To understand this bloody week in Australian politics is to keep one fact front of mind: the Coalition is down 55-45 in the polls against Labor and imaginary terrorist crises are no media match for the all-out, real-life energy wars erupting around a weak, embattled leader.

The power shortages afflicting South Australia shot live sparks into the somewhat gassy room of the government’s energy policy, and it all went KABOOM! when Australians learned that the reason our gas-rich country is not supplying gas to the domestic market is that the corporations who own it all make more money selling it somewhere else.



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The suggestion that the SA premier, Jay Weatherill, “threw shade” on the federal energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, in their infamous joint press conference is not an adequate metaphor. Furious South Australians have been reeling in darkness since the Liberals sold off their state electricity company two decades ago. Designated stool pigeon Frydenberg was lucky to merely cop Weatherill’s dark looks, rather than a mob of angry South Australians with household torches in their fists.

Malcolm Turnbull and his friends are learning to their peril that the states that Australian Eastern Standard Time forgot, are, it seems, somewhat more visible to one another than is convenient to his Coalition. Western Australia may not inhabit a lightless abyss but it can see it over the south-eastern border and, rather than allow the Liberal premier Colin Barnett and his new One Nation friends to sell the state-owned Western Power company, they instead handed an election to a born-again anti-privatisation Labor party with the kind of walloping majority that may even convince the former party of Joe Bullock that when it differentiates itself from the Liberal party, people really like it. “What is the point,” I imagine our western cousins asking, “of Barnett blowing a billion dollars on a bloody football oval when you can’t even see it in the dark?”

Poor Turnbull. If I didn’t think the Tories were reducing the lucky country to a playpen for a self-selecting club of corporate opportunists, I’d almost feel sorry for him. Hemmed in by the climate denialists on his right, and small-government zealots on his other right, he can’t rescue his fortunes with any energy policy intervention that might actually work, hence retreating to his tent and the 70-year-old (Labor) policy of the Snowy Mountains hydro scheme while sending Frydenberg into the frontline.

Having allies like the Business Council of Australia insist that the solution to everything is, as always, corporate tax cuts, is no help with an electorate that’s enraged about cuts to penalty rates and pensions and hikes to private health insurance premiums. If only Turnbull could rig a circuit to the growing rage, he might be able to solve his energy problem.

He can’t, alas – and, unable to campaign on policy and 55-45 down, he can’t really spruik a “competent government” angle, either, not when George Brandis still can’t find his diary and the treasurer, Scott Morrison, is photographed in parliament literally tossing his rock.

All of which explains the desperate-to-distract enthusiasm with which the Coalition tried to bomb “Field Marshal” Sally McManus on her election to secretary of the ACTU. She’d been in power less than 24 hours by the time Turnbull had denounced her, Michaelia Cash demanded Bill Shorten do the same, Eric Abetz took his tension out on Twitter and Christopher Pyne bleated “anarcho-Marxist!”.

The union leader had merely affirmed in her first 7.30 interview that in an Australia where unions are fined more for walking off unsafe worksites than corporations when workers die on the job, the ACTU would be backing in union members’ right to safety over any present, unjust law. The ACTU, its allies and antecedents have held this position since the industrial revolution: master-servant laws, indentured serfdom and child labour were once legal while the eight-hour day, minimum wage and equal pay were not. And in another headache for Turnbull, in every case, Australian popular opinion has backed the union movement’s moral side to the argument, not the legal one.

So the conservative outrage that McManus would dare defy the “rule of law” is confection, especially from a government that resists a royal commission into banking scandals, releases a person’s confidential Centrelink data to the media and administers the human rights hellholes of Manus Island and Nauru. The pretext for a battle with the union movement is as flimsy as any summoned since the Confederate army started the civil war, firing a 34-hour battery into a barely manned Fort Sumter. For an explanation of their explosive apoplexy, it’s not McManus on 7.30 that punters should be studying, but Paul Kelly in the Australian on 1 March.

I’m not the Grand Ol’ Oz’s target market, but my commentary comrade’s column

that day may be my favourite of the year. In it, he describes an Australian political moment in which a populist right that hogs and dogs the airwaves and hounds Turnbull into his every decision “is self-absorbed, chaotic, driven by resentment, devoid of a coherent agenda, and obsessed by the ‘you’re not listening to the people’ mantra that by itself leads nowhere”.

And from the poor performance of One Nation and its Liberal facilitators in the WA election since, Kelly’s dead right to worry that Australia’s right populism has both developed a political character that does not endear itself to the means of gaining power and which the Liberals may feel ideologically obliged to court but can’t control.

He’s also right that the problem the conservatives have underneath the surface skirmishes of the energy battle are a rising populist left’s relationship to the electoral fortunes of the Labor party. I credit him for being perhaps the only commentator who grasped the potential size of the impending massacre in the west. Certainly, by identifying an “ideological gulf” between Liberal and Labor that “runs through growth, jobs, budget, spending, tax and IR policy” – on issues such as power privatisation and penalty rates – Kelly sees same stark choice that WA’s voters did.

The Tories are obliged to go McManus this hard this early, because what Kelly calls “left populism” is just the McManus union generation out there organising nation-changing, ordinary Australians who even yet defer to that same old industrial “moral side”. Because, despite decades of Tory propaganda and Labor’s lengthy neoliberal complicity, Australians historically, habitually, consistently and as a majority hate privatisation, appreciate public services, value tax justice and remain committed to a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work. We as a people hold values that are – and Kelly admits it, the Liberals must know it and the News Corp papers are obliged to deny it – essentially, leftwing.

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WA revealed that Pauline Hanson’s default policy loyalty to the Liberals squandered any opportunity to seize popular economic policy ground for the right. Should a reinvigorated union movement be stirring Labor from the small and timid dreams of its neoliberal slumber, Turnbull’s corps are right to fear that party’s ideological heritage of egalitarian wage policy and universal services has a lot more purchase on the majority values of the Australian electorate than whatever rightwing thing post-Trump, post-Hanson “liberals” have allowed themselves to be turned into. Kelly himself decries “Left populists reject measures that create losers in the wage and benefits system” like it’s a bad thing.

Does Labor realise its opportunity? Those disappointed in Shorten’s pale disavowal of McManus’s comments this week would do well to remember it wasn’t dull comments that won Labor or lost the Liberals government in WA, kicked out Campbell Newman in Queensland or defeated Dennis Napthine in Victoria. Turnbull’s always been a smooth talker but, from federal Labor’s Medicare campaign to Weatherill’s literal retaking of power in South Australia, rounded vowels and agile verbiage can’t beat a Labor that’s confident to differentiate its economic values and spending priorities from the Liberals’. That confidence is built by an organised union movement that mobilises numbers behind anti-privatisation, pro-service demands. Unlike the US and Britain, where the Democrat and Labour party hierarchies are trying to wrangle back the bases they lost in their neoliberal shifts, in Australia it’s Labor’s union base that has wrangled back the party from neoliberalism: of the three, it’s working out.

Shorten, of course, could still screw it up. But the frenzy of Tory viciousness unleashed upon McManus – and its scale – suggests the Liberals, at least, don’t believe he will do so. Their present tactic is to destroy and discredit any representative of a campaign machine that is organised and influential and for which they have built no equivalent. Unlike the mess on Turnbull’s right, the left, claimed Kelly, “is essentially unified, it is about power and it is winning”.

So let Turnbull, Cash, Abetz and Pyne use up their energy firing on Fort Sumter. A union army won that war, too, in the end.

Van Badham is vice-president of the MEAA, Victoria.