Who Won the Australian Federal “Election” ?

05-06-2022: A week and a half after Australia’s Federal Election on May 21, the Australian Labor Party (ALP) finally has enough lower house seats to form a government. At the time of writing, all seats have been decided, with the ALP scraping through with 77 seats, one above that needed to form a majority government.[1] Yet there were many things that were suspicious about this election result. For example, on the morning of the first business day after the election, ALP leader Anthony Albanese was sworn in as Prime Minister – with only around 72% of the vote counted, and at that time the ALP was far short of the required 76 seats. Within three hours of being sworn in, Albanese stepped on a plane and flew to Tokyo to meet US President Joe Biden and the leaders of India and Japan, in a meeting of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (the “Quad”)[2] – a dangerous alliance headed by Washington which prepares for war against the People’s Republic of China (PRC). It is not far-fetched to suggest that the US and Australian ruling classes knew exactly who was going to “win” this election.

If this didn’t raise eyebrows, four days later, when the ALP still did not have enough seats to form a majority government, new Foreign Minister Penny Wong flew to Fiji to meet with the heads of Pacific Island nations, where she warned them of the “consequences” of signing up to security agreements with Beijing.[3] This follows the contrived outcry over the government of the Solomon Islands completing a security deal with the PRC last March.[4] The need for this agreement was demonstrated last year, when US government orchestrated riots broke out in the capital Honiara last year, resulting in Chinese owned businesses being torched and several people losing their lives.[5] The Solomon Islands has the exact same security arrangement with the governments of Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea – but this did not prevent a hysterical fear campaign in the Australian media about the supposed danger of a “Chinese military base” 2000 kilometres from the Queensland coastline.[6] Despite repeated assurances from the PRC that it has “no intention” to establish a base in the Solomon Islands,[7] mainstream media anti-China fear mongering barely rests.

Election irregularities

This election followed two years of extensive political and economic repression under the guise of purported healthcare. Whether or not SARS-CoV-2 exists as a dangerous pathogen, there never was, and is not now, a “pandemic”. Covid-19 was the cover for an assault on the standing of the working class in society, in a vain attempt to “re-set” the capitalist system, which is in dire straits. An enormous freedom movement emerged in response to unconscionable lockdowns and forced vaccines. This movement was unquestionably the largest and most sustained political movement in Australian history. The peak of this movement was on February 12 this year, when between 1 and 2 million people travelled to the nation’s capital of Canberra to demonstrate in front of the federal parliament to protest unjustifiable Covid vaccine mandates.[8] The city of Melbourne in Victoria endured the longest lockdowns on the face of the planet,[9] while the Australian Army was deployed to the streets of Sydney to enforce brutal lockdowns in New South Wales.[10] Partially in response, several new political parties emerged out of the freedom movement, which contested the May 21 federal election.

Yet the ruling class was determined to prevent representatives of the freedom parties from entering the government and went to extraordinary lengths to bring this about. The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) had previously been one Australian institution that was relatively trusted to conduct local, state and federal elections. Yet it would be naïve to imagine that the base corruption that infected almost all government and public institutions during “Covid” would not also contaminate the AEC. And so it was. On the Senate ballot papers, some independent candidates did not have a box to mark for “above the line” voting. When questioned about how to vote for these candidates, AEC staff gave various answers, ranging from “don’t mark a box without a name next to it” to “we use the same ballot papers from previous elections, so there may not be the same number of candidates running” to “the candidate has probably withdrawn” !! This amounts to the AEC actively discouraging people to cast a valid vote.[11] Independent pro-freedom Queensland Senate candidate Steve Dickson announced that the freedom independents would be legally challenging the AEC over the problems.[12]

While some people had to scan in to voting booths with a QR code due to “Covid”, once inside they did not have to prove their identification – making “voting” at multiple polling booths possible. The former government introduced a bill for voter ID for elections in October last year, but it was scuttled.[13] For years, the pencils used to mark the paper ballots provided by the AEC were long with dark lead and were left in the voting booths. This election, some voters were handed a small pencil with very light lead when they collected their ballot paper. Potentially, the light lead could easily be erased by AEC officials behind closed doors. The freedom movement advised people to take a pen with them to vote instead, but there were reports of AEC officials trying to prevent this. Likewise, AEC officials in some places attempted to prevent voters who were placing their drivers licence next to the ballot paper and taking a photo on their phone as a record. The AEC officials – all of whom have to be double vaxed with a Covid cocktail to be considered for the job – had their orders from somewhere.

UAP marginalised

The United Australia Party, funded by billionaire mining magnate Clive Palmer, was arguably the leading freedom party in this election. The UAP ran on an explicit platform against lockdowns and against vaccine mandates – and even called for those who have lost their jobs through mandates to be reinstated. Despite being a party which posed no challenge to capitalism, its positions were deemed too confronting for the elite and their “globalist” agenda, and were thus blocked wherever they could be. While Clive Palmer reportedly spent $100 million on advertising for radio and television,[14] the UAP was prevented from advertising on Facebook.[15] Some of the television spots the UAP was able to pay for resulted in a 9.45pm timeslot – which is way outside prime time. Unlike the previous federal election, where the UAP was basically campaigning against the ALP, this time the UAP’s main slogan was “We Can Never Trust Labor, the Liberals or the Greens Again!” Even though this was coming from a party committed to the system of private production for private profit, the UAP’s political direction was far too radical for the elite who were desperate to push voters back into the major parties. So the UAP, along with all other parties excluding Labor and Liberal, were kept well away from the main candidate debates by the mainstream media.

While it is true that the Greens were also targeted by some local authorities who tried to prevent the placement of their election advertising,[16] the Greens and the ALP were clearly the parties chosen by the top 0.1% to lead Australian capitalism for the next period. Indeed, the Greens and the ALP had already been the main parties most enthusiastic about imposing deadly Covid repression during two years of lockdowns. No one other than these two liberal bourgeois parties were more forthright in forcing people to inject the Covid vaccines, which could result in permanent injury or death. Yet the vaccine mandates were drastically unpopular across whole sectors of the population, even amongst those who chose voluntarily to take the vaccine and believed the “deadly pandemic” mantra. This is why the ALP and the Greens refused to attend some “meet the candidates” forums where they were organised by the freedom movement – despite being invited. They were well aware that they could not win a debate with anyone on vaccine mandates, i.e., take a series of shots or lose your job and the ability to feed yourself and your family. This vile abuse of power is far too evident.

‘Greenslide’ in Brisbane

The Greens were unexpected winners in this election, expanding their presence in the House of Representatives from 1 to 4. Their three additional gains were in the Queensland capital, with the Greens winning the seats of Brisbane, Ryan and Griffith.[17] It is possible that climate change was a major contributing factor to these electoral breakthroughs, as much of the east coast including Brisbane was hit with major climate change fuelled flooding in February, which led to enormous property damage and the taking of some lives.[18] This “Greenslide” was added to by the winning of some seats in NSW by the “teal” independents – whose main aim is to pressure the Liberal Party to fully acknowledge and act on the danger of rising carbon emissions. While Australia has borne the brunt of the increasing frequency and severity of greenhouse gas driven bushfires, floods, droughts, cyclones and even mini-tornados,[19] it is an illusion to entertain the notion that the Greens – or any other party committed to retaining the capitalist socio-economic system – will take “climate action”.

The massacre of the natural environment, of which climate change is just one consequence, is bound up with the exploitation of human labour. To even begin addressing this problem, the major means of production need to be brought into public hands and administered by the overwhelming majority on a world scale. That is to say, the working class in the West must rise to a position of political power so that the privately owned mega-corporations no longer have a free reign to disregard the pollution they create. Carbon free energy sources need to come online, but it must be recognised that solar panels and windmills cannot replace fossil fuel fired energy on their own by any stretch. All zero carbon energy sources including nuclear technology need to be utilised as part of a coordinated plan. This means, however, that profit gouging energy corporations which claim to be “green” must be expropriated. The Greens, much less Labor and Liberal – are light years away from such a perspective. Instead, their commitment to the fallacy of “green capitalism” means they inevitably defend the rights of the unelected Davos elite regardless of their rhetoric.

Only socialism can win freedom

Many in the freedom movement were shocked at the outcome of the election. There were hopes that the freedom parties could make inroads or even “sack the government”. And a Labor/Greens government may well be the first to order lockdowns and insane vaccine mandates and even a reanimation of the concentration camps built for Covid – with the next “pandemic”. While the UAP offered a challenge to this aspect of elite rule, the UAP was at the same time part of the same class line as the bourgeois parties they denounced. The UAP was on board with the imperialist proxy war on Russia and whipped up baseless fears about the PRC. Even though many in the freedom movement actually have some sympathy for the predicament of Russia which is being targeted by NATO, their irrational fear of “China” often pushes them, inadvertently, into the same camp as those they correctly denounce as evil for launching an unspeakable genocide via murderous “medical” injections. While it is true that the government of the PRC remains an anchor of the fake Covid narrative, this is only a condemnation of Stalinism, and not at all of socialism.

While the electoral fraud may not have been on the scale of the 2020 US Presidential Election,[20] it was real enough and aimed squarely at the freedom parties and independents. Even with the backing of Clive Palmers’ millions of dollars, the UAP was effectively sidelined because they veered off the script. The Australian capitalist state demonstrated it will not hesitate to enact official and unofficial deceit to keep “unwanted” issues off the agenda. It was easy enough to skew the mainstream media towards barely mentioning the previous two years of political and economic “Covid” repression, giving the false impression that everyone has moved on and no longer wants to talk about 2020 and 2021.

The paramount lesson for working people is that only class and not national institutions have the possibility of liberating society from the dangers of capitalist tyranny, climate destruction and nuclear war. This means socialist revolutions in the imperialist West, Asia, Africa and Latin America – combined with proletarian political revolutions in the PRC and the remaining distorted workers’ states. Labour must build a workers’ party which fights for a workers’ government, which guides the masses towards its destiny of the sweeping away of class exploitation and the irrational rule of billionaires. Authentic Leninist-Trotskyism rocked the world in 1917, and it must do so once again.

WORKERS LEAGUE

www.redfireonline.com

E: workersleague@redfireonline.com

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/politics/ (31-05-2022)

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/23/australias-new-pm-albanese-sworn-in-ahead-of-quad-meet.html (31-05-2022)

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/may/27/penny-wong-urges-pacific-nations-to-weigh-up-consequences-of-china-security-offers (31-05-2022)

[4] https://redfireonline.com/2022/03/30/canberra-plots-regime-change-in-the-solomon-islands/ (31-05-2022)

[5] https://redfireonline.com/2021/12/06/solomon-islands-washington-fuels-anti-china-riots/ (31-05-2022)

[6] https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/4/4/in-solomon-islands-australias-largesse-faces-china-test (31-05-2022)

[7] https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/solomon-islands-china-solomon-relations-china-minister-visit-to-solomon-islands-no-intention-to-build-solomon-islands-a-military-base-says-china-3011470 (31-05-2022)

[8] https://redfireonline.com/2022/02/17/the-straw-man-fascism-in-the-freedom-movement/ (31-05-2022)

[9] https://countercurrents.org/2021/10/melbourne-the-longest-in-lockdown/ (31-05-2022)