King talks up WA, Labor brand

Federal Labor leader Anthony Albanese was effusive in his praise for Madeleine King when announcing her appointment as the opposition’s resources spokesperson in late January.

Mr Albanese explained that Ms King, who has represented the electorate of Brand since 2016 and has served as the opposition’s trade spokesperson since 2018, understood the importance of the role (as a Western Australian) and that handing her the portfolio was recognition that a focus on the resources sector was central to the job.

“It makes sense to do that,” he said.

It’s hard not to read into why Mr Albanese made the decision in the first place.

Having inherited the opposition’s leadership in the aftermath of its shock, demoralising loss at the 2019 federal election, Mr Albanese was tasked with guiding the party through at least three or four more years in the political wilderness.

Paramount to this was figuring out why the party lost, with many at least partially blaming Clive Palmer’s decision to spend $84 million through his company, Mineralogy, to support the United Australia Party.

The bulk of that money went towards advertising that opposed then leader Bill Shorten, and Mr Palmer has since publicly stated the goal of his party was not to form or be part of government, but to deny Labor an election win.

Still, many of the party’s policies at that election have since been criticised as spooking retirees and blue-collar workers in marginal electorates such as Longman, Herbert, Bass and Braddon.

That includes the party’s support for making franking credits non-refundable, reducing the scope of negative gearing, and reducing emissions by 45 per cent by 2030 based on 2005 numbers.

And while Mr Albanese has since renounced many of Labor’s policies on taxation, he has found himself in a bind when it comes to addressing climate change.

That was evidenced when Joel Fitzgibbon resigned his position in the shadow cabinet this past November, lambasting the party’s climate change policies on the way out.

Having almost lost his seat of Hunter in NSW, which covers many of the coal mining-dependent communities in the eponymous valley, Mr Fitzgibbon began publicly calling for change and specifically called for climate change spokesperson Mark Butler to be ousted from his portfolio.

Mr Fitzgibbon got what he wanted.

Mr Butler, who had held the portfolio for close to seven years, now serves as the opposition’s health spokesperson, with Chris Bowen moved into the job as part of what Mr Albanese said was an effort to bring an economic perspective to the role.

Meanwhile, with Mr Fitzgibbon now no longer holding the resources portfolio, Ms King has stepped into the fray to take on what will be one of the most challenging jobs for anyone in the opposition ahead of the next federal election.

To hear Ms King tell it, dealing with climate change and how Australia achieves net zero emissions is a challenge, but a challenge she sees as worth confronting.

“I remember when I first got preselected in 2016, and a journalist said to me, ‘I can’t believe you’re doing this; it seems like you’ve inherited a poison chalice’,” Ms King told Business News.

“We only had three seats in the lower house [in WA] and all members were retiring.

“I said to him, ‘No, this is a great challenge,’ and I’d say the same today [of] the resources portfolio.”

That challenge won’t simply encompass helping Australia’s resources industry adapt to ambitious emissions targets.

Politically, the opposition is fighting an uphill battle to win the next federal election, as Prime Minister Scott Morrison has cultivated an air of inevitably around his re-election chances amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

That challenge is especially pronounced in WA.

Considering everything now written about Labor’s dominance at a state level, and especially the near-insurmountable popularity of the premier, Mark McGowan, there is a comparative dearth of material focused on the federal party’s struggles to make inroads in WA.

Of the 16 federal representatives WA currently sends to Canberra, just five of caucus with the opposition, the second-lowest proportion of any state or territory in the country.

That weakness has grown over the course of decades. Labor has not won the primary or two-party preferred vote in WA since 1987, when Bob Hawke bested John Howard with a narrow majority of 51 per cent and nine of the state’s 13 seats.

Things turned particularly ugly in 2019, when the party picked up a meagre 44 per cent of the TPP vote and just 30 per cent of the primary vote.

This is nothing new to political onlookers, however.

Labor famously lost a seat in WA at the 2007 federal election, when Kevin Rudd led the party to its only clear majority of the previous 20 years.

Steve Irons won Swan that year on a 0.2 per cent margin and earned headlines as the only Liberal to win a Labor-held seat that year; his margin has waxed and waned over the years, but his win at the most recent federal election was a gut punch to the opposition.

Amid off-the-mark polling and a landslide loss in Queensland, WA’s role in bolstering the federal government’s re-election efforts cannot be understated.

For the most part, Labor’s strength in WA is now almost entirely localised to suburbs populated by middle-income, working-class voters typified by the southern, suburban electorate of Brand.

On the face of it, Brand is as Labor friendly as any electorate can be, balancing Kwinana’s growth suburbs with Rockingham’s mix of Naval personnel and rusted-on union voters.

The seat, which was pieced together in the 1980s with parts of Fremantle and Canning to capture voters in Perth’s growing south metropolitan region, has only ever elected Labor candidates since Wendy Fatin won in it in 1984.

In practice, though, members have had to fight tooth and nail to retain it.

Ms Fatin initially underperformed the notional alignment of the seat by about 2 per cent and suffered swings against her at all-bar one election of her 12-year tenure.

Kim Beazley, whose popularity and sway in the electorate is labelled legendary by Ms King, had to eke out a win in 1996 when he first contested the seat (he had served as the member for Swan between 1980 and 1996). 

Now, just five years after arriving in federal parliament, Ms King serves as the highest-ranking WA parliamentarian in the shadow cabinet and will go toe-to-toe with Keith Pitt as the party’s resources spokesperson.

If the motivation for Mr Albanese’s cabinet reshuffle was to emphasise an economic approach, Ms King is well-suited for the job.

Among others, she calls herself a supporter of industry, and defends the innovation and integrity of resources businesses generally.

However, she’s also aware of the pressure mounting for countries such as Australia to do more to combat climate change, and warns the country is at risk of being left behind if the likes of the European Union, the UK and the US follow through on commitments to drastically reduce their emissions by 2030.

Ms King nevertheless has faith in what the industry can achieve and sees a crucial role for the federal government in providing support for its transition.

“To run that industry on the scale and efficiency needed to be competitive, we need the best available technology and people to run that,” Ms King said.

“This is what these companies have been doing for a long time in their own workplaces but also as they collaborate with universities.

“They invest in the science and technology, and that’s what they’re going to be doing for net zero emissions.” 

Mr Albanese’s decision to put Ms King in the portfolio appears sensible, given her credentials on the right and prior experience with the trade portfolio.

On a deeper level, her upbringing and background before entering parliament would seem primed to appeal to the aspirational voter Labor seemingly lost in 2019.

The product of early years in Calista and a Safety Bay schooling, Ms King rattles off a childhood not unlike any unassuming future parliamentarian, learning to appreciate politics through her father’s fondness for listening to “the wireless” and expanding her political consciousness through an arts and history degree at the University of Western Australia.

An erstwhile appreciation for physics and engineering eventually led her to Melbourne, where she briefly studied aerospace engineering at RMIT.

It was not a natural fit.

“I got in with a bad crowd that really liked going to the footy,” she said.

“As a student it was about $2 to get into the MCG; I was a sucker for the entertainment.”

Ms King returned to WA soon after, dabbling in a mix of activities.

After initially helping care for her dying grandmother, she and later worked at a bar in Corrigin, located two-and-a-half hours’ drive east of Perth.

After completing her law degree in the mid-1990s, Ms King worked on The Bell Group litigation during a stint with law firm Parker & Parker (since acquired by Herbert Smith Freehills).

A love of academia would draw her back to UWA, though, and in 2008 she was hired as chief of staff to then vice-chancellor Alan Robson.

That role gave her greater insight into how large organisations are funded and managed, as well as the particulars of university management (particularly the small details).

“There’s always the struggle of car parking at a university, which becomes the bane of every vice-chancellor’s life,” Ms King said.

“That, and the logo.”

Her professional experience served her in good stead upon her appointment as inaugural chief operating officer of the PerthUSAsia Centre in 2013 and made her a prime candidate for Labor preselection upon Gary Gray’s retirement at the 2016 federal election.

Mr Gray, who briefly held the resources portfolio in Julia Gillard’s government and would go on to serve as ambassador to Ireland, served as a mentor to Ms King and was supportive of her bid for the seat.

She won preselection with the support of the party’s right faction, securing a 7 per cent swing and winning the seat with 61 per cent of the TPP vote at the 2016 federal poll.

Her background as a Western Australian and experience with a foreign policy think tank were likely behind her naming as trade spokesperson in 2018, which has given her the uniquely difficult challenge of articulating the opposition’s approach to Australia’s economic relationship with China.

On policy, Ms King backs key figures in the state government who have defended the importance of Chinese trade on WA’s economy, while insisting that businesses she had spoken with had already indicated frustration with the worsening relationship between the two countries.

Many stressed that it had taken decades to make inroads with businesses governed by that country’s centralised regime, and that they had largely seen their work unwound in fewer than 12 months because of increasing political tensions.

“China’s changed; I accept that,” Ms King said.

“The leadership has changed and inevitably our relationship would have changed regardless.

“It is the first time Australia’s been unable to separate in some workable fashion the political relationship from that economic and trading relationship.

“That may have been through some missteps; it may have also been through China not allowing that to happen, either.

“I do not want to underestimate the challenge for the government of the day … but, we have navigated this challenge before, if you think back to the awful tragedy of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

“You cannot imagine how we recovered after that, yet we did, after that terrible time and extraordinary loss of life.

“How we can’t seem to move the dial now is challenging … but what I see missing is any kind of plan to do so.”

It’s a complicated subject that even the opposition will need to consider ahead of the next federal election, compounded by how Labor will go about contesting that poll.

Despite polling suggesting the two parties are splitting the electorate down the middle, few expect Mr Albanese, a veteran of the party’s left faction representing one of Sydney’s most urban and progressive electorates, will become the next prime minister.

His polling numbers against Mr Morrison are lacklustre and would almost certainly serve as a drag on the party’s primary vote, which is generally robust despite its recent loss and the ensuing popularity bestowed upon incumbent leaders during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Tanya Plibersek, Chris Bowen and Jim Chalmers are already making private and public moves to assume the opposition’s leadership after the election is held, and few obvious seats are emerging for Labor to contest.

In fact, it is Mr Morrison who will likely be going on the offense, having privately mused as far back as 2019 about contesting traditionally Labor-held seats like Hunter, which is highly dependent on coal mining, and McMahon, which is home to a high concentration of religious voters.

Recent scandals concerning the private conduct of ministers may yet impede how far and wide the federal government chooses to campaign, though, with the decline in Mr Morrison’s personal approval ratings in one Essential Research poll making his re-election chances seem less assured than they were at the start of this year.

Of greater concern for the federal government, however, is a poll from Morgan Research released this past month purporting to show the opposition gaining a 6 per cent swing towards it in TPP terms in WA, which would be enough for Labor to pick up Swan, Hasluck and Stirling.

It remains to be seen if Labor takes that poll seriously.

For one, that poll appears an outlier – Newspoll has routinely given the federal government a slight, if not insignificant, lead in the TPP – with Swan, the most obvious target for the opposition, having eluded the party for the better part of a decade.

Even then, with prior attempts to pick off that seat falling short, the party may look to regional Tasmania or suburban Queensland for opportunities before it thinks about pouring more money into a relatively difficult state for Labor at a federal level.

That’s reflected in the trouble the party had in 2019 attempting to dislodge incumbents in Hasluck and Pearce, which are held by well-known serving ministers in Ken Wyatt and Christian Porter, respectively.

Stirling may also prove a headache for Labor, given it held the seat between 1998 and 2004 and could only manage a 0.5 per cent swing towards it in 2019 when the seat was an open contest.

Even if these seats were to become competitive, it’s hard to envision Mr Albanese being welcomed with open arms given his most recent visit to WA, which coincided with the state election, yielded no public campaign appearances with any state election candidates.

Structurally, WA may also become less enticing to campaign in given it’s set to lose a seat ahead of the federal poll.

Cowan, Hasluck and Pearce are the most likely to end up on the chopping block, and while redistributions may influence whether each party’s leader decides to travel west, those visits will amount to a survival mission for whichever members loses incumbency.

Suffice to say that if Labor has a path to winning government, it’s unlikely it will run through WA.

Further to that, there are reasons to doubt that a federal election will be held this year despite punditry throughout 2020 suggesting Mr Morrison may try and strike while the iron is hot and shore up the federal government’s numbers.

The move would no doubt be appealing, given his government lost its majority in February when Craig Kelly moved to the crossbench.

On the same day that Mr Kelly did that, though, Mr Morrison reportedly told colleagues to prepare for two federal budgets, indicating a federal election would not be held until the second half of 2022.

For what it’s worth, Ms King cast doubt on the prospect of an early election alongside commentary that underrates the opposition’s chance of forming government whenever it is held.

Throughout this past year, she said the pandemic had highlighted the plight of many who had been affected by growing inequality and the lack of access to a job or good education.

“I think the nation realises something’s got to give; we can’t go back to the old normal,” Ms King said.  

“We are determined to not waste this chance of recovery.

“It’s a shocking thing to think this country will be a trillion dollars in debt and have no major reform to show for it.

“If we are in a post-pandemic recovery phase, we must apply all effort to make sure no-one is left behind and that the country has built itself a bright future.”

Ms King’s commitment to the cause flows through to her endorsement of Mr Albanese.

She doesn’t miss a beat when asked if the party leader, whom she considers a friend, has her support.

“You bet he does,” she said.