Vikki Campion: Why Albo isn’t Labor’s great new hope
He was the great white hope, Albo. He was the Labor man who could take the Left and talk to the Right and would blow the Liberal’s off the blue ministerial carpet. But now the tables have turned.
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He was the great white hope, Albo. He was the Labor man who could take the Left and talk to the Right and would blow the Liberal’s off the blue ministerial carpet.
Before the last election, when so many thought the Liberals were facing defeat, ministers would mutter — “don’t go too hard on Shorten, we need him there …”
They were terrified of Anthony Norman Albanese, the Member for Grayndler in Sydney’s inner west. But now the tables have turned. They are not so dismissive when they mention Bill Shorten now, of course.
The man who would once be PM has executed the nursing home and public housing offensive in Victoria against the government with surgical precision and empathy to match.
Jim Chalmers is another they fear. The Queensland MP in his eighth year of office is young and relatively unknown but so was Jacinda Ardern before she became Opposition leader in New Zealand and we have seen how that turned out.
But back to Albo. It was supposed to be Curtin, Chifley, Hawke and Albo. An Australian Labor leader parade to rival Mount Rushmore. He has all the attributes to be a Labor hero; like Chifley, who slept on a chaff bag in a shack as a young child, and Curtin, who grew up in poverty, leaving school at 13, Albo overcame early adversity, growing up with few means in the housing commission belt, to reach the upper offices of the ALP.
So why is it that Albo, who unlike so many in Parliament House doesn’t have a plum in his mouth or a silver spoon up his backside, and who grew up in the bloody-fisted suburbs of the inner west before it was known for cats and computers, is struggling to resonate with the worker?
Why is it that Matt Canavan, one of Capital Hill’s most critical thinkers, at ease with the white-collar Productivity Commission suits and PWC brains, connects so much more easily with guys and girls in high vis?
Simply, Canavan, from working class Logan, fights for miners in areas where more than one in five are unemployed and they can’t pay their power bill.
In a Collinsville crib room in 2019, miners whose fathers and grandfathers elected the only communist member of any parliament ever, flocked around Canavan. It was the first time a politician had come to speak to them. Weeks later, Collinsville voted LNP for the first time in Australian history.
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It was Canavan, who led the fight against Bob Brown’s Greens convoy in Central Queensland, that pushed the LNP across the line in 2019. But Albo, who has Mark Butler, the South Australian MP, nipping at his left heel with crazy ideas that are even anti-gas, risks falling into an over-simplistic trap where you moralise on the source of the fuel instead of the technology that converts it to energy.
This week in the Senate, Labor teamed up with the Greens to vote down a power station in Collinsville, stopping North Queensland jobs and reliable, baseload power.
Meanwhile, on the other side of Parliament House, Warringah’s Zali Steggall was talking up her recent jaunt to India to see first-hand how it was on track to meet its targets under the Paris Agreement.
She talked up solar but forgot to mention their baseload power source of choice. Luckily, her fellow committee member, Nationals Lyne MP David Gillespie, pointed out India is a nuclear powerhouse, a hungry customer of Australia’s energy dense black coal for new power stations and expanding into more nuclear, coal and gas.
Renewables are to the power grid what the backyard garden is to Woolworths. I love growing my own salads but could never grow enough wheat to provide the bread my kids devour every day.
Mothers know how much we need reliable baseload power. We are washing, vacuuming, steaming, cooking, sterilising, bathing, while the fridge and freezer are running and the television is on.
Mothers understand the kids don’t ignore their grumbling tummies while they wait for the sun to rise and batteries to charge.
Albo dismisses coal, is scared of gas and believes nuclear is a fantasy, ignoring his own CFMEU base. This is a dilemma for a workers’ man.
To become a Labor great, he needs to stop listening to the Butlers of the world, who think you can thrive on renewable salad, and instead listen to Paterson MP Meryl Swanson and Hunter MP Joel Fitzgibbon who understand their own seats rely on the worker.