Albanese’s inaction drives his own party towards extinction

Extinctions sometimes strangely entwine – like the ancient Maugean skate ray, of which it is estimated fewer than 120 remain and which will likely be driven to extinction in the next few years because of the Tasmanian salmon industry, and the federal ALP, of which 78 lower house members remain.

Maugean skates need oxygen to survive and breed. Untreated sewage flowing from salmon feedlots into Tasmania’s remote Macquarie Harbour equals that of a city of a million people. All that shit eats so much oxygen that large areas become marine death zones. The ALP is similarly suffocating in a deluge of corporate shit that eats the values and purpose it needs to survive.

Illustration by Simon Letch

And yet, under Anthony Albanese, Labor gives the ever stronger impression that it has never seen a corporation that it won’t prostrate itself to. Each knee-step taken in his bizarre pilgrimage of national humiliation, from his log cabin origins to his house on the hill, is loudly tolled by the sound of the corporate cash registers jubilantly ringing with growing profits. Qantas and the promised legislation to make it pay customers compensation for late or cancelled flights? No action – ka-ching! The gambling industry and the ads more than 70 per cent of Australians want gone? No action – ka-ching! More coal mine approvals, new gas fields approvals, $1 billion for a Gina Rinehart-backed mine? No problem! Ka-ching! Even a spineless environmental measure like Tanya Plibersek’s “nature positive” bill is axed by Albanese at the behest of the West Australian mining industry. Ka-ching! Ka-ching! Ka-ching!

The word extinction was first paired with species in the 1880s as a result of a Cambridge don’s search for the last great auk, a penguin-like bird hunted to extinction by humans. “A healthy population existed until close to the time of the species’ extinction,” Tim Flannery wrote in a recent piece in New York Review of Books. “When it came, however, the decline of the great auk was swift and relentless.” While “the great auk was difficult to hunt at sea”, Flannery continued, “when it came ashore to breed it was uniquely vulnerable.”

And so too Albo. His much-remarked gifts of backroom dealing and party wrangling that worked in the darkness of factional intrigue serve him less well on the naked, exposed rock of government. In 2022, Labor secured just 32.58 per cent of the national primary vote, its lowest vote since 1934. Labor’s electoral fortunes give every appearance of spiralling only further downwards at the next election, with the party falling, according to the latest poll, to 31 per cent.

Great auks were not difficult to tame. There was one in the court of Louis XIV at Versailles, perhaps a little lost, like Albo at the Murdochs’ recent Christmas bash. A Danish savant kept another on a leash, not unlike the salmon barons who seem to have Albo on speed dial, with the prime minister seemingly ever ready to fly to Tasmania solely to endorse salmon companies with a record of environmental destruction, one so bad their actions led to the banning of salmon farming in Washington state (Cooke Aquaculture, owners of Tassal). According to Hilary Franz, the state commissioner of public lands there, “Cooke’s disregard ... recklessly put our state’s aquatic ecosystem at risk.”

Then there are the owners of Huon Aquaculture, JBS, a global byword for criminality. In 2017, its owner brothers Joesley and Wesley Batista admitted to bribing over 1800 politicians and public officials in Brazil. Corruption was, according to an interview Joesley gave in 2017 before going to jail with Wesley, “the rule of the game. And what’s most important, corruption was on the upper floors, with the authorities.” Today Wesley’s son Henry Batista, described in The Australian Financial Review as “the Kendall Roy of salmon”, works in Hobart as CEO of Huon Aquaculture. (Henry was not implicated in the senior Batistas’ corruption.)

According to the Australia Institute, the three 100 per cent foreign-owned Tasmanian salmon companies have paid no corporate tax for the past five years. For Albo – who has extraordinarily floated plans to exempt Macquarie Harbour from all federal environmental law under a national-interest provision typically reserved for emergencies – that’s seemingly more reason to ensure the rule of law doesn’t apply to the salmon mafia.

And once one industry can exist outside the law, why not others? Why not Woodside, which plans to keep its gas fields pumping until 2070 and open new ones, making a mockery of net zero by 2050? Why not Hancock Prospecting? And while at it, criminalise those who protest such things as the fossil fuel industry’s responsibility for the climate crisis.

If you talk to extinction experts, they will point out that a sighting of a large flock of birds can mean little as to their future prospects. A flock of, say, 78 birds may give a misleading view of the birds’ prospects as a species, when perhaps only 16 of the birds are capable of reproducing. With Labor’s primary vote steadily collapsing, Albo may be remembered not as a nickname, but as a byword for a mass extinction event.

The ordinary person who has lived through the extraordinary, frequently heavy-handed state interventions of recent years with COVID, knows exactly just how powerful the state is. So too does Peter Dutton, a former Queensland walloper who in other circumstances might be thought to have the electoral appeal of a venomous axolotl. What the new right gets right though is that people are angry, that life gets harder, and people want change. People want the state to act – for the people.

What the right offers them is its newly found intent to use the state to achieve change. From Weimar Germany on, the cry of state action, no matter how mindless and destructive, has always appealed to societies where the established polity has grown incapable of acting. Dutton’s call for nuclear reactors built by the state may be a shroud to help the fossil fuel industry continue to profit. But at a deeper level it appeals as Donald Trump’s equally spurious calls for a wall appealed – it speaks of politicians willing to use the state to address problems. If hypocritical posturing, it nevertheless suggests a will to action.

Yet for Labor, still mired in its 1990s romance with the Hawke-Keating legacy, it too often is the market and only the market that has power. The best the state can do is kneel before it. And if Qantas or Tabcorp or News or Woodside or Tassal don’t wish to alter their ways, Labor simply agrees, rewarding and further enabling them.

The problem is that what is at stake is much greater than the Labor Party, but democracy itself. A society that no longer can use the state to address its problems – from the environment to housing to rapidly escalating inequality to the increasingly unfettered power of corporations – looks more and more like the US, where Luigi Mangione became a folk hero for allegedly murdering a health insurance company CEO. Historically, assassinations only become celebrated as political protest when political systems have grown sclerotic and violent change is often imminent – from Archduke Ferdinand in 1914 to the Romanovs in 1917 to the Rwandan dictator Habyarimana in 1994.

Delay, deny, defend: a version of the words found on Mangione’s shell casings refers to the immoral practices used by American insurance corporations in refusing to honour legitimate health claims. But they also can sound uncomfortably close to the strategy and rhetoric of the Albanese government in regard to so much of its failure to act on the many problems besetting our country.

For democracy does not die in darkness. It grows terminally ill in the Chairman’s Lounge. What Labor gets wrong is thinking that people respect it for grovelling to greed. For being photographed with Alan Joyce or in proximity of a Murdoch. For backing the Batistas. They don’t. They are enraged. Labor’s diminishing flock of lesser auks will be hunted down by the corporate raiders feasting on all the plumage and flesh that the state can offer in perks, breaks, subsidies, exemptions – what are, incidentally, our taxes, our heritage, our way of life – until all that is left is a bare, ever hotter rock and beneath it a dark seething sea covered in salmon feedlots, shit-flecked foam devoid of life.

Richard Flanagan is the first writer to win both the Baillie Gifford Prize (for non-fiction) and Booker Prize (for fiction). His most recent book is Question 7.

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