Labor’s Joel Fitzgibbon climate row steals spotlight from the Coalition
A week in which the government should have been under pressure instead saw Labor dealing with a rolling crisis.
A week in which the government should have been under pressure instead saw Labor dealing with what is an as yet unresolved rolling crisis. The pandemic hasn’t made it easy for oppositions to gain political traction but this week Labor stole the focus for all the wrong reasons.
Opposition agriculture and resources spokesman Joel Fitzgibbon quit the frontbench on Tuesday in disgust over what he said was the party’s failure to get the balance right on climate change. Fitzgibbon thinks it is a second-order issue in the context of the recession and job losses, but others don’t agree.
Reports emerged of a shouting match in the shadow cabinet meeting between Fitzgibbon and opposition legal affairs spokesman Mark Dreyfus. Fitzgibbon told Dreyfus to “shut up, you idiot”. Dreyfus took to morning radio the next day and publicly attacked Fitzgibbon for being out of touch with his party and with most Australians when it came to climate change.
It is an irony that this dispute is occurring in the context of Joe Biden winning the US presidency on a platform to do more on climate change, a shift that should put the pressure on the Coalition.
If the public scolding Dreyfus delivered was supposed to quieten Fitzgibbon down, it had the opposite effect. He in turn used the media to call for opposition climate change and energy spokesman Mark Butler to be sacked.
The South Australian left-wing factional heavyweight is a close ally of Anthony Albanese, who is also from the left. Fitzgibbon’s argument is that Butler has been in the climate spokesman role across two failed elections where climate change policy deficiencies were at the heart of the losses. We all remember the way Bill Shorten was caught out on the costings of emissions reductions policies during the election campaign last year.
Labor deputy leader Richard Marles defended Butler, but not before admitting that “it’s going to be bumpy” as the opposition navigates these debates. The divisions are personal and policy driven.
Equally, personal ambition isn’t far below the surface. Marles would like to be seen as the next Labor leader in waiting. The NSW right thinks it should be one of its own (Chris Bowen or Tony Burke). Jim Chalmers thinks Labor’s best chances of returning to government is to have a Queenslander leading the party, an affiliation he just happens to have. Tanya Plibersek wonders why it can’t be a woman when Labor has boosted its gender representation. I know if Penny Wong were in the house, not the Senate, it would be a woman right now and Labor would likely already be in government.
Meanwhile, Shorten wonders whether the phrase “third time lucky” can become a real thing.
Senior Labor figures attempted to hose down the divisions late in the week, claiming Fitzgibbon was isolated and on the way out. Apparently there was always a deal that he’d quit shadow cabinet by the end of this year to make way for fellow NSW right traveller Ed Husic, who frankly should have been on Labor’s frontbench half a lifetime ago given his talents.
While it is true Fitzgibbon is on the way out, it’s also true that past leadership challenges have been ignited by none other than Fitzgibbon. This is his shtick.
And Fitzgibbon isn’t a Lone Ranger within Labor when it comes to concerns the party is out of touch with so-called mainstream voters.
On Thursday evening at the end of what was a bruising week, Fitzgibbon dined at Otis restaurant in the Canberra suburb of Kingston with the national convener of the right faction, Don Farrell. It was the same restaurant where the pair established the Otis Club, a collection of Labor MPs who want Albanese to do more for blue-collar workers and their communities.
Fitzgibbon’s departure means Labor no longer has a regional MP in shadow cabinet. The agriculture portfolio therefore has been given to the newbie, Husic, a city dweller. The Nationals have had a great time pointing out there aren’t too many farms in the western Sydney electorate of Chifley.
Labor’s disconnection with the regions has rarely been more apparent than it is right now, which is a problem far greater than its tensions on what to do on climate policy. Queensland is always a crucial battleground in federal elections, and it has a vast regional population federal Labor just isn’t appealing to.
Albanese will likely reshuffle his line-up this year when Scott Morrison does the same, but he can’t create regional representatives out of thin air.
The confusion in Labor ranks wasn’t limited to all of the above this week, however. On Thursday afternoon Albanese called an emergency shadow cabinet meeting to clarify what the opposition’s policy was when it came to personal relationships between MPs and staff. Even though this was the issue that put the government under pressure at the beginning of the week, Labor has had its fair share of controversies in that space through the years.
Albanese misspoke on Wednesday evening when trying to talk ABC host Leigh Sales through Labor’s policy on what’s known informally as the “bonking ban”. He thought they already had one; most Labor MPs did not. It turns out Albo should have phoned a friend and checked with the masses in his party because they were right, as the Prime Minister had pointed out in his media conference on Tuesday.
When Malcolm Turnbull announced a “bonking ban” for ministers and their staff in 2018, Shorten said he’d keep the policy were Labor elected into government. It wasn’t, which left Labor without a policy on this issue in the current parliament. Labor’s senior women weren’t impressed, understandably so, and demanded that Albanese do something about it. But after he overreached on television, shadow cabinet had to come together the next day and mop up the mess.
So we got to the end of the mid-November sitting period and Labor is back in the headlines but for all the wrong reasons. If the government had hoped to move the media cycle on from its difficult start to the week, it needn’t have worried about how to manufacture such a political outcome. Labor did it for the Coalition and the challenges the week threw up for Labor aren’t going away any time soon.
Peter van Onselen is political editor at the Ten Network and a professor of politics and public policy at the University of Western Australia and Griffith University.
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