Anthony Albanese in jobs pitch to coalminers

Labor leader outlines his vision for central and north Queensland to become a manufacturing powerhouse in a low carbon economy.

From left, senator Murray Watt, Labor’s Capricornia candidate, Russell Robertson, and Anthony Albanese.

Anthony Albanese has outlined his vision for central and north Queensland to become a manufacturing powerhouse in a low carbon economy as he insisted mining communities that abandoned Labor at the last election were now ready for a change in government.

The Opposition Leader said he would turn around Labor’s fortunes in the state that had been a graveyard for the federal party in the past decade, arguing an Albanese government would bolster the wages and safety of coalminers by cracking down on casualisation and labour hire firms.

After visiting 10 seats in a nine-day tour of Queensland, Mr Albanese said coal would be part of the economy for a long time to come, but there also needed to be a plan to transform mining regions in the state into manufacturing hubs.

His Queensland tour included his first coalmine visit as Labor leader. He also went to the mining town of Clermont that was targeted by Bob Brown’s anti-Adani convoy at the last election.

“We’re importing solar panels and wind turbines,” he said. “It is Australian steel going into it, Australian coal being used to make the steel, Australian iron ore. But we are not making things here. Why not?”

With green groups arguing jobs in the renewables sector can make up for jobs losses in coal, Mr Albanese said it was “shortsighted to say renewables equals jobs in just solar panels”.

“That’s part of it, but the real job creation that can occur with renewables is by lowering energy costs – you make the costs of manufacturing cheaper,” he said.

“That’s why companies like BlueScope in Port Kembla, why Rio Tinto in Gladstone, (are) looking at cleaner energy, ­because it’s market driven. That’s how they lower their costs, and are able to produce things for cheaper, and therefore become more competitive globally.”

He said technology had changed the economics of manufacturing from the 1970s when high labour costs in Australia pushed jobs offshore to Asia.

“With mechanisation, yes it means less employment per output, but labour is a lower proportion of the costs, transport is a far greater proportion of the cost.

“So it makes less sense now to export the raw materials, have something made somewhere else and buy it back once the value adding has occurred.

“It makes much more sense now than it did before to, if you’ve got all the inputs – for example nickel, lithium, copper, that goes into a battery – to make it here and to then transport the finished product.”

On his Queensland trip in the past fortnight, the Labor leader visited the regional seats of Flynn, Dawson, Capricornia, Leichhardt and Groom, as well as the suburban Brisbane seats of Lilley and Petrie. Labor won just six out of 30 seats in Queensland at the 2019 election, with the party’s ambiguity over the Adani coalmine savaging then leader Bill Shorten’s support in Flynn, Dawson, Capricornia, and Herbert.

Labor’s “same work, same pay” policy would force bosses to pay subcontracted labour-hire workers the same rate as permanent employees, with Mr Albanese saying the plan would increase wage growth.

“For the miners, now under 50 per cent of employees are permanent. And that’s a shift from just a few years ago, when this government came to office, that figure was over 70 per cent,” Mr Albanese said.

“If you’re not a secure employee, if you’re casual, you don’t have the confidence to be able to go forward and say, ‘look, there’s this problem’ and to speak out. That can be (a safety) issue.”

Mr Albanese said coal exports would be part of the economy for a long time, but he would be “honest” in telling people there would be no new coal-fired power stations in Australia.

He criticised the Greens’ plan for net-zero emissions by 2035, saying it was “not feasible to move to 100 per cent renewables tomorrow without the lights going off”. “If you put up things that are not real, what you’re doing is selling your supporters short. You’re not treating people with respect. And you don’t have any prospect of bringing people with you, because people will not see a path to change,” he said. “I’m someone who is a progressive, I’m not someone who romanticises the past, I think that change does happen, and I have faith in humanity, and I have faith in human ingenuity to achieve that change.

“But it happens over a period of time. You argue your case. You can see it with issues of gender equality that are being debated at the moment, in a much better way than they were when I entered this place two decades ago. There are very few occasions when history jumps from A to Z. It usually goes a through B, C, D, E, F.”

Mr Albanese condemned the lack of respect shown to coalminers during the Greens-led anti-Adani convoy during the 2019 election.

He said he sympathised with the plight of the miners given his own childhood in working-class Sydney. “You should never look down on people. And people felt like … the convoy was looking down on them,” he said.

“Where I grew up there was only one place to look and that was up. I know what it was like to be looked down upon. You should never look down on any human being. You should respect them. And that convoy was showing people no respect.”