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On February 12, a story broke about a group of Australian Labor Party (ALP) parliamentarians who have been dining regularly on the sly in a swanky Canberra restaurant, OTIS. Dubbed the “Otis Group,” they are a cabal of right-wing Labor MPs who want to push the party in a more coal-friendly direction. According to right-faction power broker and member Don Farrell, the group’s purpose is “supporting coal workers.” The membership list of the Otis dining club is a who’s who of Labor’s hard right. Farrell comes from the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association (SDA), a union known for its yearslong opposition to same-sex marriage, abandoned only after the reform was won. The SDA is also possibly the only union in the country to have won worse conditions and rates for its members, in enterprise bargaining agreements (EBAs) applauded by the industry group and conservative MPs. Other members of the group include Kimberley Kitching, whose cheerleaders in the right-wing Murdoch press have in the past congratulated her for making reactionary appeals to “Judeo-Christian” and “Western” values. Then there’s Joel Fitzgibbon, the group’s most outspoken member. In the 2019 federal election, Fitzgibbon’s safe ALP seat of Hunter, to the north of Sydney, swung heavily toward the fringe nationalist party, One Nation, which ran a coal worker as a candidate. Though Fitzgibbon kept his seat, the swing in Hunter, along with broad swings against Labor in Queensland, has spurred fears that the ALP is losing its once-reliable blue-collar base.

Coal Will Die — But on Whose Terms? Global coal prices are dropping as the world slowly transitions to renewables. The third largest exporter of fossil fuels worldwide, Australia, too, will have to transition. This will mean the end of coal jobs. The Otis Group are only pushing to delay the inevitable, and at the detriment of the very workers they claim to represent. Without a plan for transition, the fates of coal workers will be left for the market to decide. We already know what this will look like. In the 1990s, Liberal premier Jeff Kennett privatized Victoria’s electricity supply, concentrated in the coal-rich Latrobe Valley. By 2017, Hazelwood Power Station, one of the most polluting in the country, was finally shut down, and the other stations that still operate are already old and are due to be decommissioned in the next two decades. Today, very few people dispute the necessary closure of Hazelwood. Yet the fact that it was privately owned meant that the consequences have been catastrophic. A corporation, after all, has no interest in supporting workers or their communities if they can’t make money doing so. And rising unemployment in the Latrobe Valley has led to business closures, falling house prices (making it harder for working-class residents to move), and a declining population. Only last year, the Hazelwood Power Corporation was found guilty of putting staff and the public at risk over an out-of-control mine fire that burned for forty-five days, blanketing the region in a dense layer of smoke and coal dust.