As I wrote recently for Insight, we are almost uniformly represented by fools with zero real-world experience. These credentialled ignoramuses go direct from university to politics, skillfully avoiding ever working in a ‘real’ job. It’s a problem that afflicts all sides of politics but is especially acute for the Australian Labor Party.
Labor, after all, purports to be “the party of the worker”. Once upon a dim, dark time, that might even have been true. But the days when a train driver could rise to be a Labor prime minister are long gone. Now, it’s hard to find even a Labor backbencher who’s ever soiled their hand with anything more laborious than changing the paper in the office printer. In fact, they’d probably call a technician in for even that.
Australian Labor is fracturing along a blue/white collar divide. Like its UK counterpart, it is rapidly becoming the party of inner-city professionals and public servants.
Anthony Albanese has been warned by the head of the NSW CFMEU mining and energy division to stop developing Labor policies in “inner-city coffee shops” or risk losing three federal seats in the Hunter Valley at the next election — an outcome almost certain to relegate it to three more years of opposition.
Former Labor frontbencher Joel Fitzgibbon also threatened to quit parliament if Mr Albanese’s agenda did not go further in backing blue-collar workers, opening up a split within opposition ranks following Labor’s defeat at the weekend by-election in the state seat of Upper Hunter.
“Our brand is in trouble. If we don’t heed the warning, we’ll go the way of the Kodak brand,” Mr Fitzgibbon said. “We are facing something that looks a little bit like an existential threat here.”
Of course the ALP left factions are in stringent denial. In 2015, a union ad criticising Labor for abandoning the values of its base was swiftly pulled by the party.
But the critical voices won’t be silenced so easily.
Paterson MP Meryl Swanson, from the NSW Right, said she was “absolutely” concerned her seat would be at risk at the next election as Scott Morrison targets the Hunter Valley region. Ms Swanson said she would be a “fool” to not take lessons from the disastrous by-election loss[…]
CFMEU NSW northern mining and energy president Peter Jordan, who represents workers in the Hunter Valley, said he believed the electorates of Shortland, Paterson and Hunter, held by Mr Conroy, Ms Swanson and Mr Fitzgibbon, were under threat.
Mr Jordan said it was “absolutely disgraceful” Labor opposed a $600m government-funded gas plant in the region, declaring it needed to “stop developing their policy in inner-city coffee shops”.
“Albo is falling further behind in coal country and I think that was a reflection here in coal country in the Upper Hunter on Saturday,” Mr Jordan said.
“If he thinks he is rebuilding it with blue-collar workers then I don’t know where they are.
That doesn’t mean, though, that the Coalition are the winners of the Labor bleed. What really seems to have traditional Labor types worried is the drift to third parties.
“But the problem was blue-collar miners still didn’t listen to it. They went and still voted for One Nation. And One Nation are going to deliver them what? Bloody nothing. But they still went there.”
The Australian
I wouldn’t be so sure about One Nation “delivering nothing”. Because, much as it may dismay Labor’s cafe set and the union bosses, parties like One Nation are far closer to blue-collar values, on everything from climate change to immigration.
That’s what they’re really afraid of.
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