The federal opposition leader, Anthony Albanese, has batted away concerns over NSW Labor’s result in the Upper Hunter byelection, calling for “perspective” as Joel Fitzgibbon threatens to quit the party unless it better connects with blue-collar workers.
After Fitzgibbon agitated over the party’s climate and energy policies, his federal colleague, Pat Conroy, called on him to “shut up”, saying his constant criticism was “singularly unhelpful” and damaging the ALP’s standing.
Saturday’s result prompted soul-searching over NSW Labor’s direction under the party leader, Jodi McKay, but Albanese said the outcome reflected state issues and had no federal implications.
The Nationals held the rural and coalmining seat as it has done for 90 years, despite recording just 31.2% of first preference votes in a ballot of 13 candidates.
With most of the vote counted, Labor’s primary vote fell seven percentage points to 21.3%, with both major parties bleeding votes to the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party (12%), One Nation (12.3%) and the Malcolm Turnbull backed-independent Kirsty O’Connell (8.8%).
Fitzgibbon, Labor’s former federal resources spokeperson who quit shadow cabinet to protest the party’s position on climate policy, said the poor showing reflected a failure to connect with mining workers in the state seat, warning the party faced an uphill battle to beat Scott Morrison unless it “wakes up to itself”.
“Federally, if Labor can’t persuade not just mine workers but everyone in those regions whose jobs are dependent on mining, that we stand with them, you can expect a similar result whenever Scott Morrison goes to the polls,” Fitzgibbon told 2GB radio.
Albanese, however, rejected the criticism, saying the party was “standing up for working people”, and pointing to recent Labor victories in the resources states of Queensland and WA as evidence the party brand was not on the nose.
He also said that in the coal0mining town of Muswellbrook in the seat, votes swung towards Labor.
“Let’s get a bit of perspective here, quite frankly,” Albanese said.
“This is a seat that Labor has not held in the last nine decades at any time. At any time whatsoever. This is a seat whereby, frankly, a couple of elections ago we would have struggled to find people to hand out how to votes here.”
“The biggest two resource states in this country have seen Labor win seats in Queensland and become almost a one-party state in Western Australia.”
The Labor MP for the neighbouring federal seat of Shortland, Pat Conroy, went further, calling on Fitzgibbon to “shut up”, and accusing him of dragging down the vote with his constant criticism of the party.
“It shouldn’t come as a surprise that when you have the local federal Labor MP slagging off Labor for a year that the Labor vote is lower than it should be,” Conroy said.
“His criticisms are both inaccurate, and damaging to Labor both locally and nationally, and he should do the right thing … and reconsider what his public contributions are doing to the party.”
“As the most junior backbencher he should have his say in the caucus room, that’s what every other backbencher does.”
He said that energy policy had not been a concern for voters, and federal issues were not raised with him on polling booths, saying Fitzgibbon’s “diagnosis is wrong”.
“This was purely about state issues, particularly how the Covid pandemic was being handled,” Conroy said.
Morrison has said the Coalition will target the Labor held-seats of Shortland, Fitzibbon’s seat of Hunter, and Meryl Swanson’s seat of Paterson at the federal election, saying the party has “lost touch” with its traditional base in the region.
Conroy rejected the criticism, saying Labor had ditched its unpopular franking credits policy, and the party was running a pro-worker suite of policies.
“In my experience blue collar voters care about job security, they care about getting a fair pay rise and they care about having a Medicare system for their family to rely on and that is what we’re running on,” Conroy said.
“We’re running on those bread and butter issues, not esoteric culture wars about whether or not you get up and eat a pile of coal for breakfast.”
Conroy said the plethora of minor parties and independents contesting seats in the region would make the federal election “messier”, but he was not concerned about the strong One Nation showing in the Upper Hunter.
The Labor candidate for the seat, Jeff Drayton, said that the result showed that while working-class communities were turning away from the government, “they don’t see Labor as the answer”.
“Labor needs to do some real soul-searching as to how we will win these communities back. It’s going to take honest reflection and a lot of hard work.”
While NSW Nationals’ leader John Barilaro hailed the result as a triumph for the NSW government, the federal senator Matt Canavan said the party had gone backwards, and voters wanted the government to do more to support the coal industry.
“Let’s give the people want they want and build a coal-fired power station to keep jobs here.”
He said that while the Coalition’s decision to back the $600m Kurri Kurri gas plant in the Hunter Valley would “keep the lights on”, coal-fired generation would support local manufacturing and jobs.
“We are the worlds’s biggest exporter of coking coal and iron ore, why wouldn’t we seek to build more steel mills here and use our own natural resources to create our own industries and create our own jobs.”
While Fitzgibbon endorsed the Kurri Kurri proposal, the shadow climate change minister Chris Bowen urged the government to release the business case, saying the government intended to spend $600m “of taxpayer money on a plant which his own experts don’t support”.
The finance minister, Simon Birmingham, cautioned against drawing federal conclusions from the Upper Hunter result.
“It had a range of different factors at play and certainly many of them were very much local, very much state politics.”
