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AUSTRALIA: Howard’s Senate Majority Rings Alarm Bells

Analysis - By Bob Burton

CANBERRA, Oct 11 2004 (IPS) - Conservative Australian Prime Minister John Howard was returned over the weekend to his fourth term in office with an increased majority. But there are concerns that his party’s control of the upper legislature could have dire consequences for the country.

Conservative Australian Prime Minister John Howard is set to embark on a further major deregulation of the economy and curtail the bargaining power of unions after being comfortably re-elected for a fourth term with his coalition party likely to win control of the Senate.

Howard’s Liberal-National party coalition government managed to get back into power after it comfortably garnered a 3.3 percent increase in its primary vote winning at least an additional eight seats, allowing it to have at least a 52.2 percent majority in the House of Representatives.

More significant however is that for the first time since he was elected in 1996, Howard will win at least half the seats in the 76-member Senate. With 38 seats in its own right, the Howard government will be able to defeat motions and proposals to establish Senate investigative committees.

For example, the Senate Committee that revealed government deception over its 2001 election campaign that refugees callously threw their children into the ocean, was instituted against the administration’s wishes.

If Howard’s coalition government wins an additional seat or, as a result of winning support from the conservative Family First party, the prime minister will be able to pass its own legislation without amendment.

The final outcome of the Senate votes is not likely to be known for two weeks. However, the relatively unknown evangelical Christian based Family First Party is almost certain to win a Victorian Senate seat and is likely to support the government on most pieces of legislation. While it is relatively unknown, the party’s key platform is policies against the gay and lesbian community.

Speaking at his first media conference on Monday, Howard said that the result was ”a stronger result than I dared hope for and I’m very grateful and certainly very conscious of the enormous opportunity it presents to us.”

However, he was quick to downplay the prospect that he will roll out a radical conservative agenda.

”We’ll be sensible, we’re not going to do anything rash and provocative, but we will of course present our program to the Senate,” Howard told reporters.

The impact of Howard winning a majority in both houses is likely to be significant.

Legislation that has previously been defeated by the combined vote of the opposition Labor Party, the centre-left Australian Democrats and the Australian Greens includes changes to the electoral system, curtailing the operations of labour unions and anti-terrorism legislation.

Leader of the Australian Greens, Senator Bob Brown, fears that when the new Senate takes effect on Jul. 1, 2005, Howard will unleash a barrage of radical legislation.

”We are likely to see even more radical proposals that will emulate the U.S. Patriot Act and erode civil liberties in the name of combating terrorism. There is likely to be a major move to even further privatise the public health and education system,” he told IPS.

While the Australian Greens will at least win one extra Senate seat, and possibly as many as three, a frenzy of Family First attack advertisements against them appears to have succeeded.

Labor Party Senator Bob McMullan said on election night that if Howard won a majority in the Senate ”we’ll see some very big and radical changes.”

If Family First does win a Senate seat in Victoria it will only be because both the Labor Party and the centre-left Democrats directed preferences to them in an effort to deny the Australian Greens an additional seat.

In his victory speech on Saturday night, Howard claimed that Australia was seen as a model country. ”We have a strong economy, we are a nation that is respected around the world because we are prepared to stand up for what we believe in,” he said.

Howard’s winning campaign was guided with public relations and opinion polling advice from the Australian arm of the U.S. Republican Party PR company, Wirthlin Worldwide. Ahead of the election Howard sought to remove its most controversial policies off the public agenda.

The open public conflict with the government of East Timor over oil revenues was hosed down by tabling of a more generous revenue-sharing proposal for closed-door negotiations. The harsher elements of Howard’s policies against asylum seekers who arrived by boat were softened while a series of big-spending advertising campaigns promoted government social policy programmes.

The most telling tactic though was claiming that interest rates would rise under a Labor government. In marginal seats that the Labor party expected to win or hold in Victoria, Queensland and New South Wales, the government gained rather than lost votes.

The central reason was a fear – however remote the possibility – that even just small interest rate rises would become unbearable for households with big mortgages.

For environmentalists who had backed Labor due to its commitment to ratify the Kyoto climate change treaty and pledge to protect 240,000 hectares of Tasmania’s old-growth forests, the election outcome is a major setback.

While pressure from both the international and business community is likely to force Australia to ratify the Kyoto climate change treaty, the debate over the escalating logging of Tasmania’s wilderness and old-growth forests is set to drag on.

In the last days of the election campaign Howard announced that he would protect unspecified additional areas but only those beyond the ability of the timber industry to log.

The Wilderness Society’s campaign director, Alec Marr, said environmentalists would now move to discuss the issue with government members who insisted Howard would be protecting major stands of old-growth forests.

”The government have said they will finalise the maps by December so we will be lobbying them to ensure that they do protect the most important areas of forest,” he said.