The Australian Communist Party wants to put forward candidates at the next federal election, but needs more members. Picture: Facebook
HOLD your sneers traitors, and stop flinching cowards. The Communist Party of Australia wants to fly the red flag in all states next federal election.
For the first time in 15 years the CPA will launch campaigns in select seats, although it doesn’t expect to win any of them. It does, however, believe voters are in a mood to listen.
“But standing candidates with proper recognition on the ballot paper and on the public record presents the opportunity to get socialist ideas before a bigger audience,” the CPA explains on its website.
“People are more attuned to political messages than at other times.”
The Communist Party of Australia is a distant descendant of the Communist Party (1920-91), which was hugely influential in Australia in the early part of last century, and had considerable power in the trade union movement.
The only communist elected to an Australian parliament was Oxford-educated Fred Paterson who was in the Queensland Parliament 1944-49.
The current party is determined to renew a Communist election presence, but first has to counter the “obstacles” placed in its path by the “parties of capital”.
To be the specific, the most immediate are the Australian Electoral Commission requirements that to be registered as a party a group must have at least 500 members and come up with a $500 application fee.
Oxford-educated Fred Paterson was the only community party member to be elected to an Australian parliament.Source:News Corp Australia
The CPA sees this as a plot to keep them out.
“But as Turnbull government powerbroker (Science Minister) Christopher Pyne said recently, the major parties want people to limit their options to the Coalition or Labor to keep the business of
running capitalism in Australia simple,” says the party website.
“The interests of the people of Australia, however, are not served by strengthening that cosy relationship.”
The CPA is asking for supporters to help in its bid to overcome obstacles even though “(t)he game appears to be sewn up for the major parties, especially given the role of the all-pervasive corporate media”.
And even though a seat in Parliament is not seen as the chief means to deliver the oppressed.
“The Communist Party of Australia doesn’t believe that profound social change in Australia will flow exclusively or even primarily from the attainment of a parliamentary majority of left and progressive representatives in Canberra,” it says.
“It will be led and then defended within communities, in the workplace and in the streets. But even at this stage, the chance to present pro-people alternatives to the current corporate agenda at election time can’t be passed up.”
With the Communist Soviet Union no more and China designing its own form of capitalism, the sight of an activist Communist Party here clashes with the dialectics of other minor parties, such as the Shooters, the Motoring Enthusiasts Party, Family First, and even the fledgling Jacqui Lambie Network.
What they share is an apprehension the Coalition, the Greens and possibly Labor will join to make it harder for them to get candidates elected.
So-called preference vote whisperer, consultant Glenn Druery, is managing a campaign by seven of the eight Senate cross benchers to block legislation for this expected over the next month.
Mr Druery is directing a media campaign by the group and is threatening reprisals through assaults on Liberal marginal seats.
He has Communist sympathisers.
