Monique Hore: Opposition is all froth on regional issues
Rather than dealing in “latte-sipping” stereotypes, the state Opposition should try to give Victorian voters grounds for optimism, writes Monique Hore.
Opinion
Don't miss out on the headlines from Opinion. Followed categories will be added to My News.
If you listen to some people, sipping on a latte is a sign of bad character.
Last week, Nationals MP Tim Bull used the caffeinated beverage to take aim at the Andrews Government for announcing it would ban native forest logging from 2030.
The decision had been made to “keep Melbourne’s latte sippers happy”, he said. The Member for East Gippsland is not the first politician to use that insult but he should be the last. It is all froth and so stupid it leaves you wondering whether Bull actually knows the people he says he represents.
As a backhander, it amounts to a statement that country people are so unsophisticated they don’t think to put milk in their coffee.
Secondly, it mocks the voters in Melbourne’s blue riband seats who turned red at last year’s state election. Because while Bull might like to imagine latte drinkers are confined to Fitzroy, Northcote and Brunswick, he doesn’t seem to realise that people in Hawthorn, Mt Waverley and even Ringwood also take their coffee white.
They care about trees too. And despite the stereotypes, so do voters in country areas.
But they also have competing concerns — keeping a job, for one.
The government’s promise that its plan provides “much-needed certainty for workers” will have done little to allay the fear of those facing unemployment, particularly in the Latrobe Valley, still reeling for the closure of Hazelwood Power Station.
So what should the Opposition have done last week? Instead of playing-on outdated country-city stereotypes, it could have argued that regional Victoria is being misunderstood or ignored by a Labor government spending most of its infrastructure — and other — dollars in Melbourne.
It is not as though they’re lacking ammunition. The suicide rate is higher in regional Victoria than in metro Melbourne.
Workers in the country are paid on average up to $700 a week less than those in Melbourne.
Remote and regional Victorian children are twice as likely to drop out of education at Year 10 than contemporaries in Melbourne.
Drivers are five times more likely to die on country than city roads. Worst of all, Melburnians have a longer life expectancy than other Victorians.
Given all that, the Opposition could have simply said the government was putting trees and possums over people and their livelihoods.
Even some of those menacing latte sippers might have had sympathy with that argument.
The Andrews Government’s decision is timed for maximum political advantage: exactly one year after the last election and three years before the next.
Amid dwindling native timber supply, there were fears the industry was already on its knees and job losses were inevitable.
Rightly or wrongly, Premier Daniel Andrews figured he might as well be the one to swing the axe to the delight of environmentalists who wanted the native timber industry dead and buried long ago.
The Premier has taken a bet that ending native forestry won’t come back to bite him. And until the Opposition can come up with better lines than latte man Bull, it’s odds on that he’s right.
Especially when you remember that the Coalition already holds every seat east of Melbourne — bar one, held by a former National — so Labor has nothing to lose there.
Telling them that Dan only did it because of those latte sippers in the city and suburbs is just preaching to the choir. Sure, it might be how some country voters feel but it isn’t clear how that helps the Coalition’s case in the suburbs.
And those are the people they need to be winning over, not mocking for the way they take their coffee. It is telling that the Opposition doesn’t seem to have worked that out a year after its landslide election loss.
As the Coalition continues searching for its soul, it should spend some time getting to know those Victorians who jumped ship in such huge numbers last November.
Perhaps they could even do it over a latte.
Monique Hore is a Herald Sun journalist