Extract from The Guardian
It is not helpful to coal workers in the Hunter to pretend that a transition isn’t happening and doesn’t need to happen
If you follow politics assiduously, I suspect you will have seen the speeches this week from Michelle and Barack Obama to the virtual Democratic national convention. If you haven’t seen them, take the time over the weekend to track down some video. It’s worth your time.
While there are a lot of terrible speeches in politics, and there are good speeches delivered by politicians who can’t quite inhabit and translate the words, the outings from the Obamas get top marks for both on craft and delivery. But this isn’t why I found them fascinating.
The most interesting thing about them in my view was the attempt to grapple with the challenges of persuasion in a nation so polarised that most people have stopped listening. Both speeches foregrounded this problem – the Obamas acknowledged that their words may not be persuasive because the country is at the barricades. There is so much shouting in America it is hard to know who is listening.
Implicit in the speeches was America was at risk of losing the capacity for productive disagreement – which is the foundation stone of any democracy – because Trump just wants conflict without the eventual synthesis of competing views. The current president thrives in discord.
This was what made the two speeches so memorable: the Obamas raised the stakes, they told Americans what was actually on the line. The pitch from the Obamas was remove Donald Trump not because he was a partisan enemy, but because he was corrosive to democracy, to deliberation, to facts and reason and sense. The call to action was believe the system can deliver if you care enough to exercise civic responsibility; if you want to resolve differences, which is the key to making progress, then vote and give America a chance to heal.
These pitches remind us just how serious this global moment is. They remind us that one of our best tools for dealing with the dangers of a pandemic and a global recession is to retain the capacity to have resolvable arguments. The alternative is great democracies roiling and then fracturing.
I confess I also felt some relief, watching from another hemisphere. Sure, we import culture wars from America, and the Fox News Mini-Mes on Sky News try and ramp up unhinging in the evening in the hope someone might tune in, or be outraged. Sure, #auspol can feel like a cauldron. Sure, the 24/7 news culture has turned politics into a cult of personality and a sporting match complete with live commentary. But in Australia, we are not at the desperate point the Obamas mapped out this week, and whether we lurch there is a matter entirely within our control.
So with this context firmly in mind, it was curious to see an Australian politician out in public, seemingly begging for differences to be irreconcilable. I’m thinking of the Labor man, Joel Fitzgibbon, who is intent on having a fight with his colleagues about whether the party’s policy offering is too progressive, with climate change policy the designated case in point.
Fitzgibbon wants to be seen as a front-running force in the Labor right, a person of influence, and the man who restored a wayward political party to sense, and the centre. But this week he escalated, suggesting Labor could split if intolerably progressive tendencies persisted. Granted there were several qualifications on this putative split: it wouldn’t happen any time soon and it might not happen at all. But “split” is not a word you invoke lightly, or accidentally, particularly in the context of Labor history.
There a few things to say about the Fitzgibbon offensive. The first is he has a valid point: Labor will not win the next election if working people keep voting for One Nation or Clive Palmer or the Coalition because they think Labor no longer represents their interests. The second is Fitzgibbon has tried to argue this case internally during the last two parliamentary terms, and feels people haven’t listened, so he thinks the only way to influence the play is to make a nuisance of himself – at least that’s what he’s telling colleagues. The third thing to say is it is healthy for political movements to ventilate their differences in public rather than stick to stultifying scripts. But motive obviously matters. More on this later.
While Fitzgibbon absolutely has a point about the necessity of meaningful rapprochement with workers, it would be seriously stupid for Labor to back off on climate action, given what the science says. Given this political party has spent a decade lining up on the right side of history (unlike the other major political party in Australia), it would also be politically insane. Deferring concrete action to deal with the “great moral challenge of our time” precipitated the collapse of Kevin Rudd’s prime ministership. Even if the science was somehow negotiable, the politics of any substantial pivot are diabolical for Labor.
It is not helpful to Fitzgibbon’s coal workers in the Hunter to pretend that a transition isn’t happening and doesn’t need to happen, and it is not helpful to Australia’s interests to leave our prosperity tied so substantially to fossil fuels when Australia has an opportunity to become a renewable energy powerhouse. If you care about blue-collar workers, you need to care about making this transition. Making this transition is about showing up for workers.
Climate change is an economic issue, not a matter of religious observance, or inner city high fashion. All the ridiculous language of “belief” and “scepticism” – as if climate science was astrology, or a cult, or a wellness guru – has been entirely unhelpful to progress. Labor is fully capable of putting workers at the centre of a plan for economic transformation which will see carbon-intensive industries scale back and other more sustainable industries prosper in a low carbon world. That’s how Bob Hawke would have framed climate and energy policy in the 2020s, and Hawke presided over one of the most successful Labor governments in the party’s history.
So to cut a long story short, the only way Labor will fracture on this issue is if competing forces within the political movement point blank refuse to find the obvious common ground. It will be a matter of choice, not necessity.
The other point that’s worth bearing in mind is Labor has been reconciling the very differences that Fitzgibbon is now intent on framing as irreconcilable since the 1960s. This is core business for Labor, not a new problem, which is why this week’s frolic from the member for Hunter caused intense frustration internally. As for splits, there’s already been one in the modern era. The Greens are Labor’s hard left flank. Last time I looked they were a separate political entity, taking a chunk of the progressive primary vote from the ALP.
Which leads us back to motive, and what the end game is. It’s been a difficult six months for Labor. Anthony Albanese talked about the complexities of being a constructive opposition during a global and national crisis with me last weekend. It is hard to punch on endlessly when most voters want governments to succeed. But internally, people are worried Labor has fallen off the political map, and worry that Scott Morrison is settling in for another two terms. Some wonder whether Albanese is the leader who can stop Morrison from establishing the Howard era mark two.
Fitzgibbon has been a long time Albanese backer. I see no sign that he’s part of any serious insurgency against the leader. I certainly see a bunch of rightwingers making sure they are visible, because politics is always an opportunity business, but I don’t see an agreement across the faction about any candidate to replace the incumbent in the event the party had an attack of the night terrors.
But when people like Fitzgibbon want to escalate issues that are eminently resolvable to the status of irreconcilable differences, when the fight and the posturing becomes the currency, it does makes you wonder.
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