A potent mixture of race and class is being brewed by the Australian government in preparation for an early general election. Following the rejection by the senate last week of a 10-point plan presented by the prime minister, Mr John Howard, in an effort to resolve a dispute about Aboriginal land rights it appears that he now wants to take the issue to the country. As if that was not enough, his government has vociferously supported the decision by a leading stevedore firm to dismiss 1,400 dockers and substitute non-union labour for them.
Arguments over closed shops and low productivity from dock labour are thus set to join those about Aboriginal rights at the polls. Mr Howard is promising fresh labour legislation should he win the forthcoming election, while the opposition Labor Party pledges to defend existing trade union rights. In a country where business and labour interests have a long history of dispute and have made strenuous efforts to find ways around such polarisations, there is a good deal of soul-searching about the wisdom of reawakening confrontations along these lines. But the die has been cast and the issues raised are now the subject of furious public debate.
The same applies to the race issue. It has arisen from Mr Howard's efforts to circumvent a high court ruling in 1994 which gave Aboriginal communities the right, contrary to the legal basis of British colonial acquisition of Australian territory, to claim access or compensation rights from mining and farming interests encroaching on their traditional terrain. Last week the senate voted down three of his points, giving him the opportunity to put the matter to the electorate.
The row has torn away the veil of civility between parliamentary antagonists. Following a related but separate high court decision last week to approve a highly controversial bridge project at Hindmarsh near Adelaide which is disputed by Aboriginal communities the deputy Labor leader, Mr Gareth Evans, said of Mr Howard that "this bloke seems to be never so happy as when he's bashing blackfellas".
The farming and mining interests supporting Mr Howard on the dockers issue also lend him support on Aboriginal rights. And it is clear from opinion polls that Australians are pretty equally divided on them too. But most Aboriginal activists and sympathetic onlookers in the churches are appalled at how dangerously divisive the matter could become if put into an electoral contest.
Aboriginal communities have suffered dreadfully from their exposure to colonisation, confiscation of their lands, racism and urban marginalisation. The high court hearing by which the Wik people won rights of access and compensation has held out the promise of restored dignity and well-being, but at the cost of other entrenched interests, with powerful allies among the country's political establishment.
Nor may it be possible to contain such arguments easily within the well-trodden ways of settler-Aboriginal relations. Australia has become a multicultural society after successive waves of European and Asian immigration to its main cities. The argument about whether it should become a republic is bound up with the race issue too. Australia is therefore in for a thorough exposure to the politics of identity in coming months.