5
MAKE REGIONAL VARIATIONS WORK FOR YOU, NOT AGAINST YOU
Things are unbearably tense in the cave of the devastated loser. You radiate waves of angst. The outermost shell is still shattered disbelief, but people sense the inner emotions rolling their way to the surface, like punches waiting to be unleashed: outrage at criticisms of your own performance, a sense of desertion at the way key frontbenchers let you and the party down with theirs, bitterness at the way you were suckered and simultaneously incontinent on policy, fury at the polling you (yes, okay, selectively) believed, and which turned out to be systematically wrong. You sense people are wary of your seething misery and barely contained rage. You slowly make your way to the mouth of the cave and look out at the political landscape. Temporarily blinded by the light you can’t see the full picture, locate all your people. Your eyes adjust, but you still can’t see everyone. You reach for the binoculars and look up to the north, and then across to the west. Where are they? Where are your Queensland and Western Australian MPs? Then it grips you, your guts clenching at the realisation. Hardly any of your candidates there got elected. Queensland and Western Australia are like two vast paddocks virtually emptied of Labor politicians.
We live in an era of divides, of political polarisation. This is not new. Throughout history despots, dictators and imperialists have dealt in the hateful business of ‘divide and rule’, as have lower forms of politicians in democracies. However, it is a choice.
The Liberals’ John Howard may have won four elections dog-whistling on race, but Labor’s Bob Hawke won four elections built on the foundations of Labor’s ‘national reconciliation, national recovery, national reconstruction’ principles, proving you can reject the politics of division and still mightily succeed.1 Between Hawke and Howard was Prime Minister Paul Keating, one of Manning Clark’s ‘enlargers’ battling history’s ‘punishers’ and ‘straighteners’, who won a memorable long-odds victory in 1993 over Liberal leader John Hewson and his neoliberal Fightback! policy agenda.2 So successful electoral politics need not rely on practising the hateful politics of division. This is crucial knowledge to cling to during protracted periods when the needle on the political spectrum seems stuck somewhere between inflamed and incendiary.
Australia’s foundational politics is built on ‘divide and rule’, of course: devastatingly so in the conquest of Indigenous Australians by British colonisers, the consequences of which successive governments have yet to respond to adequately, though some had tried with far better heart than others, to put it mildly. Since white settlement, politicians ranging from the ignorant to the cynical and unscrupulous have manufactured and traded on fractures along race, religion, culture, gender, sexuality, city versus country, right versus left, north versus south, and east versus west lines – ridiculously, even Sydney versus Melbourne lines, which led to the establishment of Canberra, between the two cities, as Australia’s national capital.
These politically motivated ‘otherings’ have their own historical specificities. ‘Us and them’ politics is cheap and potent for its perpetrators in the short term, and traumatic for those targeted, as well as harmful in the long run to the nation’s soul.
The damage horizon of ‘divide and rule’ politics has risen drastically in the Anthropocene – the current human-influenced geological era – as evidenced by changes in the Earth’s atmospheric, geologic, hydrologic, biospheric and other systems.3 The fate of Earth as we know it is tilting under the weight of the sheer number of humans occupying it, the exponentially intensifying consumption flowing from that, and the failure of nation-states to agree on action to avert global ecological catastrophe. If we cannot get beyond ‘divide and rule’ politics on this issue at least we are all doomed, literally. Is it worth the risk?
As divisive as Australian politics can be, there have also been periods of significant improvement, including, for example, emancipating the right to vote from privilege derived from property ownership, gender and race. This has often happened earlier here than outside the antipodes. Further, Australia’s ‘one vote, one value’ electoral system, combined with compulsory voting, gives us a fairer and more representative parliament than most, though there is vast room for improvement.
The underrepresentation of women on the conservative side of politics, for example, drags down the Australian parliament’s gender diversity overall.4 That most MPs are still straight, white men speaks to the wider diversity challenge to which all parties must rise.
An especially urgent concern is the rise of ‘stupid’ as a characteristic of too much politics – a development that has a clear international context.
The 2000 US presidential defeat of Al Gore by George W Bush was a troubling historical moment which presaged much current politics in the west. Bush’s presidency is remembered mostly for the Iraq War but deserves as much, if not more, attention for blocking Gore, a committed environmentalist, from office in an election which, if not for court decisions around dubious idiosyncrasies in the US electoral system, Gore would have won.
Queer theorist Jack Halberstam marks George W Bush’s run for the presidency as the moment US voters began to be ‘enamored with the heroic couplet of men and stupidity’.5 Bush ‘made a populist version of stupidity into a trademark,’ Halberstam said, ‘and sold himself to the public as a down-home guy, a fun BBQ pal, a man’s man, a student privileged enough to go to Yale but “real” enough to only get Cs – in other words, an inarticulate, monolingual buffoon who was a safe bet for the White House because he was not trying to befuddle an increasingly uneducated populace with facts, figures, or, god forbid, ideas’.6
Setting out to identify the appeal of male stupidity in the US and explain why it is no bar to power, Halberstam found it repeatedly represented as disarming, charming, comforting and innocent: ‘Male stupidity masks the will to power that lies just behind the goofy grin … [and] is in fact a new form of macho’.7 Herein lies the ‘daggy dad’ persona Scott Morrison, a professional marketing executive, consciously crafted for his prime ministership.8 It is part of the same ‘divide and rule’ politics that has US President Donald Trump rapturously declare, ‘I love the poorly educated’.9
The ANU Australian Election Study has surveyed political attitudes and behaviour in detail in Australia for over 30 years, exploring how and why people vote as they do. It notes that state differences in support for the major political parties have traditionally been important in determining election outcomes in Australia.10 Mostly the differences ‘reflect variations in the socioeconomic characteristics of the various states rather than differences related to the state itself’, the study said, with the larger rural base of Queensland and Western Australia tending to create more support for conservatives during the decades covered by the survey.
Underlining Queensland’s critical role in Labor’s 2019 loss, the Australian Election Study highlighted a swing to the Morrison Government there of 4.3 per cent, nearly four times the overall national swing. Labor lost two Queensland seats to the government instead of picking up the clutch it needed to win office. It pointed to a couple of factors hurting Labor in Queensland: the high vote for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party and Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party (UAP), which mostly flowed to the government after the distribution of preferences, and Queensland mining communities’ hostile reaction to the Greens’ Stop Adani Convoy of climate activists, which travelled during the election from the south up through Brisbane and into regional Queensland protesting against the Adani coal mine.11
Labor’s own election review pointed to its appalling primary vote in Queensland (26.7 per cent) and Western Australia (29.8 per cent) creating a situation where the party now holds only 11 of those states’ combined total of 46 seats.12 The Labor review also noted the party now holds only one in five Queensland seats (six of 30 seats), and won only one Senate position at the 2019 election in its worst result since the current Senate voting system was established in 1949.
Further, it points out the historical fact that Labor usually needs to win in Queensland to form government: five of the last seven times Labor has won elections, it won a majority of seats there, most recently at Queenslander Kevin Rudd’s 2007 win when Labor acquired 15 of 29 Queensland seats.13 Jim Chalmers is the most senior Queenslander on the current opposition frontbench and is widely seen as a future Labor leader. His greater prominence since the 2019 election, after which he assumed the shadow treasury role, can only help the Queensland vote.
Admittedly, things have been bad in Queensland for Labor before. After the Dismissal election in 1975 Labor held just one Queensland seat. There is no reason to believe Labor’s Queensland or Western Australia problems are permanent, but they will not be fixed by magical thinking. They require careful study, creativity and application to solve.
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It is easy – too easy – to take the ‘variations in the socioeconomic characteristics of the various states’, as the Australian Election Study respectfully puts it, and juxtapose it with the high Hanson One Nation and Palmer UAP votes in Queensland, and conclude Queensland voters are, well, less than smart. Such a conclusion would itself be stupid. If that comment annoys you, you will have experienced a glimmer of the resentment Queenslanders feel at the rest of Australia’s attitude to them much of the time.
The ‘State differences’ part of the Australian Election Study includes a ‘Threat of global warming by state’ graph.14 It shows that of Australia’s eight states and territories, the four where the Morrison Government’s primary vote was lowest (the Australian Capital Territory, Tasmania, the Northern Territory and Victoria) were those which rated highest the threat of global warming as ‘very serious’ or ‘fairly serious’. However, the climate denialist Morrison Government cannot take undue comfort from the rest of the chart. A majority of people in the four states where the government’s primary vote was highest consider the threat of global warming as ‘very serious’ or ‘fairly serious’ too: New South Wales and Western Australia (69 per cent), South Australia (64 per cent) and even Queensland (59 per cent). Herein lies hope.
Queensland voters are not dumb. They exist in a context with particular worries, some of which have different time horizons from other kinds of voters. If you are an ‘economically insecure, low-income’ Queensland voter who does not follow politics – a group which swung particularly hard against Labor in 2019 – you may well worry more about how to pay your rent and car costs this coming fortnight than about rising sea levels 30 years hence. You share this worry with voters like you elsewhere in Australia; it is just that there are rather more voters like you proportionally in Queensland than in most other states.
Queensland voters, like Western Australian voters, can resent what they perceive as condescension from southerners and people ‘over east’ respectively. Not infrequently that resentment is justified. If you want people to be part of a national solution to a global problem like climate change, for example, backing them into a corner and deriding them as dumb is not going to get them there.
The Adani coal mine was not Labor’s only problem in Queensland but lay at its heart.15 The Labor election review found that ‘Labor’s ambiguity on Adani contributed to its loss in coal mining regions’. It sent a message to voters in parts of regional Queensland and also the Hunter Valley in New South Wales that Labor ‘did not value them or the work they do’. This problem was magnified by the Greens’ Stop Adani Convoy which, while not of Labor’s making, highlighted Bill Shorten’s fencesitting position relative to the government’s unequivocal support and the Greens’ unequivocal opposition.16
‘While Labor’s position of requiring the project to secure environmental approvals before it would support it was not unreasonable, given its doubts about the viability of the mine,’ Labor’s election review found, ‘it was difficult to sustain this nuanced policy in what had become a highly emotive debate.’17 The ‘nuanced’ position was logically defensible, but the kind a responsible government, rather than an opposition hungry for office, would take. This was consistent with Labor’s government-in-waiting mindset rather than thinking like a sharp opposition working feverishly to gain every possible winnable seat.
Think about Queensland for a moment. Coal is perceived as a major industry and big employer. The reality is contested. Supporters see the jobs, many of them extremely highly paid, in places with few employment alternatives. Opponents argue that apart from the initial construction phase, coal mines provide few jobs – jobs that are in any case about to be wiped out by robotics.
The robotic transformation of the Western Australian iron ore industry began years ago. The Western Australian mines of BHP, Rio Tinto and Fortescue Mining have hundreds of driverless trucks, and Fortescue expects to have the first fully autonomous haulage fleet in the world this year.18 BHP has 20 autonomous drills operating across its Western Australian iron ore mines. Rio has driverless trains hauling iron ore hundreds of kilometres from its Pilbara mines to ports, all controlled from a NASA mission control–style office 1500 kilometres away in Perth. The first fully robotic mine is estimated to be just five years away.19
Now robotics are coming to the Queensland coal industry. BHP announced in late 2019 the introduction of autonomous trucks at its Goonyella coal mine in Queensland’s Bowen Basin.20 The writing is on the wall for Queensland coal mining jobs of the kind that exist today. New Queensland mining industry jobs will increasingly be for data scientists and desk jockeys in air-conditioned city offices like Rio Tinto’s control centre in Perth – a totally different world.
What has this got to do with the 2019 election?
Queensland coal miners, their families and the communities who rely on their spending live in an anxious world. It is a race as to which brings them down first: the climate change activists wanting to shut their mines or the company bosses replacing them with robots.
Straddling the barbed-wire fence like Bill Shorten did on Adani – wanting it both ways and instead ending up in the worst of both worlds (like British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn disastrously did on Brexit, see page 33) – was never going to work. Closing your eyes, hoping no one notices you straddling the fence, praying you don’t lose any vital appendages, is not a strategy. The pain you experienced was a signal to find a better position.
If anxious and angry mining families and communities are coming at you from one side, and furious climate change activists are charging at you from the other, you need to immerse in the situation – really work it – to develop a solution that can stick. Not just for the span of the election campaign but which transforms the situation and shows the way forward in other fraught situations with similar underlying issues. The Adani conflict pits sunset industrial era development and jobs on the one hand, and sunrise information era development and jobs on the other, against the need for action now to ensure the planet survives and thrives. No one escapes the transition. The question is how well we make that transition. It is a Queensland issue, a national issue and a global issue.
Adani as a specific conflict needed to be addressed on the ground in Queensland as part of long, personal, sustained engagement with the people and problems involved. It presented a massive opportunity to show leadership – an opportunity that could not be pursued in a fly-in, fly-out, visiting politician kind of way.
The threshold task was for people to be listened to, on both sides of the argument. Just being heard and having your views acknowledged is a powerful thing, as anyone involved in mediation will tell you. Once people feel they have been heard – really heard – and given an opportunity to express deeply felt emotions on a fraught issue, then you have a chance to make headway on developing a position that everyone may not love, but is workable and better than the alternative – and which in this case has pathways to future jobs at its centre.
Pause to consider the alternatives in the case of coal mining in Queensland. Dominant elements of the Liberal and National parties would be happy to open cut mine the whole state. The Greens want to shut every coal mine right away. The latter has no chance of happening and the former has every chance of occurring unless Labor develops a quality, sustainable position on future versions of the Adani problem, and wins office and implements that policy.
It is Labor’s problem to solve. The Adani divide is mirrored within Labor itself. If the party reaches a robust agreed internal position bridging sunset industrial era development and jobs to sunrise information era development and jobs consistent with planetary survival and thriving, it will be unified, electable and ready to govern well. Like the Hawke Government did in the 1980s, involve the relevant unions in crafting the forward path. Given the robotics revolution about to be rolled out across the Queensland coal industry by companies keen to rub out well-paid workers, the Construction Forestry Maritime Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) ought to be vitally interested in creating a strong, well-funded transition package for its members out of fossil fuel jobs and into future jobs. You can get ahead of the wave or you can have it crash on your head and get dumped. Getting ahead of the wave is obviously preferable.
Labor has successfully managed smaller scale versions of similarly divisive conflicts involving development and the environment before: opposing the damming of the Franklin River in Tasmania, settling on a ‘no new mines’ uranium policy and creation of the original Murray–Darling Basin Plan are a few examples. Labor has in the past, and can again, walk and chew gum at the same time. People who vote Labor, or who might do so in the future, can too.
Labor can craft solutions rural and regional voters as well as urbanites alike can accept as imperfect but fair, and better than the alternatives. The demonstration effect of turning regional variations to advantage rather than getting politically skewered by them is powerful. It shows a capacity for good government. It takes skilled, confident, patient and determined leadership to get it done. It is homework that cannot be dodged if you want to win an election.