Vikki Campion: Labor is ignoring its traditional working-class base
Labor traditionally railed against elites and the ruling class but it no longer fights for the underdogs who were once the soul of the party, writes Vikki Campion.
Labor has gone from being the party concerned for the deprived to becoming the party most likely to help “the chef knows my name at Aria” types into a taxpayer-subsidised Tesla – complete with charging stations across the Nullarbor for a road trip they will never take.
In 1987, Labor MP Tom Uren called for a wealth inquiry after Robert Holmes a Court was named as Australia’s first billionaire, asking: “Why a reliance on the private sector hasn’t delivered benefits to our economy or class.”
Three decades later, his progenitor and former staffer Anthony Albanese has the same policy playbook as Holmes a Court’s heir’s teal candidates, as, on the other side of the world – from the Washington Harvard Club – Malcolm Turnbull urges you to vote for them.
In the turnaround from the underdog to the top dog, they have gone from historically building housing for the impoverished to prioritising a net-zero public service and a housing policy where the bank and the government own your home, with mum and dad as minor shareholders.
The party that once cared about the working conditions of labourers will instead create new jobs for themselves inside new government institutions, commissioning reviews and lifting the cap on public servants in Canberra. Problems outside the capital will be sticky-taped over with floors of communication degrees.
It has lurched from Whitlam’s Medicare to vowing to protect an NDIS model that doesn’t best suit those it was designed to serve, while serving those it was never supposed to help, subsidising pony rides and prostitutes under the broad banner of psychosocial support.
Instead of nostalgically turning to its past successes, we have Rudd/Gillard/Rudd era Labor back, banning sheep exports, bringing in a carbon tax and GP Superclinics to house non-existent rural GPs. Where we need burns units, we’ll be getting business cases.
Noveau Labor policies are more certified ruby than red. Half a billion dollars to host the COP29 climate summit and subsidising new electric cars to help buyers save $12,000 on a $70,000 EV like a Tesla Model 3.
They are taking tax money from people who can’t afford new cars, and giving it to rich people to buy new electric cars. The silliest thing is they think this will cut emissions, when most of the recharging happens at night from coal because there’s no sun and the wind has dropped.
Their only “rural” policy of note is half a billion dollars on an electric vehicle charging network across the Nullarbor, Broken Hill, Port Augusta, Mt Isa and Tennant Creek.
Coalition governments that upgrade rural roads get slammed for pork barrelling. At the same time, Labor can promise electric vehicle charging stations in some of the poorest towns, which already have more charging places than electric vehicles registered to them – and no one bats an eyelid.
Labor has gone from being the party that began under a ghost gum in Barcaldine for shearers to the party that will see shearers out of a job in the name of animal welfare, as they enslave themselves to the class they once proclaimed warfare to from the docks of Balmain.
They seek to govern by Ultimo’s ABC, launching emotively from one $148,000 shaky iPhone video to the next.
In an animal activist how-to-vote card, alternative agriculture minister Julie Collins vowed to end the sheep trade and create a new “assistant minister for animal welfare, separate to the agriculture portfolio”, creating suit-and-tie Canberra jobs to moralise over others’ real jobs – farming, transport and export.
Animal welfare doesn’t begin and end with putting sheep on a boat. It starts with the undoubted cruelty of back-shed puppy milling; a trade pumped up by those same inner city types happily splashing thousands on a commercially-bred designer dog, and ends unchecked with activists on the ABC shutting down horse racing.
There are no fashions on the field under an animal welfare commission that believes transporting stock, no matter how, is cruelty.
Under the extreme activist lens, which claims all livestock transport, trucking included, stresses the animals, there’s not even fleece.
Oppositions are for sensible post-mortem, to safeguard the valuable programs that have been adopted by the Coalition, not to bring back rejected policy in self-righteous euphoria, banning live export, which voters rejected in 2019 to opt for better regulation.
Yet 2008 was not enough for the Labor time warp. Its 2022 policy leaps back to 1945, to the Full Employment White Paper, introduced by Post-war Minister John Dedman and criticised even then for being a statement of principles, not a blueprint for jobs.
(Labor’s website claims Prime Minister John Curtin released it – apparently – just moments before he passed away in the Lodge.)
Until recent history, Labor was a party that railed against elites and the ruling class.
Now policy wonks suck up to them and ask the public to support vague programs based on slogans like “A Better Future” underpinned by zealous social engineers who claim the right to control behaviour.
Labor has not left the inner suburbs that were its soul; rather the soul of the inner suburbs has changed Labor, where even the adage “Balmain boys don’t cry” is today a profanity.
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Originally published as Vikki Campion: Labor is ignoring its traditional working-class base
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