The Revolutionary Communist Organisation notes that the Northern Territory election campaign is currently underway, and due to conclude on the 24th of August. The Territory will have the choice of re-electing the incumbent Labor government, or bringing to power the right-wing Country Liberal Party, the local affiliate of the Liberal and National parties. Regardless of the result on election day, Capital will win. Aboriginal People will remain dispossessed of land, reparations won’t be paid and criminalisation by the carceral state will continue. Both Labor and the Country Liberal Party (CLP) have campaigned on a tough-on-crime platform that will worsen the social crises affecting Aboriginal People.
The incumbent Labor government has been leading the process of expanding the Territory’s prison system which disproportionately impacts Aboriginal People. Part of this plan involved forcing Darwin’s only residential drug and alcohol rehabilitation service to shut down in July to make way for a new women’s prison. The Labor party is working to strengthen the repressive arms of the Territory which pose a barrier to the liberation of working people of all races and nationalities. Regardless of whether the CLP or Labor win this process will continue.
Furthermore, there is no commitment on the part of Labor or the CLP to raise the age of criminal responsibility in the Territory above 12. Both parties are campaigning for a crackdown on youth crime as a symptom of social crisis without addressing its causes, namely colonisation and racism. Addressing these root causes is antithetical to Labor as the state building party of Australian capitalism and the CLP as a party of the Territory's high bourgeoisie. The petty bourgeoisie Greens raise progressive demands at this election but fundamentally mislead the working people of the Territory by masking the need for a workers’ party. The time and talents of many proletarians sympathetic to socialism, overwhelmingly young, are swept into a political project of another class uninterested in overthrowing the Commonwealth of Australia.
Australian Capital is built on three pillars. These are the colonial dispossession of Aboriginal People and Torres Straits Islanders, the exploitation of working people at home and imperial extraction of value from working people in peripheral developing nations. A future workers’ party and the current workers’ press must clearly articulate these truths and educate, agitate and organise working people to overthrow the three pillars. Both Laborism and petty bourgeois green politics promote loyalty to the capitalist state and act to shore up its support and legitimacy among Territorians despite sometimes campaigning for progressive demands.
The only path forward is the formation of a mass workers’ party to coordinate and advance the campaign for the implementation of the communist program in all liberatory movements that aim to supersede the present state of things. Core tasks, especially in the north of the continent, will be Blak liberation, disbanding the Northern Territory Police, expelling the Australian Federal Police and prison abolition. A workers' party should use future Territory elections to campaign to build worker support for all the demands of the communist program including radical land reform, dismantling the police, opening the prisons, Aboriginal self determination and the militant eradication of racism. These are all demands which require the overthrow of the capitalist commonwealth, and the establishment of a democratic republic through which First Nations people, as part of the continent’s working class, can abolish the distinction between coloniser and colonised.
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