Pearls and Irritations

We hasten to add that we are not comparing him to the Beetrooter’s personal failings, but his drift away from the political mainstream.

In the past, both Fitzgibbon and Joyce have been seen as true believers, stalwarts of their respective parties, key members of the leadership groups.

But since they have fallen from favour, they have turned into mavericks – outliers determined to follow their own agendas rather than collaborating and at times compromising with the programs of the parties they were elected to represent.

Joyce, of course, has all but jumped the fence – he is off on a course of his own and will not, cannot be restrained short of recapturing the National Party leadership he believes was unfairly wrested from him.

This is never going to happen, so he may as well be left to play his own game, however close it becomes to political masturbation.

But Fitzgibbon remains in the Labor tent – barely, at times, but sufficiently loyal to talk about negotiating change rather than tearing the structure down. The problem is that the change he demands is to go back to the past, the halcyon days when the Labor Party was, as he saw it, the true party of labour.

By this he means manual workers – men (mainly men) with boots on their feet and callouses on their hands, the blue-collar masses of the glory days. And his archetypal heroes are unsurprisingly the miners in his own electorate, which. gave him a terrible shock in 2018.

So there is more than a modicum of self-interest in Fitzgibbon’s ideology, and nothing wrong with that. The issue for the wider party is that for the majority of the country, times have changed.

These days workers are more likely to be found in the tertiary sector rather than in primary and secondary industry – there are more of them in services than in resources and manufacturing combined.

And mining, while not on its last pick and shovel, is clearly on the decline. Customers are queuing up to embrace transition into alternatives, most likely renewables, which Fitzgibbon apparently sees as a poisoned chalice being proffered by the Greens infiltrating his loyalist ranks.

His warning last week of their subversive intent has brought Labor’s ongoing dilemma, the need to reconcile its traditional voters with its progressive newcomers, to yet another mini-crisis, giving Anthony Albanese’s opponents joy and his supporters angst.

It will not lead to a showdown, but it has proved a distraction and something of an embarrassment, to the point where Albanese has been forced to go public and tell Fitzgibbon, in the most tactful possible way, to please shut the fuck up.

He won’t, of course – zealots never do. And if there is any doubt, just take a look at Barnaby Joyce. And then look away. Some distractions and embarrassments are best ignored.

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