Like Albanese, other senior members of shadow cabinet including Jim Chalmers, Richard Marles and Joel Fitzgibbon have been making accommodative noises towards the coal industry, as part of a pitch aimed at winning back blue collar voters in the regions. Global trends across Western democracies suggest Labor is, to use a technical expression, pissing into the wind. If it wants to win government again it needs to acknowledge a structural change in politics worldwide. It needs to look beyond the regional working class for votes. Illustration: Andrew Dyson Credit: In the US, the rural/urban divide is an increasingly dominant force in politics, as typified by Donald Trump’s sweep through regional blue collar voters in the midwest in 2016. Brexit, which is supported most strongly in regional areas of England, is symptomatic of a redrawing of the UK’s political map. As the recent election results show, Labour no longer has a stranglehold on working class constituencies in northern England. Similarly, right-wing populist parties have triggered a structural decline in working class support for the French Socialists and the centre-left SPD in Germany. In the post-Turnbull era, in which Scott Morrison is actively courting the populist right and One Nation is resurgent, Australia is catching up with this long-term international phenomenon. The breakaway of the regional blue-collar vote from the centre-left is much bigger than the travails of one party in one country.

Labor’s leaders are quixotic to think that a few messaging tweaks will be enough to reverse this trend. It hasn’t worked anywhere else and it’s unlikely to work here. Loading Regional areas with a resources-focused economic profile are likely to be especially hostile territory for Labor in the coming years. Adani is far from a one-off. The elephant in the room is that carbon emissions from Australia’s coal and gas exports dwarf the entirety of our domestic emissions across all sectors. Pivoting Australia’s economy away from reliance on these exports looms as the defining national challenge of the coming years and decades. Labor will have to face up to this task, including by providing transition pathways for coal mining communities. But don’t expect these communities to vote their current livelihoods out of existence on the back of a promise of new jobs in the future. As it stands, Labor looks set for another cycle desperately chasing hard-hatted photo ops with miners, followed by a sound walloping from regional blue-collar voters at the ballot box. Perhaps the party has Stockholm syndrome.

Now for the good news for Labor, if it chooses to listen. Centre-left parties around the world are winning power by building coalitions of voters who predominantly live in cities and their surrounding suburbs, span a range of income brackets from the precariat to the middle class, tend to work in the broad and expanding services sector, and are increasingly culturally diverse and university-educated. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video This strategy benefits from the long-term demographic tailwinds provided by increasing urbanisation, education, immigration, and job creation in the services economy. Justin Trudeau’s centre-left Liberals will again lead Canada’s government thanks in large part to a haul of 79 out of 121 of seats in Ontario, home to Canada’s largest city, Toronto. That’s despite not winning a single one of the 48 seats in the resource-heavy provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. The US Democrats’ thumping win in the 2018 congressional midterms was on the back of similarly lopsided state-level results. They cleaned up in America’s big cities, which helped them to win 46 out of 53 districts in California and 21 out of 27 in New York. Meanwhile, they were much less successful in regional areas, especially in states that are home to fossil fuel production such as Texas and West Virginia. Emmanuel Macron re-made the French electoral landscape through the creation of a primarily urban coalition. In the 2017 presidential run-off, he rallied the support of the centre and the left to defeat the far-right Front National.