Despite the left-media’s obsession that it is the only issue that matters, a succession of Australian governments have crashed on the rocks of climate policy. Successive surveys show that voters consistently rank climate as a fifth or tenth-order policy, well behind the bread-and-butter issues of employment, economy, health and education. The climate kiddies can scowl and wave their placards all they like, but voters live in the real world.
Kevin Rudd pontificated about “the great moral challenge of our time” and tried to over-tax the mining industry to pay for it – the blowback was one of the biggest factors in his ignominious downfall. Julia Gillard broke her day-before-the-election promise and brought in a carbon tax: game over, from the start. Malcolm Turnbull turned the Coalition teal and turned a landslide into near-defeat. Bill Shorten lost the election by pandering to the Greens over coal-mining.
Labor leader Anthony Albanese hasn’t learned a damned thing from any of it. Some of his colleagues are giving up trying to tell him.
Joel Fitzgibbon has quit shadow cabinet and will join the backbench, after months of public freelancing on climate policy.
And he says Anthony Albanese will win the next election if he listens to him and adopts a more restrained climate change policy.
Fitzgibbon is laying down the gauntlet and tacitly hinting at a leadership challenge.
Mr Fitzgibbon — who quit shadow cabinet on Tuesday — said he will run for his NSW mining seat of Hunter at the next election and would only ever challenge for the Labor leadership if he was to be drafted.
“I think Albo can win if he listens to Joel Fitzgibbon,” he said in Canberra.
And if he doesn’t listen? The threat is left clearly hanging.
Fitzgibbon can at least see what apparently the rest of his party will not: they’ve sold out their working-class history for thirty pieces of silver and a bowl of kale from the inner-city left.
Mr Fitzgibbon on Sunday said Left frontbenchers Mark Butler, Pat Conroy and Andrew Giles were “delusional” for arguing the US election showed ambitious climate change policies could be an electoral advantage[…]
He said he had been trying to rebuild the party and “deliver a Labor government”, according to caucus sources.
He said the party can’t expect people in the inner Melbourne seat of Cooper to vote the same as someone from central Queensland.
Fitzgibbon is also able to read what ought to be bleeding obvious from more than a decade of election results.
Labor’s Anthony Albanese’s leadership is under threat from potential challenger Joel Fitzgibbon. The BFD. Photoshop by Lushington Brady.
After resigning, Mr Fitzgibbon said Labor’s climate policies had been rejected at several elections and the party had done nothing to reduce carbon emissions.
“I think the Labor Party has spent too much time talking about things like climate change — which is an important issue — and not enough on issues important to our traditional base,” he said in Canberra.
“The Labor Party, since the 2013 election, has had, I suppose, at least two energy policies and two climate change policies. And I note that both of them had been rejected by the Australian people.
What’s the old saying about repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting a different result?
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