The left in Australia has no class

It is not the Left that today speaks to the working class. It is the Right. It is the Right that speaks about cost of living pressures and which successfully ties these bread and butter issues to the politics of climate change and asylum seekers. The Left, by contrast, is seen as being elitist and dominated by the concerns of the intelligentsia. Even the co-option of Australian nationalism by the establishment is couched within the framework of the little Aussie battler.

These concerns are not unrelated to a lengthy chapter by Senator Lee Rhiannon on the Greens. Rhiannon, correctly, argues that the Greens will remain the parliamentary voice of Australia's social movements only if the party's internal procedures remain framed around the principles of participatory democracy. There does exist the danger that the parliamentary party will hijack the Greens and take it in a more centralised and conservative direction.

The Greens can become the authentic political party of the Australian working class. By engaging in grassroots activism in working class communities, for instance through campaigns on local issues and local elections, the Greens can slowly build a base of support as happened in the inner-city. The Greens might also engage in grassroots activism within trade unions. It is possible to build a red-green alliance in this way, which would give working class communities a real say in parliamentary politics.

Labor's rotten boroughs out in the working class suburbs of urban Australia disenfranchise working class communities. The Australian Labor Party has become a mechanism for keeping the hopes and aspirations of working class people in check.

Though there is much to commend in Left Turn one cannot but help wonder whether the working classes will read it but also, more importantly, whether it was written for them; there is too much cultural theory mumbo jumbo.

So long as the Left has no class it has no future.