Opinion: Joe Biden, Annastacia Palaszczuk aren’t for the workers
A Queensland Labor senator has made an extraordinary claim linking Annastacia Palaszczuk and Joe Biden’s election triumphs. Talk about delusional, writes Peter Gleeson.
Peter Gleeson
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The once-great Australian Labor Party takes workers for mugs.
The party in this country is undergoing the most fundamental ideological change in its long and mostly successful history.
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No longer the party of the worker, its flirtation with zealotry job killing climate and energy policy has already cost it the 2019 election.
Now it wants to pretend that “progressive centrists’’ are part of the New World Order, and that Joe Biden’s likely victory is all part of a grand plan to woo back blue-collar workers.
That ship has sailed. Here’s what Labor Left faction senator Murray Watt told The Australian: “Social democratic parties can win when jobs and health are their core agenda.
“It is vital that centre-Left parties connect with working people and demonstrate they are on their side.
“(Likely US president-elect Joe) Biden and (Queensland Premier Annastacia) Palaszczuk demonstrated that they were clearly on the side of working people, and working people got behind them.’’
Seriously? Talk about delusional. It was the blue-rinse set, not blue-collar workers, who got Palaszczuk across the line.
Ms Palaszczuk won the election because pensioners backed her in a pandemic to keep them safe.
She recorded massive swings to Labor in retiree strongholds such as Bribie Island, Caloundra and Hervey Bay.
Other than Michigan and Wisconsin, Biden was deserted by blue-collar workers in rust belt states, just like Hillary Clinton was in 2016.
Middle America despises Biden. Why else would they vote en masse for a nasty narcissist like Trump?
The reason? Biden wants to shut down the oil and fracking industries and increase the taxes of people earning over $120,000 a year by about 15 per cent.
How is that backing blue-collar workers?
Senator Watt conveniently forgets that it was the Queensland Labor Government that was hellbent on ensuring the Adani mining project never get off the ground, citing the protection of the black-throated finch as the obstacle.
Only when Bill Shorten lost last year’s federal election, and coalminers deserted Labor, did Palaszczuk change her mind.
Right faction Labor MP Joel Fitzgibbon is more rational. This is what he said about the US election result: “There are still too many who feel they are victims of elitist and impatient progressives. There are many of them here in Australia too.’’
Fitzgibbon is right.
Senator Watt is one of them: impatient, elitist and keen to rewrite history.
What Senator Watt forgets to tell people is that the Palaszczuk Government has a newly set up departmental unit called the Just Transition group.
It has a sole charter to “transition’’ miners out of coal and into other occupations, such as becoming a barista.
It is real. It is up and running and it will slowly but surely impose its will on Labor policy over the next four years.
Then there’s the Labor Environment Action Network, or LEAN as it is known, a grassroots network of Labor Party members.
It has a stated aim to “engage and mobilise ALP members around climate change and the environment’’ and to “put environmental protection and sustainability at the centre of Labor’s culture, values and policy’’.
LEAN supports union negotiations to ensure communities impacted by shifting global energy markets are backed by “regional diversification bodies that are locally led’’.
In other words, they have a strong commitment to coalminers being retrained as baristas to serve their local community.
The Federal Coalition Government is secure in office while Senator Watt and his Left faction accomplice Mark Butler are spouting their illogical views on climate change and so-called progressive centrists.
Even the CFMEU has called out Labor on its anti-mining stance.
In the US, watch Biden closely when he assumes the Oval Office.
His template to kill jobs will be replicated by the modern-day ALP.