CURRENT POLITICS - Democracy |
Remarks
presented at the Wheeler Centre forum on Democracy at the Capitol Theatre,
Melbourne. Wednesday,
12 June 2013
First,
it gives me the chance to spend time with friends. Secondly,
I can seek your help to track down what I’d long thought to be a quotation from
George Orwell. As
an undergraduate, I read all I could of Orwell and carried away what I thought
was a summary of his attitude towards democracy. Twenty
years ago, I went back to his essays to footnote his exact words. No
luck. Even
Mr Google has not ridden to the rescue. So
you are my last hope. If
an audience as diverse and as distinguished as this one can’t identify the source, I shall stop
looking. I
suspect that my memory has fashioned a paraphrase. Anyway, here’s what I
recollect Orwell saying: The fascist alleges that democracy is
a bourgeois fraud. A socialist knows that bourgeois
democracy is a fraud.
Why
do socialists think that bourgeois democracy is a fraud? Our
answer is that political democracy will remain hollow until there is economic
and industrial democracy. Equally
important, all three depend on participatory democracy.
In
1888, the man who drafted the Commonwealth constitution and became the first
Chief Justice, Sam Griffith, thought it ‘notorious that there is not any equal
freedom of contract’. Why
not? Because of the imbalance between those who controlled more and more wealth
and those with nothing to sell but a capacity to add value for capital. Today,
Griffith’s admirers want us to believe that unions deprive an individual
cleaner, whose second language is English, of her right to negotiate conditions
with Freehills on behalf of a multinational corporations.
That
is why the Grocon dispute over union OHS reps on building sites is a matter of
life and death. Laws
are taking away the ability of workers to stop a workplace over asbestos. These
moves lean on a jurisprudence in which killing is not murder if done for
profit.
Between
2007 and 2010, the US investment house BlackRock bought eleven percent of the
shares in Australia’s 128 largest companies measured by revenue. Was
such a prospect an issue at the 2007 election? Was
the fact that the raid had happened raised before the 2010 polls? Will
BlackRock and its ilk even rate a mention in the three years of campaigning
since then? Industrial
and economic democracy are not as central to debate as they have been. That
sad fact came home five years ago during a visit to Broken Hill. I
consulted the Lonely Planet guide only to find that its authors could not get
their heads around the idea of social democracy. Since
1904, Broken Hill has had a Social Democratic Club. The
guidebook turned this radical organisation into the Social and Democratic Club. Well,
the Club is all of those things, but it retains its socialist roots. Indeed,
social democracy is not underground at Broken Hill. The
city has a newspaper that is not owned by Mass Murdoch. The
Barrier Daily Truth is still run by the Industrial
Council. Murdoch gave up his Australian
citizenship to own television networks in the USA. Even without being able to vote here
he’s had more political clout than any elected member of parliament. When I pointed this out in my weekly
column for the Australian I was
reduced to the ranks and discharged. Freedom of the press was won in the
1820s when hundreds of workers went to prison for selling unregistered
publications. Convict editors in Sydney and Hobart
did the same for us in the 1820s. Bradley Manning carries on the
tradition. As does the CIA officer who’s just
reminded us that Big Brother is watching. Please don’t get too excited about
this. Pine Gap has been sucking up your
phone messages for forty years.
Its
displays are all about what the Bulletin
was wont to call the national gasworks. The
National Portrait Gallery opened without a single image of a trade unionist. The
Right was censoring the National Museum even before it opened in 2001. To
redress this class bias we need a red armband view of Australian history. We
need monuments to the three popular votes that blocked assaults on political,
industrial and economic rights. They
are the defeat of the two conscription plebiscites in 1916 and 1917, and
the rejection of the 1951 referendum to ban the Communist Party. Millions
are being poured into celebrating the invasion of Turkey. The
popular victories that preserved even bourgeois democracy are ignored, indeed,
suppressed. It’s
better to campaign and lose than to make an executive decision. For
example, many local governments voted to go nuclear free. The
Eurobodalla shire decided to hold a plebiscite. The
nuclear-free side won. But
even if the vote had gone the other way, involving the entire electorate would
have more effect than yet another motion in chambers. Organising
is an education for the organisers as much as for those to whom an appeal is
made. I
shall end with a quotation which I can footnote. Its
author was Samuel Champ, Hobart organiser in 1916 for the Builders’ Labourers
Federation: These are the people to whom we owe
the liberties we enjoy today. When those words are chiseled into the portals
of a museum of democracy we can be more confident that the democracy it
represents is no longer a fraud.
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