For 130 years, the Australian Labor Party has touted itself as the “party of the worker”. For at least the last thirty years, that’s been a blatant lie. Not one federal Labor parliamentarian has ever had a blue-collar job. Most have never had a job outside politics, full stop.
Of course, Labor still tries to put over the class rhetoric at election time, but voters aren’t buying their bullshit any more. Working-class Australians are well aware that the Labor party no longer cares or even knows much about them.
If the party learned anything from its spectacular drubbing at the polls a year ago, it’s showing no sign of it.
Large swathes of Labor’s traditional working-class vote deserted a party that had drifted off into a green-left, climate change embrace.
Labor’s formerly wedded on voters were rightly more worried about real threats to their own jobs rather than empty promises to save the planet. The transformation of once-safe Labor seats has been remarkable.
[…]workers no longer feel welcome in a party that idolises the celebrity of Greta Thunberg over the humble decency of a coal miner.
Matt Canavan is a Coalition senator, so naturally he’s going to boast about winning over formerly-Labor-voting workers. But Canavan also represents the Central Queensland seat of Capricornia, a seat held by Labor for 90 of its 120 years. The miners and factory workers of Capricornia have walked away from Labor in droves.
Central Queensland is the starkest example of how the Liberal and National parties are now the true parties of the worker, but it is evident across the country. The swing to the Coalition at last year’s election was three times higher in statistical areas that had above-average mining employment. And, last year’s Australian Election Study, produced by the Australian National University, showed that 42 per cent of “tradies” (those with a non-tertiary qualification) voted for the Coalition, compared to only 32 per cent for Labor. Last year’s election was a “hi-vis” revolution. (As an aside university-educated voters split equally 36 per cent to each of the Coalition and Labor, and 17 per cent to the Greens.)
If you are toiling in a mine, in a factory or on a shipyard, there is no way you can trust the Labor party, and its green hangers-on, with your economic future.
But what recent elections have also shown is that the days of rusted-on voters are rapidly passing. Voters today are increasingly happy to dump the party their family may have voted for for generations. So, what must the Coalition do, to keep the working-class on their side?
Simple: dump the baggage of the Turnbull years. Stop trying to out-green the Greens.
We must avoid getting sidetracked into championing the latest climate change fad, be it net-zero emissions or 100 per cent renewable energy. These policies destroy the jobs of miners and factory workers. The workers have voted for us because they see us fighting against the Greens that want to take away their jobs. If we weaken that fight, we weaken any desire for the worker to vote for us.
A lesson that New Zealand’s National Party would do well to remember, too.
“Bipartisanship” doesn’t win elections. “Bipartisanship” is just an admission that you’re not an opposition, you’re bootlickers for the government.
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