Anthony Albanese walks dangerous path back to centre

The opening shots are being fired in the political civil war about to engulf Australia’s centre-left.

Anthony Albanese with opposition Northern Australia spokesman Murray Watt in Rockhampton this week.

The opening shots are being fired in the political civil war about to engulf Australia’s centre-left in a conflict between the Labor Party and the Greens that flows inexorably from Scott Morrison’s election victory.

The immediate battleground is coal and climate change. This is the most vital flashpoint because it constitutes the touchstone of progressive politics and is fused with incalculable emotion and ideology, given the drought and bushfires. But a list of extended potential conflicts spans religious discrimination and identity politics, depending on how far Labor under Anthony Albanese attempts the hazardous journey back towards an undefined political centre.

The Greens are fixated at the window of opportunity opening for them as Labor repositions, given that the Greens always pose a greater threat to Labor than the Coalition. That is the reality of power on the left. With Albanese defining Labor’s identity as progressive — thereby consigning to history its long conservative tradition so basic to its quest for majority support — the stage is set for a fragmented but ideological struggle between Labor and the Greens over the true path of left-wing politics and Australian progressivism.

Consider the events of the past week. Albanese toured regional Queensland in a jobs crusade that involved a dramatic repositioning on coal. His message is that Labor supports coal exports. He says halting such exports will not advance the climate cause because nations will merely source from elsewhere.

Labor believes in reducing domestic emissions, backing global action to cut emissions but allowing Australian coal to be exported, and that means supporting the regional coalmining communities in Queensland.

“By exporting coal we’re not creating demand for coal,” Albanese said. “That’s there and if Australia stopped exporting tomorrow it would just be replaced by coal from other countries.”

His message was realism in tackling climate change and “not disadvantaging Australia in terms of our economy and jobs just for a gesture”.

Just for a gesture — that’s a wave of contempt towards the Greens who have made the termination of coal exports into a test of climate change virtue and morality. Albanese fails their test. The Greens will depict his pragmatism as a betrayal of progressive politics.

“We just need to connect more with Queenslanders,” Albanese said in a pretty frank statement of his quest. In truth, his stance is completely sensible. Queensland ALP senator Murray Watt denied there was any contradiction. Referring to Adani, he said: “One of the problems with this debate has been that it’s been reduced to an individual mine, or now there are people who are setting a new test which is that we have to stop exporting coal.”

Watt said neither of these issues would help the emissions reduction campaign. Under global arrangements, individual countries decided how to meet their targets through a “variety of ways” and notably by shifting to renewables.

Yet the people Albanese is defying are the legions of youth consumed by the cause, the Greens in their self-righteousness, the climate change lobby groups and many of the progressive commentators.

That Albanese made his tour against the backdrop of the fires only deepened the political conflict. The Greens went into near hysterical hyperbole. Their leader, Richard Di Natale, lumped Scott Morrison and Albanese together on the same unity ticket, saying they were “cheerleading coal” in a “bipartisan consensus to fail”.

Greens policy is to phase out coal exports, currently the nation’s main export worth $67bn annually, by 2030. Greens spokesman Adam Bandt said the problem was “devils in Canberra with coal in their hands and denial in their heads”. He accused Labor of “spitting in the face of bushfire victims by spruiking coal”.

The Greens now have a huge wedge against Labor. Their script is easy to write: don’t trust Labor on climate change, it backs coal exports to save votes, it has no principles, it’s as bad as Morrison.

If this is Albanese’s firm stance then Labor has to retaliate. It has to fight the Greens and defend the common sense, economic self-interest and sensible balance in its new policy structure. But this won’t be easy. Bad blood between Labor and the Greens runs deep on climate change. Witness the Greens sinking Kevin Rudd’s carbon pricing scheme in 2009.

Global warming politics in Australia moves in cycles driven by climate itself, droughts and media bandwagons. Morrison’s success at this year’s election was based on holding his Melbourne seats in the teeth of the progressive ­assault around climate change. The issue remains his chief vulnerability this term.

But Morrison will benefit from a war between Labor and the Greens over climate change logic and fidelity. In addition, he will savage Albanese’s repositioning as that of a leader devoid of conviction. “I don’t know what the Labor Party thinks any more,” Morrison said. “They seem to be just saying things that people want to hear.

“They look up their location services enabler and if it says they are in north Queensland they say one thing and if they are in Melbourne they say something else. Australians know they ­always get the same message from me wherever I am in the country, and I think that gives them some certainty.”

The politics of the bushfires is more complex than usually ­depicted. The Prime Minister has no intention of panicking under pressure, modifying the climate policy he took to the election, punting for a higher emissions reduction target beyond 26 per cent and moving towards the policy of the ALP that he ridiculed and ­defeated. Morrison said his stance reflected the “sensible centre” — the need to balance ­emission ­reductions and the economy. He brands as a “lie” the ­unscientific progressive mantra that increasing Australia’s 2030 targets will ­alleviate the ­intensity of the bushfires.

During his regional Queensland tour, Albanese struggled to find the middle ground between winning back coal communities and keeping his climate change credentials. He was for coal ­exports but he was also anti-coal.

Albanese said there would not be another coal-fired power station built in this country. The future, he said, was renewables. He didn’t talk about the transition away from coal jobs but said cheap ­renewable power was the key to future jobs in new manufacturing industry for regional Queensland, an extremely optimistic scenario.

The ALP leader avoided saying coal was the answer for the region. He tried to depict himself as the workers’ friend concerned about wages, jobs, casuals being ripped off, the prospects for Australia ­becoming an energy superpower based on renewable energy and a jobs strategy for the region that extended far beyond coal into new industry.

But Albanese struggled over Adani. He felt unable to offer an explicit endorsement. “Look, Adani has been approved, it’s been approved,” he said. He dodged questions on more coalmines opening in Queensland’s Galilee Basin, saying such decisions were for mining companies not the government.

In this sense the trip proved there is no easy path for Labor trying to regain standing in the ­resource-based communities of Queensland but retain its climate change credentials in the big southern capitals. Albanese’s trip is a micro ­example of the strategic dilemma he faces as ALP leader — insisting on Labor’s identity as a progressive party as you try to move back to the political centre is fraught with contradictions. This is because Labor cannot control the groundswell of progressivism populism and its erupting ideological manifestations.

Contemporary progressivism is no longer seen in terms of social democratic reforms, once Labor’s core business. Its quest is identity politics, self-expression, individual liberation, saving the planet and a strident, intolerant, self-righteousness that runs against much of the pragmatic “down to earth” Australian character.

Contemporary progressivism wants to change the way people live and the values by which they live — it is confrontational not ­reassuring. The deepening conflict between Labor and the Greens transcends policy. It goes to values, how people relate to each other and the tension in their views about society and human nature.

The issue in early 2020 will be the role of religion in society. For the Greens, this is akin to a political electric current. They are fundamentally opposed to Morrison’s pledge to legislate a religious discrimination act. At the end of the week the Greens and progressives were talking up a storm following release of the second draft ­exposure of the proposed law as the basis for more consultations.

Morrison sees this initiative as essential, given statutory inadequacies for protection again religi­ous discrimination in Australia. These are more obvious now ­religious beliefs are targets for ­attack. For Morrison, the bill is vital in its own right but also necessary for a multicultural ­society that rests on the assumption that people of different faiths and no faith can live together in respect and harmony. If there is no respect, there is no harmony. If there is no proper protection for religion, there can be no respect.

Attorney-General Christian Porter said the second draft followed more than 90 two-hour sessions with different stakeholders. While Morrison called this “a bill for all Australians”, it will trigger an epic battle within the parliament. Media analysis to this stage has focused on the difficulty the government faces winning backing from its own side.

But this misses the main point. This bill constitutes a threshold challenge for progressives and for the Labor Party. It will determine, ultimately, whether Labor believes in laws to protect people against religious discrimination or whether it will align with the ­majority progressive position and seek to vote down the bill.

The Greens, in their customary way, branded the earlier exposure “a Trojan horse for hate designed to make discrimination against LGBTI people legal”. Greens spokesman Nick McKim said the revised draft “massively widened the scope of the legislation” and increased “the number of organisations that will be able to discriminate”.

MP for Sydney in the NSW parliament Alex Greenwich, a champion of the same-sex marriage campaign, called the bill a “potent danger to all Australians” because it sought to enshrine “religious privilege” and was a betrayal of ­ordinary people.

The ultimate issue is whether the progressives can advance their campaign to gradually drive religion from the public square or whether Morrison and Porter can enact a law that protects the life of people of faith.

Porter has said that rights collide with each other and that compromise is essential. He said, however, “that for religion to exist at all, religious bodies must be able to maintain a chosen level of ­exclusivity to their premises or composition or services”. He said the new draft does not change the essence of the bill.

It extends the definition of ­religious organisations to charities such as St Vincent de Paul, which means they can preference a person of faith in employment. Religious hospitals, aged-care ­facilities and accommodation providers will be able to take faith into account in staff decisions. Porter said the bill meant a person could not be discriminated against on religious grounds in terms of ­employment, joining a club or qualifying for a profession.

In relation to conscientious ­objection by a medical professional, the objection must be to a procedure, not a person. For ­example, a doctor can object to a procedure but this is valid only if it applies to all instances of the procedure rather than just applying to a certain person.

The so-called Israel Folau provision remains. An organisation wanting to restrain religious comments by an employed individual must accept the obligation of proof to show the organisation would suffer undue financial hardship. Porter said the boundary would be defined by whether the employee was operating in spare time outside employment time. For instance, a Christmas party might seem to be in a work context while something posted at the weekend on Facebook was outside any employment space.

“We’ve been listening to everybody,” Morrison said. The reality, however, is the entire purpose of the bill is to give religious ­expression a statutory protection it now lacks. By shifting the balance point, the Morrison government is asking the parliament to decide what priority it accords to protecting religion.

Two years ago when same-sex marriage was legislated, the Labor Party voted as a bloc throughout the day against every amendment to protect religious faith from discrimination. The same-sex marriage issue has seen a historic shift in the culture and character of Labor.

The test is now coming over how far this extends, how much Labor believes in supporting religious faith against discrimination and whether Labor will break from progressive ideology on this question.