LABOR shadow minister Joel Fitzgibbon has spectacularly quit his resources portfolio after a Party room shouting match on Monday, further weakening Anthony Albanese’s grip on the leadership.
The pair are reported to have had a mid-meeting verbal brawl which saw Mr Fitzgibbon storm out after saying he regretted not running for the ALP leadership.
The bust-up occurred after Mr Albanese appears to have again sided with his Party’s radical Left-wing climate group following last week’s US presidential election.
UNLOSABLE
The Party has been engaged in a public civil war since its crushing defeat in last May’s “unlosable” federal election – which it had dubbed the “climate change” election.
Labor’s shadow cabinet in September secretly backflipped its environmental policy and decided to embraced gas while acknowledging Australia would not be a low-carbon economy “anytime soon”. The decision was publicly announced the week prior to the US election.
The move, backed Mr Fitzgibbon, repeated calls for Labor to focus on a pro-jobs agenda.
Mr Albanese, who toyed with campus communism as a student and doesn’t have trade union roots, has struggled to put workers’ interests ahead of his enviro-socialism agenda.
PHYSICAL
The verbal brawl has been described as vicious by those who witnessed it.
It was “by far” the most heated argument seen in shadow cabinet or cabinet since the Rudd versus Gillard years, according to reports in The Australian newspaper.
“I actually thought it was going to get physical,” a Labor MP who was in the room told the paper.
The argument was allegedly initiated by Mr Albanese after he lobbed “a veiled third person swipe” at Mr Fitzgibbon’s position on climate change.
Mr Fitzgibbon is reported to have retorted “I’m right here mate” before explaining his differences with Mr Albanese over Labor’s failure to learn from the Queensland and US elections.
IDIOT
While most MPs sat in bewildered silence, shadow attorney-general Richard Dreyfus called Mr Fitzgibbon a “disgrace”.
Mr Fitzgibbon is reported to have replied: “Shut up, you idiot. You just assured me I’m on the right path,” inferring his long-held disdain for Mr Dreyfus’ judgement.
The climate battle is tearing Labor in two with Mr Albanese’s hard-Left socialist faction at odds with MPs who are aligned with Mr Fitzibbon, union leaders and Party stalwarts.
Former ALP king maker Graham Richardson declared climate change politics dead and buried earlier this year, saying the Australian economy faced “more important challenges”.
He said a shift away from renewable energy was a “post-COVID fact” — regardless of the ructions it would cause within his own political Party.
“We’ve got real problems and, if you’ll pardon the pun, global warming goes on the back burner for some time now,” he said.
Mr Richardson served as Environment Minister under former prime minister Bob Hawke.
Mr Fitzgibbon said he remained supportive of Mr Albanese and would only consider a tilt at the leadership if he was drafted into the role.PC
Every knowledgeable person with integrity, honesty, decency, ethics and care for our entire world knows the Climate Change Mob Claims are totally untrue, extremely damaging and deceptive and it has to stop now.
Labor will get smashed at the next election if they continue to pander to the multi coloured flag waving, incense sniffing, kaftan wearing, climate change alarmist, illegal immigrant supporting, soy latte sippers of inner Sydney and Melbourne.
Maybe somebody can enlighten us on how many windmills will be required in the eastern States to meet a Net zero carbon emissions target.
How many hundreds of thousands of these windmills will be required and how many gigawatts of batteries required to provide some temporary stability to the grid?
And at what cost to the electricity consumer. 3, 4 or 5 times current prices.
Nobody will answer this question as the answer highlights the technical stupidity of a Net zero emissions target.