Labor’s Joel Fitzgibbon leaves Parliament after a quarter of a century without, alas, much to show for it.
Gifted a safe seat by his father, for whom he’d worked as an electorate officer — though he did spend his early 20s in the real world rather than in politics — Fitzgibbon was elected to Cessnock Council in 1987 at 25 and took over as member for Hunter in 1996.
The Hunter was a bit different in the 1980s. Coal job numbers were still in the tens of thousands. Wine tourism was barely a thing — many Hunter wineries were still family owned and hadn’t yet been snapped up by corporations.
Hunter coal kept the lights on in New South Wales. Fitzgibbon quickly entered shadow ministerial ranks in the mining and energy portfolio but had to wait 11 years to reach the ministerial wing, carried in by Kevin Rudd’s 2007 win which saw him become defence minister.
In that role he was noteworthy for three things: being an early sceptic of the F-35 scheme; being the subject of an alleged intelligence operation in relation to his friendship with Chinese-Australian businesswoman Helen Liu; being the only Rudd minister to lose his spot when he resigned in relation to his brother Mark — the head of health insurer NIB — using Fitzgibbon’s office in the ministerial wing for lobbying.
By contemporary standards, Fitzgibbon’s offence looks positively innocuous, but Rudd had better standards of conduct than governments before or after him. It didn’t cruel their relationship — Fitzgibbon became one of Rudd’s chief lieutenants in the former PM’s incessant campaign of destabilisation against the Gillard-Swan government that opened the way to the Coalition’s rapid return to power in 2013.
After a near-death experience at the hands of One Nation in 2019, Fitzgibbon reemerged as a tribune of coal mining companies — these days mostly multinationals — urging Labor against climate action.
That created the unusual sight of Fitzgibbon being left behind not so much by inner-city greenies on fossil fuels, but by the NSW Coalition government, in which Environment Minister Matt Kean and the NSW Nationals ramped up regional investment in renewables, with the Hunter Valley targeted as a renewable energy zone rather than as a life support unit for the dying coal industry.
It thus seems the right time for Fitzgibbon to leave politics, possibly to explore other opportunities on offer in the fossil fuel sector.
He did his best to white-ant ALP emissions policy. Between that and his barracking for coal mining, he might as well have ben a Coalition Senator anyway. Good riddance.
It’s the best news in what has become a tedious news cycle. But aren’t Labor replacing him with a former miner?
He’ll be the best beard in Parliament since …ever.
Yes and that’s a good tactic
Coalition? Put him in One Nation.
Or fat Clive’s party.
I think he will go into the mining company scene, it’s where he belongs
He was practically a coal lobbyist no loss
Maybe that swing wasn’t about Labor policy, it was just Joel.
Former Labor cabinet ministers Greg Combet and Craig Emerson, both of whom took up advisory positions for Santos and AGL within months of leaving public office;
former leaders of the National Party, John Anderson, who became Chairman of Eastern Star Gas (bought out by Santos in 2014) and Mark Vaile, who became a non-executive director and chairman of Whitehaven Coal;
former Liberal Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, who is a board member of Lakes Oil and former board member of the Clive Palmer company, Resourcehouse Ltd;
former Liberal Premier of NSW, Nick Greiner, who acted as a lobbyist for a consortium of coal companies during the privatization of Queensland Rail.
Michael West
Perhaps the most notorious of revolving door incidents in recent times is Ian Macfarlane, former Federal Minister for Energy and Resources and self-confessed member of John Howard’s “Greenhouse Mafia”, who took up the role of CEO of the Queensland Resources Council within weeks of leaving his ministerial position
https://www.michaelwest.com.au/revolving-doors-how-the-fossil-fuel-lobby-has-governments-ensnared/
Downer was Foreign Minister who approved the Timor Est bugging and then joined Santos on leaving politics?
No suggestion of corruption or misuse of our security apparatus for private commercial ends then?
Woodside not Santos
Indeed and he was appointed a board member for Woodside for spying services rendered.
What are the chances of Joel re-entering politics, but in some sort of gonzo loony party made up of Sky After Dark types? Ross Cameron, Mark Latham, George Christensen, and maybe Mattie Canavan, if he could be persuaded to totally unleash his inner-ratbag without the (barely there) constraints of the Nationals? Also Bernardi, Finn, Credlin…a goon squad of Trumpian-proportions!
You don’t have to be a total nutjob to support coal in a coal mining electorate. Just shortsighted and unenterprising.
And gutless.
I would be surprised if that happened, I see Fitzthegibbon being feted by his Chinese influencers as per Andrew Robb style
Perfect timing. Goodbye, Joel, hello Kristina! Let’s just shift the drop zone so the good people of Fowler can have an MP who actually wants to represent them and who didn’t need to be shown where it was on the map, and the Hunter can get a nice, middle-class, white lady to help them understand climate change and the future…the universe does provide…
I’m not sure that the
fossilscoal miners of the Hunter would warm to a nice, middle-class, white lady, especially with a yankee accent.The coal miners of the Hunter now make up a small percentage of the electorate last time I saw it reported. Newcastle has moved on, the Hunter Valley is wine country who can’t stand the coal industry for the effect it has on grape growing. They’re a bit more diverse than that. I suspect that a lot of types of people would be a better fit than a coal lobbying local member.
Miners as a whole are a tiny proportion of the workforce but are still lauded as horny handed sons of toil…when it suits the suits on both ‘sides’.
Meanwhile their employers roll around on big piles of our subsidy money (the fuel excise exemption alone is a lazy couple of billions), pay SFA tax and a pittance as royalties.
Then we, the tax payer, again cop it in the neck for remedial actions, for the topography, the dust diseases, local environmental degradation, depletion of the aquifers and the general deterioration of our climate.
The sooner they take their holes elsewhere, the better.
I like Keneally but she would probably lose Hunter (from a Muswellbrook resident).
Keneally failed to win the swinging seat of Bennelong hence the ALP will never risk her on a 3% margin.
She also reduced her safe state set, Heffron, from 60%+ primary votes to scrambling for preferences.
The last election she “won” was in 2011, with swing against her of 15% – in an erstwhile stalwart Labor fiefdom.
The reason for her constant preferments, from her entry into politics despite her rise without trace and eventually into the Senate, is a Mystery for the Ages.
Or an investigative reporter, were that species not extinct.