He has a way with words!
Opinion
Albanese’s inaction drives his own party towards extinction
Richard Flanagan
Writer
January 18, 2025 — 5.00am
Extinctions sometimes strangely entwine – like the ancient Maugean skate ray, of which it is estimated fewer than 120 remain and which will likely be driven to extinction in the next few years because of the Tasmanian salmon industry, and the federal ALP, of which 78 lower house members remain.
Maugean skates need oxygen to survive and breed. Untreated sewage flowing from salmon feedlots into Tasmania’s remote Macquarie Harbour equals that of a city of a million people. All that poo eats so much oxygen that large areas become marine death zones. The ALP is similarly suffocating in a deluge of corporate poo that eats the values and purpose it needs to survive.
Illustration by Simon Letch
And yet, under Anthony Albanese, Labor gives the ever stronger impression that it has never seen a corporation that it won’t prostrate itself to. Each knee-step taken in his bizarre pilgrimage of national humiliation, from his log cabin origins to his house on the hill, is loudly tolled by the sound of the corporate cash registers jubilantly ringing with growing profits. Qantas and the promised legislation to make it pay customers compensation for late or cancelled flights? No action – ka-ching! The gambling industry and the ads more than 70 per cent of Australians want gone? No action – ka-ching! More coal mine approvals, new gas fields approvals, $1 billion for a Gina Rinehart-backed mine? No problem! Ka-ching! Even a spineless environmental measure like Tanya Plibersek’s “nature positive” bill is axed by Albanese at the behest of the West Australian mining industry. Ka-ching! Ka-ching! Ka-ching!
The word
extinction was first paired with species in the 1880s as a result of a Cambridge don’s search for the last great auk, a penguin-like bird hunted to extinction by humans. “A healthy population existed until close to the time of the species’ extinction,” Tim Flannery wrote in a recent piece in New York Review of Books. “When it came, however, the decline of the great auk was swift and relentless.” While “the great auk was difficult to hunt at sea”, Flannery continued, “when it came ashore to breed it was uniquely vulnerable.”
And so too Albo. His much-remarked gifts of backroom dealing and party wrangling that worked in the darkness of factional intrigue serve him less well on the naked, exposed rock of government. In 2022, Labor secured just 32.58 per cent of the national primary vote, its lowest vote since 1934. Labor’s electoral fortunes give every appearance of spiralling only further downwards at the next election, with the party falling, according to the latest poll, to 31 per cent.
Great auks were not difficult to tame. There was one in the court of Louis XIV at Versailles, perhaps a little lost, like Albo at the Murdochs’ recent Christmas bash. A Danish savant kept another on a leash, not unlike the salmon barons who seem to have Albo on speed dial, with the prime minister seemingly ever ready to fly to Tasmania solely to endorse salmon companies with a record of environmental destruction, one so bad their actions led to the banning of salmon farming in Washington state (Cooke Aquaculture, owners of Tassal). According to Hilary Franz, the state commissioner of public lands there, “Cooke’s disregard ... recklessly put our state’s aquatic ecosystem at risk.”
Then there are the owners of Huon Aquaculture, JBS, a global byword for criminality. In 2017, its owner brothers Joesley and Wesley Batista admitted to bribing over 1800 politicians and public officials in Brazil. Corruption was, according to an interview Joesley gave in 2017 before going to jail with Wesley, “the rule of the game. And what’s most important, corruption was on the upper floors, with the authorities.” Today Wesley’s son Henry Batista, described in The Australian Financial Review as “the Kendall Roy of salmon”, works in Hobart as CEO of Huon Aquaculture. (Henry was not implicated in the senior Batistas’ corruption.)
According to the Australia Institute, the three 100 per cent foreign-owned Tasmanian salmon companies have paid no corporate tax for the past five years. For Albo – who has extraordinarily floated plans to exempt Macquarie Harbour from all federal environmental law under a national-interest provision typically reserved for emergencies – that’s seemingly more reason to ensure the rule of law doesn’t apply to the salmon mafia.
And once one industry can exist outside the law, why not others? Why not Woodside, which plans to keep its gas fields pumping until 2070 and open new ones, making a mockery of net zero by 2050? Why not Hancock Prospecting? And while at it, criminalise those who protest such things as the fossil fuel industry’s responsibility for the climate crisis.
If you talk to extinction experts, they will point out that a sighting of a large flock of birds can mean little as to their future prospects. A flock of, say, 78 birds may give a misleading view of the birds’ prospects as a species, when perhaps only 16 of the birds are capable of reproducing. With Labor’s primary vote steadily collapsing, Albo may be remembered not as a nickname, but as a byword for a mass extinction event.
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