Laura Tingle examines the shape of the Labor Party

REPORTER (2019): Happy election day, Bill. How are you feeling?

BILL SHORTEN (2019): Pumped.

REPORTER (2019): After five weeks of campaigning today’s the day Australians finally cast their ballots.

REPORTER (2019): Polls point to a Labor win as Australians cast their votes today.

BILL SHORTEN (2019): Ready for change.

LAURA TINGLE, CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: There are things that Labor that would rather forget about the 2019 election campaign. Perhaps first and foremost, the sense of certainty that they were going to win.

But what they don’t want to forget is the feeling that you can win. Two years on, and potentially just months from another election campaign, the parliamentary party is divided about its prospects and here are a couple of pictures that show you why.

In Queensland, the sea of blue outside Brisbane has come to represent Labor’s alienation from a blue-collar base that has been transformed by a resources boom, the decline of manufacturing and unions and the rise of the subcontractor.

Anthony Albanese has better net satisfaction ratings than Bill Shorten did, but he suffers from a long shadow cast by the PM’s approval ratings during the pandemic.

The brutal reality is that the Opposition has been deprived of oxygen by the pandemic. This year began with rumbles about Anthony Albanese’s leadership. Six months on, it’s not so much leadership rumblings as frustration and, in some places, quiet panic.

There is some musing about whether Labor would fare better under a leader who looks very different to the Prime Minister but more significantly, the parliamentary party seems divided between those who think Labor can win and those who don’t feel there’s enough sense of urgency in the way Labor is prosecuting the political attack; that Albanese is leaving too much to the last moment.

Anthony Albanese can argue he has done a considerable amount of housekeeping since becoming leader including dealing with rebel union leaders but cutting through with voters is what matters to his colleagues.

ANTHONY ALBANESE, OPPOSITION LEADER: When you lose three elections, if you go about doing the same thing you should expect the same result. I very clearly have outlined, very transparently, publicly, that we would kick with the wind in the fourth quarter.

LAURA TINGLE: We’re in the fourth quarter, aren’t we?

ANTHONY ALBANESE: Absolutely.

LAURA TINGLE: And where’s the kicking with the wind?

ANTHONY ALBANESE: The kicking with the wind is in our policy for a national reconstruction fund for job creation, our policy that we’ve put out there for secure work, our policy for transforming childcare and women’s economic opportunity, our policy in terms of housing.

LAURA TINGLE: Albanese has been tied up this week in the day-to-day talking with colleagues and strategic manoeuvres of the Parliament, but the bigger issue looming remains talking to the public.

Do you think there’s a mood for change in the electorate?

ANTHONY ALBANESE: I think there is. This is a government that will be having served almost a decade in office, shooting for longer in government than John Howard had, with no legacy to show for it. No economic reform, no social reform, no plan for Australia’s future and people will ask, “Is this as good as it gets? Are they going to get better?”

LAURA TINGLE: But we have seen voters cling to the safety of incumbency like never before during this pandemic.

ANTHONY ALBANESE: We have a Prime Minister who doesn’t accept responsibility for things that he’s responsible for and we have a Prime Minister who waits until there’s an absolute crisis before he acts, whether it’s bushfires, whether it’s the need for wage subsidies and protecting people’s livelihoods during the pandemic and protecting businesses.

Whether it be the rollout of the vaccine, setting up national quarantine centres. Labor will put forward a positive agenda for Australia’s future at the next election whilst pointing out some of the inadequacies of the current government.

LAURA TINGLE: Anthony Albanese says he’s setting things up so that Labor will be kicking with the wind in the fourth quarter. Now some of your colleagues are a bit concerned that we’re in the fourth quarter and, as Paul Keating might say, you’re not kicking any tries at the moment.

JOEL FITZGIBBON, LABOR BACKBENCHER: Well, there’s not enough policy out there, but I think we’re only just into the fourth quarter, and it would make no sense to deliver policy too early in the game.

So I don’t see that as a problem. I think more than anything this is about trust.

LAURA TINGLE: Joel Fitzgibbon has become the go to internal critic of Labor in its current manifestation. He has a long history as a disruptor for several leaders but it would be a mistake to think he’s a lone voice of concern about the party’s election preparedness.

Fitzgibbon is at the forefront of the internal brawl about energy and particularly coal policy and these are issues which will be key to breaking up that huge swathe of blue across Queensland and Western Australia.

ANTHONY ALBANESE: Obviously Queensland will be a major battle ground, it always is. Labor needs to do better there. We need to do better in Western Australia as well.

LAURA TINGLE: Why is it that Labor holds no seats north of Brisbane?

ANTHONY ALBANESE: Well, we haven’t been good enough. We haven’t presented policies that have appealed to people in those electorates.

The big pitch which we’ll be making is about regional economic development.

ANTHONY ALBANESE (April): Matt Burnett will be our candidate for Flynn at the next federal election.

LAURA TINGLE: Mayor of Gladstone will try to win the hotly contested central Queensland seat for Labor, one of a clutch of seats in the region that went the government’s way last time with the help of One Nation preferences.

MATT BURNETT, LABOR CANDIDATE: When I was announced as the candidate for Flynn we did it at Berg Engineering, a local manufacturing firm, and at that point Anthony reinforced the $15 billion reconstruction fund. Now that will create more jobs in more industries, not just in Gladstone but right across central Queensland.

LAURA TINGLE: The LNP’s Ken O’Dowd has held Flynn since 2010 but he’s retiring at the next election.

MATT BURNETT: There’s certainly a mood for change in Flynn, and I feel that Anthony Albanese is cutting through.

LAURA TINGLE: What is the Labor Party’s policy on the future of Australia’s coal industry?

ANTHONY ALBANESE: Well, one is that in terms of coal workers, we support workers and respect them whatever work they do. Whether they’re coal miners, whether they be nurses and the current government is undermining the wages and conditions of coal miners by supporting contracting out, by supporting labour hire, by undermining those hard-fought wages and conditions.

But as I have said to the coal miners’ national conference in March, there won’t be a new coal-fired power station built in Australia. We have to be honest about that.

MATT BURNETT: I support mining. I support those coal-fired power stations. I support the railway workers, the port workers. We live in central Queensland; blue-collar workers are a massive part of our economy and they know I support them.

What I’m saying is I support those current jobs and those current industries equally as much as I do support the new ones.

LAURA TINGLE: So Labor’s candidate in Flynn says he supports coal-fired power stations, and Anthony Albanese is saying no to any new ones.

But there are other issues abroad in regional Australia.

Last year, Labor’s Kristy McBain won a by-election in the southern New South Wales seat of Eden-Monaro.

KRISTY MCBAIN, LABOR BACKBENCHER: People have been through a really tough time. Over a million hectares burnt in Eden-Monaro. There’s been 28 declared natural disasters in the electorate, and not one cent has been spent out of the $4 billion recovery and resilience fund announced by this government two years ago.

So for my electorate, they want to know where the proactive leadership is. Reactive decisions to quell disquiet amongst communities doesn’t cut it. They want someone that’s not going to blame the states.

LAURA TINGLE: You said in your budget speech in reply that the pandemic created a once in a century opportunity to remake the country, but you didn’t really go into details of what that was. How transformative or radical will it be?

ANTHONY ALBANESE: We need an economy that works for people not the other way around and we know that at the moment too many Australians are trapped in insecure work.

JOEL FITZGIBBON: I think we’re up against a very ordinary government, and certainly not one which is unbeatable.