Labor vowed to take on miners over Indigenous heritage. Now Albanese is their guest

On his whistle-stop tour across northern Australia, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese shone his campaign spotlight on just one of the vast area’s two key constituencies, which are the mining industry and Indigenous communities.

While Albanese jumped on an iron ore ship to praise the rivers of royalties swelling Commonwealth coffers, there were no moves to rekindle memories of the referendum to establish an Indigenous Voice to parliament.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese campaigned in Western Australia on Friday.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

The failed vote in 2023 burnt enormous political capital that Albanese had won in his 2022 election victory. Despite visiting electorates home to many Indigenous Australians – Leichhardt in Far North Queensland, as well as seats in the Northern Territory and north-west Western Australia – Albanese did not spend time at any explicitly Indigenous sites.

Instead, at the obligatory high-vis campaign stop with great big mining infrastructure in the background care of Rio Tinto’s facility in the Port of Dampier in Karratha, Albanese issued a paean to his hosts.

“There are four ships here at the moment, three of them are going to China., one of them is going to Vietnam, producing wealth for Australia. Rio Tinto contributes about $10 billion in royalties to the economy,” he said.

Albanese’s goal? To broadcast his support for the mining industry to Western Australia. The sector is crucial to the state’s economy and a great many of its workers in the Perth suburbs where Labor must retain as many seats as possible in its bid to retain majority government.

Albanese’s focus on the demands of the resources sector is so sharp that he overruled Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek last year, when she sought to cut a deal with the Greens to create a new nature watchdog agency. The deal was swiftly canned after Western Australia Labor Premier Roger Cook and the state’s mining lobby expressed their opposition to the move.

When asked by reporters what a re-elected Albanese government would do for Indigenous communities, who feel let down by the referendum’s No vote, Albanese stuck to generalities.

“We took up the gracious invitation of First Nations people to put that [Voice] proposition to a referendum,” Albanese said. “It wasn’t successful and we respect the outcome.

“We’ll provide practical measures going forward in closing the gap on education, on health, on housing.”

Some of that was on offer. He announced $60 million towards a new aged care home and re-announced a $10 million outlay for CareFlight to buy a plane for medical evacuations in the Top End, which will help Indigenous and non-Indigenous Territorians.

The symbolism was more awkward.

Rio Tinto is the company that in 2020 destroyed ancient Aboriginal rock shelters at Juukan Gorge, which had held evidence of human habitation dating back 46,000 years.

The company acknowledged responsibility for “breaking trust and damaging relationships with our many stakeholders” and committed to never repeat its errors in the wake of the disaster, but in 2022 Labor vowed to strengthen environmental laws to prevent anything similar happening again.

After three years in office, nothing has happened.

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