Greens take seat in Australia

[Philip Ferguson <plf13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The Cunningham victory for the Greens is not just indicative of a small,
but significant, trend in Aussie politics (as noted by Steve, with
examples of various independents), but is also a notable trend in NZ.

In fact, in 1990s, there was an increasingly strong trend for
'outsiders' to win parliamentary seats.

For instance, before the 1990s no Labour or National MP had ever quit
their party and won their seat at the next general election.  Yet Jim
Anderton quit Labour in 1989 and comfortably won his (old Labour/working
class) seat in 1990, and has held it ever since, usually with huge
majorities.  In the early 1990s, Winston Peters left the National Party
and has held his seat at each successive election (I think 3 or 4 of
them).  Although he only held it by a handful in 1999, he won a gigantic
victory in July this year.

In 1993, the Alliance's Sandra Lee (one of the leaders of the Maori
party Mana Motuhake) won traditionally Labour Auckland Central.  It took
boundary changes and a fairly dirty Labour campaign in 1996 for the
bourgeois-liberals to get it back.  In 1999, the Greens won Coromandel,
a big seat consisting of rural areas and small towns on the east coast
of the North Island.  Labour was pushed back into third place.  This
year the National Party won it back.

In 1993, Winston Peters' party - NZ First - also won Northern Maori, the
first time labour had ever lost a Maori seat.  In 1996, NZ First won all
the other Maori seats.  (Peters' party lost them all in 1999, following
a disastrous period in coalition with National.)

Rightist Labour MP Peter Dunne also held his seat in Wellington in 1996
after leaving the Labour Party, although he was helped out by national
who didn't stand against him for an election or two.  However, this time
around, they stood and he still won with a very large majority.

Obviously, MMP has played a large part in ensuring a dispersal of votes
in general elections and a fragmenting of parties.  But the seats above
are all constituency seats, where there is no proportional representation.

Overall, the greater the degree of bourgeois democracy in terms of the
elections, the greater the fragmentation of parties.  The last
parliament had Labour, National, Alliance, ACT, Greens, NZ First and
United parties all represented.  The current one has the same parties,
except the Alliance got annihilated, while departing Alliance leader Jim
Anderton's new Progessive Coalition has two seats.

The votes of all sections of society have been quite widely dispersed.
The fact that this has been going on for over a decade now, and is quite
a broad trend, suggests it is not some blip or electoral quirk, with
everything returning back afterwards to a stable two-party system in
which the bourgeoisie has its Tory party and the trade unions have their
Labour Party.  That era is gone, certainly in NZ.

The new equilibrium in NZ is a multi-party parliament, in which Labour
currently has to be backed by *two* other parties (the Progressive
Coalition and United) to be able to form a government and in which the
old Tory party (National) got its worst-ever vote.  In the last
parliament Labour was dependent on the Alliance (its coalition partner)
and the Greens (the Greens and Labour fell out in the July elections
over GE, as Labour is refusing to renew the moratorium on GE).

This dispersal of class votes and multi-party power politics, in the
context of the atomisation of the working class and the emergence of a
young generation of workers who have little or no attachment to Labour,
is the kind of framework in which revolutionaries have to chart a way
forward.  I'm delighted there is a new generation of workers without
that suffocating attachment to Labour - they are more open to
revolutionary ideas as a result.

Philip Ferguson

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