Well, if you’re going to start somewhere it may as well be Perth.
Anthony Albanese’s out-of-town tryout of a series of headland speeches went over well enough for a Tuesday matinee on the road. The idea was simple, but with a neat fold-over: Labor is the party of wealth and job creation, but one that’s committed to transitioning traditional industries to renewable energy. It’s a green new deal in all but name.
That’s not a bad first go, though such things will only go so far while Labor fails to address the core question: what, in 2020, is a Labo(u)r party for?
Is it a “hands off” jobs, wages and basic services minimalist party, which offers people more to spend as they wish? Or is it one which wants to offer people better ways to live: better designed and shaped cities, a responsive education system, a reconstruction of working life, real gender equality through parental leave and childcare, etc?
Prior to that there’s an even more fundamental conversation to have about what Australian society in 2020 actually is. Various Labor types — usually lifelong academics or apparatchiks — are throwing around terms like “blue collar” and “working class” as if these were simple, received categories (always absent, invoked and never self-represented). This needs deeper thought, especially if you propose to redesign worker protection around the appeal of the gig economy, as Albanese also proposed.
The proximate danger for Labor remains the simplistic atomised framework offered by its economistic Right. In their conception, a rational “offer” — coal, then solar — should be enough to win northern and regional voters. But these voters’ rejection of Labor has now become as much cultural as calculating.
In Queensland, yes, there are many workers supportive of new energies like solar. But there are also many who see the preference for solar over coal as representing something else: the passing into history of the industrial working class, and a distinctive way of life which is now not only being marginalised but disdained. The new world is directed towards automation; the knowledge class is marching in.
Paradoxically, the promise of coal then solar is not an exciting journey; it is asking these workers to conspire in their own cultural extinction and replacement. Faced with that, many will continue to prefer the Coalition’s messages of “have a go, get a go” and the “promise of Australia” — not an invitation to an exciting journey, but the political consecration of where, and who, you are.
One reason the Labor leadership is not yet fully awake to this paradox is that it still does not fully accept the key class division between itself and its supporters: being in command of knowledge, policy, information and culture, as opposed to being commanded by it, and subjected to it.
Witness Richard Marles’ recent, embarrassing musings on how his post-university beginnings as a lawyer for the TWU gave him an appreciation of, and closeness to, the lives of truck drivers. It’s hard to know which is more cringeworthy: believing that yourself, or believing that truck drivers would believe that.
The full truth is that Marles, a hereditary Labor grandee, went to the TWU after being president of the Melbourne University Student Union, at a time when union management positions were being filled by warriors of the Victorian Right’s pathetic sub-factional wars. Thousands of hours were spent on this — no doubt all on their own time — and the idea that union members didn’t notice this is delusional. Is Marles worried that someone might actually adopt Nick Dyrenfurth’s self-parodic suggestion — that a Labor party has affirmative action quotas for working-class members — and getting in an early bid?
Sadly, Marles’ brain-burp indicates that Albanese’s headland speeches will only go so far in remedying Labor’s problems. Getting a new map of class and culture in Australia would require dismantling the narcissism that makes real rethinking difficult and, of course, predisposes its leaders to snarling hostility when criticised.
Without such rethinking, I (and others) see no reason why the next election would not be a 2019 repeat: 76-80 for the Coalition, 64-68 for Labor, four to eight crossbench (unless the Nats collapse rurally), with much the same geographical spread. Federal Labor would then have won one and a half elections in 30 years. And, well, ah. A more searching process than a headland speech is required to avoid that.
But props to Albo for having a go. Now it’s time for the long trek across the Nullarbor. Maybe Marlesy will pick him up in his rig, blue singlet sweat-stuck to his chest, Waylon Jennings blasting from the quads, furry dice banging against the mirror. Ten-four, rubber ducky! We got ourselves a Conroy!
What did you think of Albo’s speech? Email boss@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name for publication.
So far, his speech is tldr. But got a link for it? Transcript preferably
Albo’s speech is an audio file, browse for it as “abcmedia podcast rnd_20191029_1806.mp3 “.
It sounds dreadful. He pauses in the middle of sentences and inserts ums and ahs between them, as if he expects to be interrupted. Someone needs to tell him that he must pronounce the “L” in “Australia”.
He has abdicated from Labor’s prime duty to lead Australia out of the carbon-based economy. Instead of promising coal truckers nonsense about “renewables jobs”, he should be telling them to pocket their wages as well as they can and get the hell out of there before it becomes illegal. Wishy-washy hippie nonsense about solar will cut no ice with them, when there is a clear undertext that gas must go too, taking out everything that depends on gas, including solar.
Give Albanese a break. You obviously don’t understand the difference between coking coal used in steel production and steaming coal used for power generation. Steel is a an alloy of carbon derived from coming coal and pug iron. There is no alternative to coking coal ar present and potential alternatives are energy intensive and and are not without green issues.
Alternatives
https://leard.frontlineaction.org/coking-coal-steel-production-alternatives/
As pointed out, it’s energy intensive, but you don’t have to use fossil fuels to make the electricity
Johnny, why the fuck should Albanese or Labor for that matter, get a break? At the election, in the Queensland seats where thermal (not coking) coal mining was a central issue, Labor tried to straddle a barbed wire fence with too-short legs, one of which was already committed to climate change responses. At the last minute, in the seat of Herbert (Townsville), Labor dumped anything vaguely greenish in its campaign and threw a right leg over the fence into the Galilee Basin Pledge which was an ode to coal mining and a grovel to the AWU and CFMMEU who, of course, controlled the pursestrings for the Labor candidate’s campaign funding. The blood is still on the tracks. Green voters walked straight across to the LNP leaving Labor hooked on the wire, down 5%. Whilst currently sliding up and down, Labor has to lift one of those legs back off the barbed wire – to save us all from the metaphor. Will it be the left one or the right one?
Rather than using an excess of coking coal, there are alternative ways of reducing steel from its ore. Traditional coke-fuelled blast furnaces consume about 7 tonnes of coal for every tonne of steel, including losses during coking and the incomplete oxidation implied by reduction. It is far from es’s sential as the traditional low-melting steels have less than 7% carbon. However the reduction itself can be performed with hydrogen or methane (as in SiroSmelt) or by electrolysis in a chloride electrolyte.
There is AT PRESENT no viable alternative to coking coal. Alternatives are therefore moot. Getting rid of coal fired power should be the first step. Let’s not do a GanGreens overreach as happened with the ETS. In the meantime please find other targets more worthy of vitriol
We can make excuses forever, but the kiddies have charged us with climate inaction. Making non-carbon processes available is a job for the universities, funded by government policy. Now is the time for Labor to be laying out that policy. Neither can we make the one-thing-at-a-time excuse; we should be setting dates for the elimination of all our carbon-based fuels.
What? No one pronounces the ‘L’ in Austraya.
No one doesn’t ironically pronounce the l
“Rock ‘n roll I gave you all the best years of my life …..”
Another excellent article, Guy. Is it too much hope that some people in the Labor Party hierarchy might read it?
The central Queensland coalfield workforce has another albatross hanging over it: FIFO. Fly in – fly out is a way of life for so many there now and will be central to the development of the Galilee Basin; there is a huge labour camp and soon an airport being built at the Adani mine site and there will be much more to come. FIFO is shithouse for working families but no one will talk about it. It’s a valid point you make, Guy, about the Labor leadership having little connection to the “blue collar” workers who apparently vote for them, or used to before Pauline and Clive and Katter gave them something else to look at. If Labor isn’t very, very careful it will lose touch with its greenish ‘base’. Although I s’pose there is an element of FIFO in the parliamentary workforce – politicians have some idea but they won’t be going there.
Oh come on Guy. Find a new target. Labor has to electable for things to change. Joining the hard left stalwarts won’t achieve anything. I believe Qld will turn on the Scummo and the LNP as they did with Can Do Newman. There are plenty of seats to be won and providing a transition policy that makes social and economic sense will get them elected
How am i suggesting they join the hardleft stalwarts? Ive said they need to have a deeper conversation about what they think class society is, and what they should advocate. Didnt say where tgat should land