Labor pains

What if? Loaded with wistful regret and dashed dreams, it’s a question that can’t be pushed entirely aside as the hard-headed analyses trickle into Jay Weatherill and Craig Emerson’s review of federal Labor’s shock election loss in May.

After all, it’s a question that still occupies half the nation. Had Labor triumphed and kept to even a portion of its platform, Australia’s future would look rather different. Aboriginal people in the north could have contemplated the end of demeaning work-for-the-dole tasks, like collecting litter. There’d be some prospect of affordable dental treatment. The future would be slightly less unequal, as the new government began to claw back redistributions favouring the wealthy. And Australia might have eventually been something other than the crony-capitalist global climate pariah it is now.

Or so we’re told. The reality is that Labor’s confusion over climate policy and specific polluting projects did not begin as the promised swings failed to materialise during the evening of May 18. For the whole campaign Labor was notoriously “on the fence” regarding the Adani coalmine, a project that any party committed to emissions-reduction goals would immediately reject.

Deputy Labor leader Richard Marles is set to deliver a speech this evening that is unlikely to clear anything up. The senior member of Victoria’s Right faction will reportedly tell the John Curtin Research Centre that his party lost voters by offering blue-collar workers “handouts rather than hope” when it “agonised over every word during press conferences on what at its heart was the business case of a private mining venture”. The contradictions inherent in Marles’s analysis reflect Victorian Labor’s secret submission to Weatherill and Emerson’s inquiry, which apparently advocated for greater policy devolution to state branches. Just what this would have meant for the party’s position on Adani is unclear, especially given Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s rush to approve the mine following the federal election loss.

With its historical, ideological and organisational roots in the labour movement, Labor will always be vulnerable to the accusation that it isn’t prioritising jobs enough. And mining jobs, even when comparatively few, are apparently worth more than tourism industry, renewable energy and even pastoral jobs, no doubt owing to the respective union coverage rates of those industries and to views held within the most powerful unions, namely the Australian Workers’ Union and the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union. Although there remains spirited disagreement within them, the unions of our time are a long way from delivering any green bans.

It’s difficult to find any sustained analysis of class, capital and the state in Australia’s unions, or in the parliamentary party with which most of them remain affiliated. Labor’s democratic-socialist objective remains in its constitution, but in practice informs little of its social analysis and few of its policies.

As a result, Labor is perennially unable to articulate to itself – let alone to unions, or to voters – why aligning itself entirely with the interests of a major coalmine in the vicinity of the Great Barrier Reef operated by a multinational with a disturbing labour rights record might not be such a great idea. Opposition agriculture and resources spokesperson Joel Fitzgibbon wants his party to stop fighting these battles at all, advocating yesterday for Labor to admit defeat and simply adopt the Coalition’s emissions targets.

As the Climate Accountability Institute this week names the 20 fossil-fuel companies that together are responsible for a full third of global carbon emissions, and Greg Jericho reminds us that nobody under the age of 34 has ever experienced a month of below-average temperatures, the question to ask is whether Labor can ever be part of the solution to this most wicked and most catastrophic of all problems.

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