Tim Blair: Labor comfortable in opposition as climate fight continues
An economic downturn following COVID gives Labor every reason to ditch its climate policies, but that means the party might have to end its defeat addiction, writes Tim Blair.
Opinion
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No study has ever been conducted, so far as I’m aware, into the ergonomic qualities of federal parliament’s opposition benches.
But they surely must be the most comfortable chairs in all the land. What else could explain Labor’s determination to keep sitting in them?
Labor has won outright just one solitary federal election from its previous nine attempts. A tie in 2010 — when the Coalition secured in excess of 650,000 votes more than Labor — went the ALP’s way following vanity interventions from Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor.
The only other time Labor went close to winning was in 2016, when Bill Shorten fell just short of toppling Malcolm Turnbull.
That election should have provided the blueprint for a subsequent win in 2019, because it contained the secret to Australian electoral success.
Besides being a dreadful campaigner and an even worse strategist, Turnbull bore the mark of the climate change loser. It’ll take you down just about every time.
After all, it took Turnbull down twice — once as opposition leader, when he formed a (now grotesquely rekindled) alliance with Kevin Rudd on emissions reduction, and again when he went climate crazy as Prime Minister in 2018.
All Labor needed to do last year was go big on jobs and cut the climate nonsense. Instead, Labor again embraced the climate monster, hoping this time it wouldn’t bite.
It is still hugging the beast today.
Well, as best it can, given how weakened Labor’s become due to blood loss. All of those open wounds really take a toll.
Labor’s Joel Fitzgibbon would prefer a shift to the government benches, a radical plan that places him at odds with the rest of his party.
Noting that a climate fixation keeps hurting Labor at the polls, Fitzgibbon last week took leave of shadow cabinet.
His colleagues subsequently showed their attitude towards Fitzgibbon by, as The Daily Telegraph’s Anna Caldwell wrote, insulting him — and, by extension, insulting Fitzgibbon’s blue-collar Newcastle electorate.
“I just disagree with him, and a large majority of the Australian Labor Party and I’d suggest the Australian community also disagree with his strongly held views,” former Labor Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus told the ABC, modifying his more robust caucus commentary (he reportedly called his comrade a “disgrace”).
Numerous Labor identities offered similar opinions. Fitzgibbon is out of step with the nation, apparently.
That’s why Labor is such an unstoppable election-winning machine.
“We don’t get to say no to climate change, we don’t get to say no to the effects of climate change, and we don’t get to opt out of taking action,” Dreyfus continued.
“It’s not overreach to take strong action on climate. Change is coming.”
And there’s the next election gone, unless Labor flukes another Rudd-style mercy victory following the latest decade or so of Coalition rule.
It might profit Labor to think more about people than about big, dumb global issues.
For example, there are any number of women out there who in the manner of farmers’ wives run the financial side of their partners’ trade businesses.
Some have become so proficient they’ve taken on identical work for other tradies. This cohort may be well-disposed to a Labor policy that simplifies and reduces small-business taxation.
They may also appreciate additional tax breaks for online accountancy courses and the like.
Of course there is the minor difficulty that the more aware one becomes of economics, the less one is inclined to vote Labor, but that need not be an insurmountable barrier.
That title is still held by Labor’s climate policies.
And even if Labor learns to shut the hell up about global warming whenever the next election is held, it will only take another Bob Brown climate convoy to remind voters where Labor stands.
Brown’s 2019 convoy was perhaps the most significant Australian voyage since Burke and Wills left Melbourne 160 years ago — the former in search of the Great Inland Regenerative Battery or whatever it was looking for.
The ex-Greens leader and his disciples drove deep into Queensland coal territory demanding the Adani mine, and mining in general, be stopped.
This galvanised locals, who — in the amusingly out of touch way of those who like being able to feed their families — performed spontaneous “welcome to country” ceremonies for their employment-opposing visitors.
And then they voted against Labor, costing Bill Shorten the unlosable election. Even Brown fan and biographer James Norman, writing for the ABC, admitted the convoy may have been tactically unwise.
“Perhaps,” he wrote, “the Adani convoy could have done better groundwork before marching into traditional mining towns in Queensland.”
Yes, perhaps. More damaging still, members of the convoy were for once honest about the outcome for ordinary Australian workers if their climate quest succeeded.
“Sure, the local people are angry,” one urban-sounding convoy comrade told 7News.
“It’s important to empathise with their concerns because if we’re successful, their family and their livelihood are reduced.”
How sweet of them. They’ll “empathise” after shutting down industries and wrecking families.
Yet even now Labor remains closer to the Greens and those obscene attitudes than they are to the concerns of their former heartland voters.
Labor needs some spikes in those cosy opposition benches. The workers’ party has become way too relaxed about losing.
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