The world
economic crisis comes to Australia its population is just over 15 million - freeze.
Jonathan WEST SYDNEY - The Australian ruling class entered the current world recession with the naive belief that an investment boom in the economy's resource sectors - particularly mining - would insulate it from
As late as July 21, 1980, the Australian Financial Review thought it possible to exclaim in an editorial:
"Australia is in the grip of investment fever. Fired with the bullish statements from Federal politicians, the nation has leapt from the sheep's back to that of the Organisation of Petroleum-Exporting era of prosperity."
However, this dream was shattered in the second half of 1982.
Investment fell off a trickle. Unemployment skyrocketted and is now equal to the levels in many other imperialist
From an official figure in June 1982 of just over 6 percent, by unemployment jumped to almost 10 per cent. In 1983 it will go much higher.
nger shielding the economy from t world downturn.
The much-trumpeted sources boom was based upon substantial investment in the production of minerals and energy-producing raw materials like coal and oil. However, as the world recession deepened, demand for these products fell. Prices for the rawmaterial exports of Australia dropped off sharply in late 1981 and early 1982. With this in mind, and a perspective of longcancelled or postponed their most important projects.
of investment between to postpone the impact of the recession. Increased orders for manufacturing companies supplying the raw-materials developments, plus the increased demand resulting from such large amounts of money entering the economy, masked weakness of Australian
But the real crisis of Australian industry is now becoming more evident
And working people here are being forced to pay the price.
Because Australia has a relatively small population and domestic market in comparison to other imperialist countries -
Australian capitalism has been able to develop a secondary-industry base under heary tariff and quota protection. Australia has one of the most protected economies in the capitalist world. The resulting lack of competition has proand inefficient, and therefore uncompetitive, industry.
Without the shield of a boom in the primary sector, Australian industry Is now entering a longterm structural crisis. It cannot compete with the products of more advanced industries from other imperialist countries such as Japan and Western Europe. It has to maintain the high tariff barriers to survive, yet so long as these remain high, it has no to upgrade its
The attempts of the Australian ruling class to make working people pay for the crisis produced important changes in Australian politics in 1982.
The employers launched in quick succession a series of co-ordinated attempts to win back concessions they had been forced to concede during the short-lived
One of the key gains for Australian workers had been the widespread introduction, after a sustained fight by workers in most major industries, of a shorter workweek. In many industries weekly working hours were reduced from 40 to 38, and in the sectors where the determined campaigns had been waged, weekly hours were reduced to 35.
The employers responded to this when the crisis hit by either reneging on the agreements altogether, introduction of a four-day week with loss of one day's pay. This form of short week became particularly common in throughout the metal industry, in direct contravention of the court-sanctioned legal awards for those workers.
In other areas, however, the employers responded with the more usual practice of mass lay-offs. Particularly hard hit were workers in the steel industry, which in 1982 entered its worst crisis since the Great Depression. Unemployment in steel industry-based cities such as Wollongong is now close to the 1930s levels, with figures of around 25 per cent out of
Escalating this offensive late in government of Malcolm Fraser announced that it favored a 12-month wage
With inflation currently running at around 12 per cent, a year's wage freeze would mean an across-the-board cut of 12 per cent in workers' wages.
However, because the Australian constitution does not give the federal government the power to institute controls over wages or prices, the federal government had to win agreement for its plan from the six state governments, important of which are headed by the Labor Party.
After initially denouncing the scheme as a "gimmick" and a "fraud," and demanding that it be implemented only in conjunction with a price freeze, the Labor state premiers agreed to legislate for
This stance was opposed for a time by national Labor Party leader Bill but he also soon changed his position under pressure from business
As Australia's powerful oil industry workers, backed by the Australian Coun cil of Trade Unions, prepared to go into action in January this year to win wage rises, Hayden stated to the press regarding the wage freeze:
"I hope to the maximum extent possible that the trade union movement will try and make this gimmick work."
The rapidity with which the Labor Party leaders reversed their opposition to the wage freeze highlighted the response of the official labor movement
Rather than leading and inspiring a working-class the Labor Party and union leaders have put themselves forward as "responsible managers" of the system.
They have accepted that the way to deal with the crisis is to reduce wages so that profits will rise.
The ALP parliamentarians share the basic outlook of the major capitalist party in Australia, the Liberal Party, concerning the causes of the crisis and what to do about it. They agree that workers should bear the burden. Their "answer" to the recession is the same as that of the trade union bureaucrats: Cut real wages, shore up profits through protectionist measures and government handouts, and wait for events in the economy to restore capitalist
The ALP leaders no longer speak of socialism, even in the remote future; now mere reforms within the framework of
capitalism have taken on the status of a "maximum" program for some long-distant epoch.
Central to the Labor leaders' program for managing the capitalist crisis is a "prices and incomes policy" - a social contract between a future Labor government and the trade union movement in which workers sign away their right to use their union strength to fight for increases in the living standards in return for vague promises of taxation reform and other social reforms.
The explicit aim of the social contract they will not accept the freeze and will use their considerable industrial muscle to break through it.
The oil industry workers have the official endorsement of the Australian Council of Trade Unions executive, although the executive is trying to keep the claim bogged down in lengthy legalistic machinations in the arbitration courts.
Australian workers are not beaten or demoralised.
If the oil workers are able to defeat the wage freeze, they will set an example that is likely to be taken up by many other sectors. 1983 could be a very hot year for an Australian ruling class already reeling under the sudden impact of a crisis to which they believed themselves to be immune.
and is to raise capitalist profitability, the Labor leaders have been selling this scheme to the employers as a more