Joel Fitzgibbon has a piece in the Herald today, as part of the debate in the Australian Labor party about what it should do to win back government, after its amazing loss. It does not seem to be particularly well thought out, and is probably based on the massive swing against him in an electorate with a big coal industry, which he has blamed on the party being too green.
He starts by mentioning the difficulty of satisfying traditional voters and the “more recently arrived progressive followers.”
By more recent progressives, he presumably means the people who voted for Whitlam in the early 1970s, or even earlier. These people are not recent. They are not an add on, by any normal measure. That he thinks they are, is rather strange in itself.
He is “against a creep to the left,” a creep which seems improbable, given the party’s steady move to the right from the Hawke and Keating days onwards, and the steady loss of union power.
The centre is now what would have been called centre right in those days. Even the Conservative Menzies would be considered a rabid left-winger if people approached his writings without preconceptions, as he thought that people had a right to social security without harassment.
Fitzgibbon wants to win back blue collar workers, which is fair enough – if he had evidence that Labor lost significant numbers of blue collar voters anywhere other than Queensland, where a union was fighting against them.
Some data on Blue collar workers… Randomly picked, and a little old, so I need something better, but…..
29% of people in the labour force are blue-collar workers. This is not much of a base to base your hopes on, when you have close to 100% of all working age and older people voting.
Blue collar workers are apparently under-represented in social service groups, cultural groups and school groups. So they are probably not party members of union members. So they will be hard to get loyalty from. If they are relatively low wage, they will want some wage security, which is not something he mentions as important.
He thinks it is important to reject the Greens, despite the Greens’ firm alliance with Julia Gillard, and their general alliance with Kevin Rudd. It was not the Greens fault that Rudd was deposed, or that Gillard was deposed. It is not clear, why if climate is a priority, then more intensely separating from the Greens than Labor currently does (which is pretty intensely), should also be a priority, unless Labor had better climate and environmental policies – which I doubt it has.
One way of keeping both blue collar and professional voters might be to be separate from the Greens, but make it clear that the Greens are potential allies, and that Labor will not allow greening to diminish jobs; even though there is actually little evidence that being green would lower either jobs or wages. At the moment, anyone with any concern about environment is not going to give Labor their first preference – especially not given his leader’s ongoing promotion of coal and Fitzgibbon’s next proposals
He seems to think that refusing to support increasing oil, gas and coal mines and exports and incidentally killing water supplies and fertility, is the same as “turning our backs on resources-sector workers”, but it is not. It would be if you did not have plans to replace jobs with equally high paying work, or if you did not realise that mining jobs are in decline in any case. As I’ve said before, there are almost no mining jobs in the mega-Adani mine.
I guess this refusal to go against mining corporations is Labor’s official position but it does not have to be. We do not have to destroy our ecology in order to give people good work, and interestingly the survey above states “blue-collar workers gain less meaning from their work than other people gain from theirs.” So they may not be enamoured of their jobs, just of having work and income. It may not be sensible to defend jobs which are both boring and dangerous.
Again, part of Labor’s problem may be that the workforce does see that Labor abandoned them when it introduced the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s and 90s which may well have led to stagnant wages, house price increases, increasing inequality, cut backs in services and so on. Certainly I could imagine that people might not think Labor had any solutions to these problems. His idea that “Hawke and Keating proved Labor can promote and defend these causes without walking away from our traditional base” is probably delusional.
He then promotes religion: “People of faith worshipping in Eltham expect the same respect and freedoms as those worshipping in Everton.” Strangely the survey quoted above reports blue collar workers are even less religious than most other Australians. So you may put your supposed base off by becoming more overtly religious and granting religious people privileges to interfere in other people’s lives on the grounds of religion – which is what the religious freedom debate seems to be attempting to do.
Finally “Labor has the policy wit to remain a leader on climate change policy while also supporting our coal miners and those who work in the petroleum sector.” Unfortunately this is just an aspiration; he gives no evidence for this assertion, and no inkling of what policies might be involved. He doesn’t even wave his hands about. This is a particular failing given the Black November/December fires, and it puts him on a level with the PM.
Labor needs to show that it understands the ecological precariousness of agriculture and water in this country, and how these are repeatedly threatened by mining, and how Labor is going to act without threatening numbers of jobs or incomes, and by providing new jobs.
Perhaps it could start trying.
Continued in What could the ALP have done better?
Tags: climate change, coal, politics
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