The One Nation alliance with the mining and energy unions may have failed in its infancy at the Queensland state election but only because Annastacia Palaszczuk found a way to counter it.
It has now flexed a new-found muscle in the NSW Upper Hunter state by-election.
And if Anthony Albanese believes this left/right blue-collar workers’ association is not coming his way at a federal level in a number of key regional seats, he is dangerously mistaken.
Joel Fitzgibbon isn’t. And a lot of his colleagues agree; there are obvious federal implications from the result, which saw Labor’s primary vote drop to about 20 per cent in some booths.
To deny the message from this is a dangerous assumption.
Yes, it was an obscure state by-election – triggered by an appalling set of allegations against the former sitting Nationals MP – but the issues that dominated the campaign weren’t.
They were federal.
And they confirm things that were apparent in the 2019 election and the collapse of the Labor primary vote, which almost lost Fitzgibbon his seat.
The deniers will claim the Upper Hunter was a Nationals seat held for 90 years and impossible to win. For Labor to have stolen it even outside the politics of pandemic incumbency would have been miraculous. Fair enough.
But as Fitzgibbon, as the federal Labor member and former minister, will attest to, the Labor primary vote in the federal seat of Hunter has followed a similar trajectory over the past couple of decades, which can only lead to the conclusion that it is the Labor brand – just as the Liberal brand is on the nose in WA – that is now the issue.
The Fitzgibbon dynasty – Joel and his father before him – has held the seat for almost 50 years. Labor has effectively held it for more than 100. It was home to one its favourite sons, Doc Evatt, who was gifted the safe seat for a term because the party feared he would lose the inner-Sydney seat of Barton, now held by the Labor Left’s Linda Burney.
For argument’s sake, take the random booth of Singleton in the Upper Hunter by-election, which is indicative and deeply coal heartland. In the 2007 federal election, this booth delivered Fitzgibbon 60 per cent of the primary vote. By the time of the 2019 election, this was reduced to 36 per cent, despite Fitzgibbon being a very popular local member.
At the 2015 NSW state election, which returned the Coalition government with a reduced majority under Mike Baird, the Singleton booth returned a 36 per cent primary vote to Labor.
At last weekend’s by-election, the Singleton booth collapsed to about 20 per cent for Labor.
The fact Albanese had gone out the day before the by-election to oppose a new gas power plant for the region, which is an energy production employment hub, has been described as the greatest act of political sabotage a federal Labor leader has inflicted on a state Labor branch.
But it suits Scott Morrison nicely for Albanese to assume that there are no federal implications because it plays to directly to his broader political strategy.
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