Labor confusion over coal alienates its working base

In attempting to depict Scott Morrison’s Pacific step-up as a “stuff-up” over climate change, acting Labor leader Richard Marles has further alienated the opposition from its traditional base and from swinging voters in marginal seats. While the next election is three years away, the party faces a mammoth task to order its priorities so as to put Australia’s interests first and to communicate those priorities to voters. Mr Marles could not resist taking a pot shot at the Prime Minister on ABC Radio National yesterday, claiming the government alienated its closest neighbours at the Pacific Islands Forum when it refused to co-operate on ending coalmining in Australia or going carbon-neutral by 2050. Opposition foreign affairs spokeswoman Penny Wong has been savvier. While claiming on Sunday that Mr Morrison had damaged Australia’s relationships with Pacific Islands nations, she also admitted that a Labor government would not have acceded to demands at the forum that Australia ban new coalmines and coal-fired power plants.

Mr Marles is a slow learner. In February he alienated many voters across Queensland, in the Hunter in NSW and other areas when he claimed, erroneously, that the global market for thermal coal had collapsed. This was a “wonderful” and “good thing”, he said, because it showed the world was acting on climate change. After Labor’s drubbing in May, when its primary vote fell to a dismal 33 per cent, and just 27 per cent in Queensland, Mr Marles admitted those remarks had been “tone deaf” because they failed “to acknowledge the significance of every person’s job. I really know this.” Not well enough, judging by his tin-eared sermonising yesterday.

Labor’s climate change policies are under the microscope in the party’s election review being led by former South Australian premier Jay Weatherill and former federal minister Craig Emerson. As Troy Bramston writes today, influential internal lobby group the Labor Environment Action Network has told the review that the party must reconsider its climate change policies and how they are communicated to voters. One of the key issues identified in the LEAN submission was the party’s inability or refusal under Bill Shorten to put a price on its climate change action plan. “It couldn’t say how much it would cost, where the money was coming from or what economic dividend it would deliver or save. It is basic Australian politics — how much, who pays, what does it save. We had no answers.” Its wishy-washy stance over the Adani coalmine in central Queensland and its failure to balance mitigating climate change with the need for “economic opportunities” for workers, industries and rural communities also contributed to the party’s poor showing.

LEAN is on the right track. Labor’s uncosted climate policy alarmed families, especially those connected to the mining sector. It pandered to the whims of what election profiler and former Labor senator from Queensland John Black described as the “goat’s cheese circle” in the capital cities: voters who are tech-savvy, well off and who vote for Labor or the Greens but who have little understanding of how an economy works.

Unlike Malcolm Turnbull, Mr Morrison shrewdly shifted the Coalition’s approach to climate change away from ideologically driven initiatives towards direct action measures. His goal was and is to enable Australia to meet its Kyoto and Paris targets while still supporting the fossil fuel industry. Mr Morrison knows climate policy can be problematic for both sides of politics, including in Liberal seats in leafy suburbs of the major cities that are no longer blue ribbon. It is no coincidence that while backing coal, the Morrison government has moved to keep faith with environmentally conscious Coalition voters with initiatives to ban the export of recyclable waste, tackle plastic waste in the Pacific and increase recycling. Such an agenda will never appease green groups and climate change zealots. But neither will overly ambitious, uncosted climate policies such as those rejected in May restore Labor’s standing. Sooner or later, that is the lesson Anthony Albanese and his frontbench need to learn.