Nov 30, 2007

Socialist Alliance, Greens and where to now

by Dave Riley
I've always taken the view with the Socialist Alliance that the core requisite is frankness and fact. Thats' backed up by the reality that we have a very public internal party persona. We'd leak big time if we were in the obscurantism business.

No secrets -- otherwise confidence and trust would suffer.

What strikes me so much in the wake of last Saturday is that it is no longer last Saturday and the tasks, such as they are, is business as usual. Same ole same ole.

What that means for the Greens is going to be very interesting given that its another four years before there's a day in the sun electorally at that level.

Have the Greens moved away from a parliamentarist mode to something else as a consequence of their engagement with Your Rights at Work politics? Has the activist left now gravitated to that milieu as Socialist Alternative and the International Socialist Organisation would have it?

And with the electoral deference to the Greens has the Socialist Alliance been totally marginalised as a consequence? Is there no prospect in chipping away at that voter niche?

My experiences suggest differently because a party like the Greens has this overwhelming incapacity to morph into a consistent campaigning outfit. I'm sure some localised Greens outfits have made that transition but we're not talking about a generic phenomenon -- otherwise in Greens touchstones like Grayndler (in the Greens Sydney inner city heartland), Pip Hinman would be a no go completely. We earn every friggin vote we got through the effort of doing stuff 365 days per year.

If you like thats' our tragedy and encapsulates the present sentence which we are serving: regardless of our attainments in the movements and within mobilisations, we've not been able as yet to translate that presence into electoral numbers. I guess the best example of that is here in Queensland where well known indigenous activist Sam Watson( especially in the wake of the Mulrunji deaths in custody campaign) wasn't able to lift SA senate numbers. That doesn't make him any less the activist or less relevant to Murri politics but it does underscore our relative shallow electoral presence.

I'm sure a lot of this has to do with our limited resources ( how many $AUD millions was in the Greens war chest?)and constrained ( read almost non- "existent") mainstream media profile -- but the key element is that aside from the Your Rights at Work mobes, and the Lebanon protests, there's been no major rise in the movements over the past two years. Your Rights at Work were the clincher despite how warped and contained those events were. Those are what got Rudd across the line.

We tried to mark off our APEC presence in New South Wales with Alex Bainbridge on our senate ticket -- so I guess that shows how far we can get profiling that way at this stage of our development and broader presence. [And Alex did get media during August.]

But we are dealing with 'reach out' issues I've never had to consider before. We are so qualitatively beyond the confines of the circle spirit inner urban left that its all new territory for all of us. Its all DIY too.

AND we are negotiating this journey with a very loyal and dedicated membership team. The partnerships that underpin the SA are still holding. People are forgetting that. The only hiccup we've experienced --aside from the vagaries of the Howard years -- is the exit of the small affiliates through 2006.

No one can say that they then went on to do great things and make their mark in the world, alone or collectively. They left with the promise of nothing -- regardless of their rationale.

When I see what this has meant for the ISO I have to say its like cutting off your nose despite your face.

During the period 2005/06 we had a drop off in numbers in sync with the pits of the Howard experience -- this is what these affiliates embraced -- that very broad demoralisation. I guess the affiliates themselves accounted for a segment of that too inasmuch as their members were signed up to the SA.But as we pull together the statistics for this campaign we know how it stacks up with previous elections in terms of member and supporter engagement. Here in Qld we received three times the level of donations compared to the 2004 campaign and a separate trade union instigated windfall that was historically unique .

On top of that the partyish -- MultiTendencySocialstParty - push that flows from our 2005 SA conference decision has gone through a period of tweaking and consolidation. We're learning to deal with some very new experiences on the left --and, most importantly, we are learning from each other regardless of what tradition we come from. So a new team is forming albeit unevenly around the country as we get down to the business at hand.

The approach we took where its all about working together on task and campaigns is bearing fruit. You can imagine how complex that can be -- fostering a cooperative engagement across geographical and, at times, political divides.

But we can still deliver the goods. when the time comes so that next year --as the Rudd honeymoon wanes -- is going to be very interesting.