Labor legend Jennie George slams ALP’s energy policies
Former union titan and Labor MP Jennie George has watched in despair as new energy warriors betray her old Labor values. ‘I feel like the party left me, I didn’t leave it.’
It was late 2019 when former unions titan and Labor MP Jennie George faced up to an uncomfortable truth that had rankled for months, intruding on her quiet retirement on the NSW south coast.
She wasn’t just disillusioned with the ALP, she realised. She was deeply troubled that the party she had served for the best part of a decade in the federal Illawarra seat of Throsby (now Whitlam) had “lost its moral compass”.
Corruption allegations aired in the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption hearings in 2019 involving a Chinese billionaire and an illegal $100,000 cash donation to Labor’s Sussex St headquarters in Sydney were just the start. “It was as if nothing had changed, despite the enormity of the revelations,” George observes.
By then she also was questioning the ALP’s energy policy and what she saw as glib assurances to heartland blue-collar workers about their future in the promised renewables jobs bonanza. It was all weighing her down and George, the straight-talking first female president of the ACTU for five years until 2000, couldn’t ignore it. “It was difficult remaining a passive enabler of policies and actions that had caused me growing concern.”
She began closely examining Labor’s energy policy, drilling down on job creation promises, filtering them through the muscle memory of a union official asking how these figures were calculated and what they meant for workers in traditional industries in the regions. She had to decide: “Do I keep my mouth shut and just accept everything that’s happening, or if I feel really strongly, which I do, do I speak out. I felt a responsibility to question.”
At first she mounted a small protest and stopped paying her dues. For three decades George had been a paid-up ALP member but this was a pause that she felt would free her from any residual obligations to the party.
She observed the rise of Anthony Albanese to Prime Minister in 2022, looking for a signal that would coax her back to the fold. Perhaps now she could see out her retirement with partner Denis Lennen in the coastal haven near Ulladulla, concentrate on healing the two broken ankles that still gave her trouble and continue quietly mentoring independent MP Dai Le who defeated star Labor candidate Kristina Keneally in the southwest Sydney seat of Fowler.
“I hoped that under Anthony it would be different,’’ George, 76, tells Inquirer.
She recalls launching Albanese’s campaign for Grayndler in 1996 when she was ACTU president. He and others in the party encouraged her 2001 run for Throsby in what was a messy pre-selection that nevertheless led to her claiming the steel and coal seat until her retirement in 2010.
They have much in common: both from the party’s Left faction, they were raised by single mothers in inner-Sydney public housing and both have close ties to Italy – George was born to Russian parents in a displaced persons camp in the Puglian town of Trani, close to where Albanese found his long-lost father living in Barletta.
Following the 2022 election she began delving further, watching question time, reading Hansard and Senate estimates transcripts, examining the morass of energy policies guiding the country’s clean energy transition as coal-fired power is phased out.
She spoke with friends in regional Victoria who felt railroaded into having transmission towers built on their land, watched regional unrest in communities hosting renewable projects as part of the government’s target of 82 per cent renewable energy by 2030.
What did she learn? “I realised it was all about the target. That the target was more important than anything and it doesn’t matter who gets in the way,’’ she says.
In early 2022 George began writing her own personal notes – titled What Happened to the Light on the Hill? – a moment in time record of her disillusionment.
They start with the 2019 ICAC hearings that heard extraordinary evidence of cash being delivered to NSW Labor headquarters in an Aldi plastic bag to circumvent donation caps. Union corruption, she noted, was equally reprehensible. “In my three decades in the union movement I was surrounded by hardworking, committed unionists. The later revelations of corruption by a handful of officials tarnished the reputation of us all.”
Her notes cover her disappointment with the government’s climate policy. And they end with her disenchantment with the party. “The party that was formed to give political expression to the needs of working people has allowed the light on the hill to dim.”
Her missives now make regular appearances on The Australian’s letters page, delivered with the same directness that readers will remember from George’s union days. She taps them out on her smartphone, waiting for someone in the party to take note. “I was hoping that maybe Anthony’s office might follow the letters and there might be a change of heart on some of the issues, but that doesn’t seem to be the case and they seem to be progressing helter skelter,” she says.
“Yes, we must reduce our emissions, but the transition must address the human impacts in a sensible and balanced manner.”
When her concerns about the accuracy of the modelling behind Labor’s promised 604,000 new jobs were put to then opposition climate change spokesman Chris Bowen on ABC television’s 7.30 program in 2021 he defended the figures, adding: “Well, Jennie George’s service to the Labor Party in the parliament should be respected, but with respect, she’s wrong.”
If all that leaves readers thinking that she has defected to the Liberals, think again. She reflexively calls them “our political opponents’’. “The worst thing would be for anyone to think that I” – she breaks off. “Of course I am always Labor at heart. I feel like I’m old Labor; I feel like the party left me, I didn’t leave it.”
George is instantly recognisable in a busy cafe in Ulladulla, her hair styled in a neat short bob, her gaze behind the glasses direct and appraising and that deep voice husked up from years of smoking. She has given away the fags, and a walking stick rests by the table – a legacy of two broken ankles sustained in a fall.
She indirectly owes a deep scar visible above her buttoned shirt to former ACTU and Labor Party leader Simon Crean, who died suddenly in Europe in June last year, aged 74, from a heart attack.
At the doctor a few days’ later, George mentioned she’d had some palpitations and before she knew it she was in Sydney having emergency open heart surgery. Initially it came as a surprise – her mother Natasha had lived to 94, but then she remembered that her estranged father Oleg had died young from a heart attack.
She values her privacy and is reluctant to do this interview because she thought she left public life when she retired in 2010 to become a carer to her mother, who’d given birth to baby Eugenie (anglicised to Jennie by a teacher who thought it easier to pronounce) in a migrant camp in Italy where food was scarce and nappies were fashioned by gauze donated by the Red Cross. In her retirement she could have lived off a lifetime of memories back to those hard post-war days in Australia, to her years teaching and then rising through the NSW Teachers Federation to the top of the ACTU, the first woman to lead the country’s union movement.
The heady celebrations in 1995 when the ardent feminist was endorsed as president-elect, paving the way for a succession of women leaders – Sharan Burrow, Ged Kearney and Michele O’Neil – were captured by journalist Brad Norington in his biography of George. Streamers, balloons and flowers filled the stage as 700 delegates cheered their new leader who was up there singing and dancing to Helen Reddy’s anthem I Am Woman. Even Bill Kelty, Norington said, an ardent supporter of George but not noted for his advocacy of women’s issues in his earlier years, mouthed the words “I am woman hear me roar”.
“Jennie George had arrived, crashing through the doors of the boys’ club,” Norington wrote.
Following the 2022 federal election she looked at the new entrants to parliament and saw that she shared a common background with Le, who came to Australia as a child refugee from Vietnam and was raised in Sydney with her sisters by a single mother.
Le had been driven from the Liberal Party in messy factional battles that led to her successful run as an independent against former NSW premier Keneally in the safe Labor seat of Fowler.
During her time in the Illawarra, George had faced her own factional wars with Labor.
“I was the subject of branch stacking. I had to threaten them, to say: ‘If you keep going you’ll leave me no choice but to run as an independent,’ ’’ she says.
After her election to Throsby she publicly backed embattled opposition leader Kim Beazley in the 2006 leadership battle against Kevin Rudd. She was outspoken in caucus and didn’t get on with Rudd who, she says, informed her she was losing her parliamentary secretary position shortly after the 2007 election because she “lacked merit”.
“The antipathy was mutual … people like Kevin Rudd didn’t appreciate upstarts like me. He probably thought I was a loudmouth, that I didn’t toe the party line.
“I’ve always had this notion that if you’re elected by the people, you are their spokesperson. That’s what I said to Dai, ‘You’re now the voice of Fowler.’ ’’
She saw in Le a shared struggle. “Although my folks came in 1950 on a different boat we had a similar experience in migrant hostels, trying to rise up in your own right despite all the odds against you.”
George rang the parliamentary switchboard in Canberra shortly after the 2022 election expecting to be put through to Le’s staff but to her surprise the newly minted MP answered the phone herself.
“We started talking and the relationship has developed since then. I broke a few ceilings in my time and I think what Dai has achieved is really quite significant.”
Le recalls that first phone call came as she was trying to set up a new office and learn the ropes, thankful for the offer of help from someone she held in high regard.
“I just felt so humbled, in awe really,” she says.
“The funny thing is that I said to Jennie: ‘But you’re from Labor’, and she said that Labor today is not the Labor it was.
“And I recognised that Fowler was old Labor too, it’s not new Labor. And possibly that’s why there was a huge swing in May 2022 towards an independent.’’
George was never truly at home in the ALP and looking back now concludes she never did quite fit in. “It’s not my natural home, the union movement is. They’re quite different cultures.”
While she still believes in the cause, the separateness allows her to “step aside and see practices that I find hard to reconcile with”. And so she looked at the ALP’s Powering Australia plan released in late 2021 with its promised 604,000 jobs by 2030. That modelling included 63,994 direct jobs and George kept looking at the remaining 540,000 indirect jobs, squaring it off against her knowledge gained from her years in the Illawarra.
Steel has a multiplier effect of three to five jobs for every direct job, she says, wondering how Labor had arrived at the “extraordinary multiplier of around nine” in calculating the number of promised indirect jobs.
The loss of “carbon jobs was never factored in to the modelling, she noted, and delving deeper she found 306,000 of the jobs were “induced” jobs in unrelated sectors created by access to cheaper energy unlocked by renewables.
“To say that Labor’s policies will not lead to the loss of jobs defies reality,” she wrote. “Displaced workers, mainly in the regions, have a right to know where the alternative secure employment options will be. Labor’s policies fail that test.”
What she saw as meaningless figures were often accompanied by empty slogans. “It was rather a glib attitude to say that on climate change, the cost of inaction was greater than the cost of action without actually telling the electorate what the cost would be and the price people might pay for it.”
George says she believes in climate change and once chaired a parliamentary committee that examined its environmental impact on Australia’s coastal zones.
“It’s not as if I come from a predisposition that is hostile to the agenda,” she says. As she sees it, she is raising simple questions about baseload power requirements, job losses and creation, and the effect of the transition on trade-exposed industries.
After airing her doubts about the job figures and the promised $275 reduction in power bills by 2025, she noted that both pledges were hardly mentioned again.
Far from being wrong, as claimed by Bowen back in that 2021 interview, she says her claims have been validated.
When asked this week whether the 604,000 target was still in place and achievable, a spokesperson from Bowen’s office told Inquirer: “The Albanese government has created around 650,000 jobs since coming to power, many of these in energy and low emissions sectors of the economy.
“We know that in 2023 alone, 337,498 rooftop solar systems were installed across Australia – creating employment opportunities for thousands of electricians, installers and more – and that’s just one part of the clean energy industry.”
The Powering Australia plan estimates jobs created by 2030, the government argues. There’s still six years to go.
George sighs when she hears this response. She forwards a recent ABC story stating that 8000 jobs and billions of dollars in renewable projects proposed for the Illawarra region have failed to materialise.
Albanese did not comment on George’s criticisms but his government points to a raft of achievements in backing wage rises for low-paid workers, improvements in workers’ rights and the introduction of the $10bn National Reconstruction Fund to kickstart investment in manufacturing projects.
George doesn’t believe she is starry-eyed about the past but she looks back to the Bob Hawke and Paul Keating eras and believes they would have handled the energy debate differently, bringing the community along, earning social licence.
“These issues are beyond partisan political stands. I would imagine that Paul and Bob would have got together the best brains and said: ‘This is the challenge our country faces, how do we get from here to here without harm?’
“They would have tried to have a consensual framework from the start.”
George claims no particular expertise either but she believes the nuclear option to supplement renewables should at least be examined.
“I think we’ve got to look at nuclear because if you think like I do, that you can’t run a First World economy on renewables alone, then there’s got to be some alternative for the future.”
So she will continue her letter writing, keep making her considered interventions and follow the debate in the hope that someone is listening.
She hasn’t yet resigned from the party. Why?
“I’m waiting. I’m waiting to be comforted by a change in direction on energy policy – and for there to be no repeat of the bad old days.
“I’ve never resigned because I am waiting for things to turn around.”
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