Bill Shorten’s response to Christine Milne’s resignation was pretty shabby, but it was also revelatory. After all this time, the ALP – and particularly its right wing – is still unable to process the reality of Australia’s political fragmentation.

Shorten’s send-off for Milne was, to borrow a phrase, “weird and graceless”. After a couple of lines of perfunctory, clearly insincere congratulations to Richard Di Natale, he vented the issues he shares with large sections of the ALP’s leadership:

Labor’s priority is to protect living standards, jobs and a secure economic future. The Greens have other priorities. I’m proud to lead the only political party that gives members a say in choosing their leader.

Why draw attention to an election where members voted overwhelmingly for his opponent, and where his own supporters’ conduct has been under scrutiny? Because none of this comes from a rational place.

Why choose this moment to indulge in bromides about jobs and the economy? Because of a compulsion to repeat the only real rhetorical response that Labor have ever really managed to generate to the smaller party. The fact that it has no discernible effect does not seem to have led anyone to think that it should be abandoned.

The stimulus in this case was a successful, drama-free leadership transition from Milne to Di Natale. Remember that a large part of the reason that Labor is now in opposition is Shorten’s own role in the undermining Rudd, and then, eventually, Gillard. The contrasting spectacle of a party negotiating this process with goodwill and a modicum of maturity may have been too much to bear.

It’s one of a long series of desperate helicopter punches that the ALP have thrown at every hint of Green success. Just over a month ago they added two lower house seats in NSW and maintained a strong upper house contingent. Labor sources were reported as saying they were the kind of people who “go to restaurants and are more worried about how the chicken was treated than whether the waiter is earning the minimum wage”.

Time and again, we see the ALP desire to lash out at the Greens triumphing over good sense. It’s all ultimately self-defeating because, as Osman Faruqi pointed out in Guardian Australia at the time, all the best evidence points to the fact that Greens voters are overwhelmingly former Labor supporters.

They have become disillusioned with Labor for a variety of reasons, not least because, as a parliamentary library study puts it, because of Labor’s “diminished commitment to full employment and economic redistribution”.

Given a choice, progressive voters have abandoned the party in significant numbers, as is borne out in the history of Labor’s primary vote. When Bob Hawke first won government in 1983, he got near enough to half of the first preference votes (49.48%).

Now, they would be happy with anything in the 40s. Kevin Rudd won with around 43% of the vote, and Gillard formed minority government with just under 38%. Meanwhile, the Greens have consistently polled above 7% for a decade, and in the time since the last election they have tracked at around 10%. This is evidence that party identifications have formed among a group of voters who, in an earlier times, would have been reliably returning inner city Labor MPs.

Labor could craft progressive policies to win these voters back, or they could acknowledge that they are now represented by an alternative that isn’t going anywhere soon. But they have steadfastly refused to do either. Instead, they vacillate between insulting the voters, decrying their progressive values, or making endless forlorn predictions that any moment, the Greens will simply curl up and die.

None of this constitutes a strategy. Rather, it’s a kind of resentment – which is frequently a product of a frustrated sense of entitlement.

Shorten’s boilerplate about jobs and economic security is the last echo of the strategy that Labor held to throughout the 1980s and 1990s, where they assumed they could simply triangulate for the median voter, and rely on progressives to hold their nose and opt for the least worst option. The collapse of a stable two-party system has put paid to this, and many in Labor can offer no answer more imaginative than a tantrum.

Australia’s compulsory, preferential voting system tends to encourage the thought that the left flank has nowhere to go, but the failure to successfully deal with fragmentation and the rise of new political forces can be observed elsewhere. In Scotland, British Labour allowed local constituency parties to become moribund, and were content for activists to die off on the assumption that they had the country in the bag.

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As of today, they are reaping the whirlwind – Scotland has comprehensively turned to the SNP. As for Australian Labor, one wonders when they will move on from a position where they often appear to reserve more contempt for the Greens than they do the Coalition.

Everyone knows that it’s likely that any future Labor government would be forced to work with the Greens in the Senate, and after the Gillard government, everyone also knows that this can work quite productively. If Labor under Shorten wants to continue to hew to the centre, they need to acknowledge that only ensures that Australia’s political landscape will maintain its current shape for some time to come.