Australian Labor Party

Hughenden Strike Camp, Queensland, 1891. State Library of Queensland.

Working class support for One Nation (Part II): In defence of the explanation

Lisbeth Latham looks at criticisms of the labour aristocracy thesis, arguing that they rest on analytical errors worth examining carefully as they illuminate why the left struggles to explain working class support for One Nation.
Caption: Imperial Federation: Map of the World Showing the Extent of the British Empire in 1886 (cropped). Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Working class support for One Nation (Part I): Towards an honest explanation

Lisbeth Latham argues the surge in support for One Nation has forced a question the Australian left has avoided answering honestly: why do some workers support a politics that appears to cut against their own material interests?
Anthony Albanese (left) and Max Chandler-Mather

Australia: Labor consolidates as main party of capital, Greens’ left challenge has mixed results

Stuart Munckton — Labor has replaced the dysfunctional conservatives as the main party of Australian capitalism, simultaneously opening space to its left.

Lessons of the Australian Prices and Incomes Accord

Former ACTU heads Bill Kelty (left) and Simon Crean (right), and former Labor PM Bob Hawke attend the Prices and Income Accord 30-year anniversary. Photo by Renee Nowytarger. Source: The Australian.

June 1, 2013 -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal --The 30th anniversary of the Prices and Incomes Accord, signed by the Australian Labor Party federal government and the Australian Council of Trade Unions, has just been celebrated by the former employers, union officials and ALP politicians of the period. At the time, and again today, this class-collaborationist "social contract" was lauded as a tremendous step forward for workers and "the economy". The reality for Australian workers was the opposite and the lessons should never be forgotten.

Below is a talk presented to the political school of the South African Municipal Workers Union -- in Durban in 2001 -- by Norm Dixon, at the time editor of Green Left Weekly and a national executive member of the Democratic Socialist Perspective (since merged into the Socialist Alliance). It is excerpted from the SAMWU Political Education Book, 2002-03.

The ALP left in Leichhardt municipality in the 1980s

'Primal Socialist Innocence and the Fall'?: the ALP Left in Leichhardt Municipality in the 1980s

By Tony Harris*

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