wider electorate and provide effective opposition. This will be reinforced by the appointment of the former president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, Simon Crean, as deputy leader and shadow treasurer. Crean has performed well on the front bench, and was responsible for developing a more interventionist approach to industry and regional policy.

Australian Labor has no intention of spending 18 years in the wilderness, let alone the 23 years that followed its own near fatal split in the 1950s. Beazley knows that to win power on a programme of social and economic renewal, the party must reconnect with its traditional base before it can reach out to other groups and interests. After this election, victory is in his sights.

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