Labor’s surrender to the fossil fuel lobby, and its rediscovered enthusiasm for protectionism, is a big gamble that it can retain and regain enough blue-collar seats to stave off the threat of minority government after the next election.
Labor, it seems, doesn’t fear Peter Dutton too much. Dutton — with a little help from his deputy — managed to turn what should have been one of the defining issues of the next election campaign, Labor’s broken promise on the stage three tax cuts, into a problem for the Coalition. And his obsession with nuclear power guarantees there’ll be pictures of the opposition leader and a nuclear power station at every polling booth come the next election. Labor hasn’t even begun its scare campaign on that yet.
But minority government is a very real possibility. Losing one or two seats in Western Australia or Victoria will see the Albanese government having to negotiate power with the independents — or, worst of all, the Greens. Labor did that in 2010: Anthony Albanese, then leader of the house, was a key player in keeping people like Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott happy. But it’s fair to say Labor is keen to avoid having anything to do with the Greens ever again. Which is a problem, given they keep losing seats to them.
The government’s embrace of fossil fuels and the farce of carbon capture, along with the incessantly invoked “Future Made in Australia”, are an unsubtle attempt to avoid this fate. In today’s edition of the West Australian — the in-house journal of WA fossil fuel ruling claque — Albanese proudly boasted this week was his “20th visit to WA since becoming prime minister”.
He was keen to ensure West Australians got the message on two issues. “We are resolute in our commitment to making sure WA gets its fair share of the GST. We also want to see a future made in WA, with secure, well-paid jobs. That’s why I was in Perth again this week to share two important announcements.”
One was the shocking handover of half a billion dollars to the fossil fuel industry in the form of free geoscience data on gas and mineral deposits. “The road to net zero runs through WA’s resources,” Albanese said, forgetting that the main resource is a fossil fuel.
The other was a gift of $33 million for planning for a new port, Westport, which will move container trade from Fremantle to Kwinana — all part of the “supply chain resiliency” that is central to Albanese’s manufacturing vision.
Western Australia’s GST rort — both sides know it’s a rort, and neither side will touch it for fear of losing seats in Perth — was forensically dissected by economist Saul Eslake this week in a “debate” with erstwhile WA leader Colin Barnett. What’s staggering is the sheer enormity of the rort. As Eslake said, the pro-WA GST changes “have resulted in one of the biggest cost blow-outs of any single ‘policy decision’ in at least 25 years. How many Hunter Class frigates could we have afforded for the difference between the originally estimated cost of those changes and the most recent estimate of them in last December’s MYEFO, a total of $31 billion?”
On the refusal to fix the GST rort, on the failure to establish a genuinely effective petroleum resource rent tax for offshore gas resources, and now on Labor’s embrace of the Western Australian gas industry, Labor’s need to hold its Western Australian seats is exercising one of the most malignant influences on policymaking in a generation.
In comparison, the Future Made In Australia stuff — which the government is strongly linking with fossil fuels — is small beer. A billion wasted here, a billion wasted there, some more tax concessions (to put more unnecessary oversized utes on roads).
For Labor, this is performative blue-collar policy. “We had to restore faith” with blue-collar voters who had drifted off to One Nation and the LNP, Albanese told the Financial Review’s Phil Coorey this week, singling out Queensland and Western Australia as the prime beneficiaries of the policy. “For working-class people, they want confidence that we care about security and we do.”
Albanese’s correct about voters wanting certainty — as Crikey has argued before, one of the defining issues of the past 30 years is how certainty has been taken from workers and handed to corporations.
But in this case that seems to mean ditching the climate change rhetoric, ramping up mining and fracking, and spending billions funding jobs that — in the government’s view — working-class voters think they should have, rather than jobs the economy actually needs. Australia might need hundreds of thousands of aged care workers, and construction workers, and mental health professionals, and teachers, but instead we’ll start trying to compete with China in making solar panels.
As we noted recently in a different context, there’s a view among progressives that a lack of manufacturing jobs feeds through into alienation and male violence, because men regard service economy jobs as “women’s work”. A Future Made In Australia is that belief in policy action.
In focusing policy on the victimhood of WA and Queensland voters, Labor risks alienating voters in the south-eastern corner who think the climate crisis is something that should be addressed, not just spoken about, and people for whom service industry jobs aren’t “women’s work” but real and rewarding jobs. Surrendering to the fossil fuel companies and embracing protectionism thus represent a gamble that the latter won’t outnumber the former. Otherwise, Albanese might need to rediscover his skills at wooing crossbenchers.
Is Labor dabbling in performative blue-collar policy? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
