by That’s how a Labor partisan on Twitter described my criticism in Independent Australia of Labor’s strategy of avoiding any policy difference with the Morrison government, and shutting down all discussion of the climate catastrophe until they get around to announcing a policy for the 2022 election. The one exception I noted (and the one that incited this response) was support for the coal industry. As I noted Rather than offer a climate policy in response to the catastrophic bushfires of the last summer, Labor took the view that ‘the immediate focus should be on firefighters battling the blazes, people at risk and those grieving lost loved ones’. While scoring points on scandals like the sports rorts and cynically exploiting of divisions within the Government, Labor has put
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That’s how a Labor partisan on Twitter described my criticism in Independent Australia of Labor’s strategy of avoiding any policy difference with the Morrison government, and shutting down all discussion of the climate catastrophe until they get around to announcing a policy for the 2022 election. The one exception I noted (and the one that incited this response) was support for the coal industry. As I noted
Rather than offer a climate policy in response to the catastrophic bushfires of the last summer, Labor took the view that ‘the immediate focus should be on firefighters battling the blazes, people at risk and those grieving lost loved ones’. While scoring points on scandals like the sports rorts and cynically exploiting of divisions within the Government, Labor has put forward hardly a word of criticism of the Morrison Government’s policy position, let alone any alternative.
There have, however, been a couple of exceptions to this pattern of near-invisibility. First, Labor has made it clear that coal mining is here to stay and that the future of coal-fired power will be left to “the market”. Second, while displaying intense solicitude for those voters who switched their support to Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, Labor has engaged in co-ordinated and ferocious attacks on the Greens.
My article mainly focuses on the point that Labor can’t assume that it will have a reliable majority in Parliament, and therefore shouldn’t engage in partisan warfare with Greens and independents with whom deals will need to be made in future. But I’d like to discuss the whole “wait until 2022” thing a bit more.
No one expects an Opposition party to have a detailed election program at all times, and it’s unsurprising that Labor would want to reconsider some issues in the light of the 2019 loss. But I’ve never seen anything like the argument coming out of the Labor party that, since they aren’t in government, they shouldn’t be expected to have policies on anything, and shouldn’t vote against regressive and disastrous government policies. Even more striking is the corollary that the only decent thing to do about the climate disaster is to sit quietly and then vote for whatever policy Labor comes up with in two years time.
Maybe I was spoiled by several years in which that notoriously post materialist liberal enviro elitist, Bill Shorten, actually proposed policy, but I can’t remember any Opposition, from either side of politics, being as lame as this one. It’s fortunate, perhaps, the Morrison government is so incoherent and incompetent that it effectively functions as its own opposition.