It’s essential that every government initiative, if it is to succeed, has clear targets. The Morrison government’s Hunter Valley gas plan has a clear target: Joel Fitzgibbon, the embattled member for Hunter, whose once safe seat is now marginal after a 21% vote for One Nation last year.
Fitzgibbon is fighting for his life — and his honour. Hunter is a Labor legacy, held uninterrupted since 1910 by Doc Evatt and two Labor father-son teams: the Jameses and the Fitzgibbons. To avoid being the bloke who lost this dusty jewel in the crown, Fitzgibbon has become a de facto independent within the Labor fold, running a relentless war against Labor policy on coal, renewables etc.
Labor could expel or deselect him, but it won’t of course. It’s the usual one-two. Fitzgibbon goes off, playing to the Valley, Labor chastises him, playing to the big city ‘burbs, and on it goes. Eventually this becomes normalised, and might even be a better way of dealing with Labor’s geographical divide than its pre-2019 idea of having Bill Shorten say one thing on coal in Townsville and another in Northcote, as if the telegraph had not yet been developed.
So there’s every advantage for the Coalition in leaning on it. It marks a new stage — or a new stage in the new stage — of its transformation. Landing a state-funded gas boondoggle anywhere would please its corporate donors. Landing it in the Hunter pushes the split between Fitzgibbon and Labor’s leadership. Fitzgibbon duly announced his support and urged Labor to get behind it. What else could he do, realpolitik-wise?
But of course it was perfectly timed to queer Labor’s pitch as it attempted to get away from an emissions reduction-led policy to a production-side one. Labor has adopted the notion of Australia as a “renewable energy superpower” and net exporter, suggested by Ross Garnaut and others, and was just swinging its guns round to this when the Coalition launched its gas attack.
As numerous commentators have noted, the initiative marks a new high point in Coalition hypocrisy about free markets, small government, “backing winners” etc.
The idea of buying up the wheezing, dying Liddell Power Station was one thing (Abbott typically over-egged it by saying troops should be sent in to operate it, which rather detracted from the “jobs” message). Creating a whole sector which displaces investment in greener, more efficient equivalents is something else.
There’s no need to ask whether such a policy is donor-driven or image-driven, because it’s both. It’s a further subordination of economic policy to culture wars, which in turn pays off via an increasingly strong relation with a narrow range of corporate donors. The Coalition is not going to suddenly do a leapfrog and become a client of big sun and big wind. The fact that this is unimaginable is a measure of how cultural- and class-defined the politics of energy are.
Yes, it’s the knowledge class again! Pencils at the ready cos this will be on the exam.
OK, when you live in an industrial society dominated by the two classes organised around wages and capital, the relationship between politics and scientific transformation is constrained within those classes — and it’s the organised working class that is often most supportive, because things like hydro dams etc offer new types of power that will help lift us out of capitalist relations and low wages.
It’s the bourgeoisie who want to restrain techno development, to control the falling rate of profit.
When you get a post-industrial economy and society based on rapidly transforming new tech, the political divide changes from the economic to the techno-cultural.
The big economic question is over — Labor won’t offer the socialisation of the 50 largest corporations — and so a struggle for recognition between the old working (and middle) classes and the rising knowledge class takes place.
What represents and signifies and extends the power of the knowledge class is the abstract capacity of science. For knowledge class people the idea of solar power — that its yield rate keeps climbing from repeated redesign, that energy comes from invisible abundance — is exciting and class-affirming. For some working people it may be the opposite: it’s a black box technology that abolishes work, and a way of being in the world through working, largely of an embodied physical character.
It reminds millions of people that they are now surplus to requirements.
So in this class-culture struggle, the settings switch. It is the working and some middle classes who come to identify with relatively more concrete activities — digging or piping stuff out of the ground — against the “exciting” world of new technologies.
Look across the world — at Trump, at Brexit, at the new right in Europe — and you’ll see that the great political divide is between the concrete and the abstract. The right understand this, even if it doesn’t have the language for it; the left does not, and it will continue to lose on such terrain until it learns a whole new way of thinking about it.
One hi-tech “bid” after another ain’t gonna do it; it’s a failure to understand the several things that pushing brown industries appeals to. The right comes into crisis with this politics — witness Trump on COVID and Brexit now — but that of itself will not bring it down.
Labor can only be the party of the big picture against such nihilistic politicking by posing the rational alternative. One sympathises with Fitzgibbon, but the light on the hill has to rise higher than the lit fart in the valley.
Garnaut’s “renewable energy superpower” plan doesn’t have to be abstract – it’s about manufacturing as well as energy. We don’t have to generate invisible electrons and send them off to other countries by mysterious abstract means – we can use them locally to make stuff and the export the stuff! (Or even use it ourselves to, say, build social housing.) Labor needs to be talking about this all day every day to anyone who will listen.
Guy has simultaneously verballed Labor as having no interest in traditional workers and then perpetuated the Co-alition deceit that renewable energy means less jobs than coal and gas. By Guy’s logic the ‘knowledge class’ would have stopped work on the discovery of pencillin because the people employed to empty sputum pans were worried about their job security. Last time I looked there was no shortage of work in the modern health sector and after COVID there’ll be even more.
No, i’m not against renewables. I dont think Labor has no interest in traditional workers. Im saying that selling solar etc is a cultural problem, and if you think there’s not a cultural dimension to all of this…well, that’s why Labor keeps losing the regional working class.
Yes, coal and gas arent going to provide many jobs, with mine automation. But people still think they do. And renewables, if they work well, are less labour intensivr. You dont have to keep digging up the sun…
FFS, “..renewables, if they work well, are less labour intensivr.”
Wrongedy wrongly wrong.
The point of real renewables is that they are relatively simple, small and endlessly adaptable, expandable and always improvable – by the people using them.
A knowledge class, as it were.
yes, and employ less workers than coal mines once did. they may be capable of mass distribution, but thats not a full time job is it?
Apart from “..employ
lessworkers” – that would be ‘fewer‘, you are stating a plain falsehood.Assuming that you cannot be so ignorant/uninformed the mendacity must be deliberate.
The one uncontested point it is that small scale, alt-tech, by definition results in more people employed at every stage.
no, yr missing the point Carolyn. I mean part of the appeal of coal and gas is that you dig it out of the ground. It has a symbolic power that the Coalition understands. The abstract character of solar is that it occurs at the atomic level, is collected using black box technology, which scientific oriented types – including labor activists – feel at home with, and many other people dont. The failure to recognise this cultural dimension, and divide, is why Labor makes one political error after another
That is an appallingly inaccurate,never mind condescending, non-answer to a very reasonable point.
There’s nothing black box about solar nor wind power generation – anyone half handy with a spanner can run, repair and, soon, create even cheaper,simpler, more robust micro installations.
Which WILL NOT rely upon your concrete cohort who only see the real world from their chi-chi double glazed a/c urban shoeboxes.
Its not condescending, it’s just a reply. Yr still missing the point. Of course solar is black box in that very few people know exactly how a solar cell works, at the sub-atomic level. You can burn coal in a grate. You dig it out of the ground. You see it come out.
You seem to have misunderstood my abstract/concrete division if you think the ‘concrete cohort’ are the ones in the chi-chi apartments. That’s the abstract knowledge class
Solar cells are made from sand that you dig up and melt in big factories (OK, those are mostly in China and Korea at the moment).
Wind farms are made from steel and other pieces of skilled manufacturing work, delivered by enormous trucks and installed with cranes and spanners, and are as obvious in their operation as can be. There’s no magic “abstraction” going on there.
To make the abstract/concrete division convincing, you need to explain why both are equally hard sells, in those regions.
We stopped digging asbestos up when we discovered it was bad for us. We can stop digging up coal too.
As in detached from reality, you mean? Nb: “abstracted”
Agree with Carolyn: there’s plenty of scope (especially with the hydrogen and amonia plans) for making stuff that has to be shipped to its (foreign) destination in actual ships, or pumped to more local destinations. That ought to appeal.
Throw in cheap renewable-powered aluminium and steel smelting, and production and manufacturing industries downstream of that and you’ve surely got a bankable winner?
Of course even electric cars need replacement tyres, aftermarket chrome wheels, spoilers, decals, fluffy dice and what-not…
“Of course even electric cars need replacement tyres…” – except those new-fangled flying types 😉
Yes, but once again you miss the point magnificently. What you find exciting and dynamic, many people find challenging, exlcusionary and a source of fear for their future. So they vote Coalition, or Trump in the midwest.
And, when/if you figure out ‘HOW‘ to appeal to such types – presumably by ditching all notions that may upset their tiny-minded, precariously balanced, equanimity – you might want to consider ‘WHY‘ you would want them inside the big tent, damaging the carpet with their knuckles.
Why not go for the religious vote as well?
Equally rational & functional.
well, no, they’re not knuckle-draggers. they’re sections of the traditional working and middle class who are cut out of the knowledge/science loop.
Absolutely Labor should go after the religious vote as well.
Your last line sez it all.
what, that many australians are religious and you cant ignore them? that labor was built on the Catholic vote? that treating all religious people as xtreme happy clappies is inner city elitism at its worst? yep, says it all
And didn’t that work out well, state aid to church schools, chaplain scam continued by atheist Gillard, Shoppies’ Bullock crushing SSM for years, yeah let’s have more religion, the ultimate irrationality.
Say good night Gracie and leave the dying to bury the dead.
Spot the classist ALP broekens in the replies lol
I know I shouldn’t be feeding the troll by replying, but this is a spectacularly bigoted comment. How do you think we should deal with workers whose industries are rendered redundant by technological/structural advances? Take them out the back and euthanise them all?
Try showing them – “the Vision Splendid, of the Sunlit Plains extended, and at Night the Wondrous Glory of the Everlasting Stars” – wayyy better than the moonscape of the Hunter hinterland.
There are multifarious alternatives for those who eschew grundle’s No Ledge clache but it would require moving beyond the soy latte belt.
I recommend that you try leaving behind the concrete & cafes… when/if C19 permits travel.
You were the one claiming that the working-reactionaries only respected stuff that could be kicked or shunted in pipes. I was pointing out that you can do both of those things and still have renewables. And the big factories that come with it. For the people who insist on diging in the ground, we have plenty of non-carbon opportunities there too: iron, aluminium, lithium, uranium if you squint. If you’re providing them with more and better-paying jobs of exactly the sort that they’re used to, what is there for them to complain about?
How am I missing the point, exactly? Must be particularly dense today.
No you are not missing the point but Rundle’s point is that comprehensive perspectives, such as yours, are not commonplace : anything but in fact.
Two simple things you’re missing:
So really what Labor have to do is to remind the good people of the Hunter Valley that they once made stuff as well as digging it up. Newcastle was a centre of manufacturing railway carriages before the state government decided it was cheaper to outsource them to other countries, with predicable problems https://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/nsws-2-billion-new-trains-are-too-wide-to-get-through-tunnels/news-story/47bd2ee36f43cd3cdd2819078feb6011
Maitland was a centre for wool processing, spinning & weaving until We sent our wool to China for processing, losing quality on the way.
There are sound environmental reasons to go “back to the future” with clean power.
Agreed. Electric vehicles are another area where the old-style working class is at odds with the knowledge class. There are a myriad working-class jobs tied up with supporting the internal combustion engine that would either disappear or be sharply reduced in number if Australia suddenly moved to electric vehicles: everything from automotive mechanics to the people who work in car parts distribution around the country.
All this would be well and good if the survival of all classes wasn’t on the line from climate crisis.
I think there may be a third class, though. The super-rich financial class. This differs from the old wealthy capitalist class, because most of their wealth is held in binary form within computers, rather than in brick-and-mortar capital.
You are correct in so much as the rank-and-file of the Union movements, or what is left of it, have no real appreciation of what is going on in the world around them.
Exactly like the majority of voters elect governments who work against their own interests, they vote the Union Apparchiks into power based on entirely false premises.
For millenia, the mainstream of working society has been misled by avoided truths, half truths and outright lies.
That “There is nothing new under the Sun” is most apposite when it comes to manipulation of the masses.
It’s not that they have no idea what’s going on – it’s what level of ‘social action’ they are trained to, comfortable in. If you work in material physical things, only got an OK high school education, and have no way into high-tech work, the new renewables stuff will feel distant, obscure, and not in your interests
Spoken like a person who has never belonged to a union (except maybe during some half-remembered teenage retail job). And I bet you feel really clever about it, as though that makes you some kind of independent thinker, when you’ve actually spent your entire life blithely enjoying the fruits of the labour movement’s victories.