1 week Ago By Mike Foley
On his whistle-stop tour across northern Australia, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese shone his campaign spotlight on just one of the vast area’s two key constituencies, which are the mining industry and Indigenous communities. While Albanese jumped on an iron ore ship to praise the rivers of royalties swelling Commonwealth coffers, there were no moves to rekindle memories of the referendum to establish an Indigenous Voice to parliament. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese campaigned in Western Australia on Friday.
Credit: Alex Ellinghausen The failed vote in 2023 burnt enormous political capital that Albanese had won in his 2022 election victory. Despite visiting electorates home to many Indigenous Australians – Leichardt in Far North Queensland, as well as seats in the Northern Territory and north-west Western Australia – Albanese did not spend time at any explicitly Indigenous sites. Instead, at the obligatory high-vis campaign stop with great big mining infrastructure in the background care of Rio Tinto’s facility in the Port of Dampier in Karratha, Albanese issued a paean to his hosts.
Loading “There are four ships here at the moment, three of them are going to China., one of them is going to Vietnam, producing wealth for Australia. Rio Tinto contributes about $10 billion in royalties to the economy,” he said.
Albanese’s goal? To broadcast his support for the mining industry to Western Australia. The sector is crucial to the state’s economy and a great many of its workers in the Perth suburbs where Labor must retain as many seats as possible in its bid to retain majority government. Albanese’s focus on the demands of the resources sector is so sharp that he overruled Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek last year, when she sought to cut a deal with the Greens to create a new nature watchdog agency.
The deal was swiftly canned after Western Australia Labor Premier Roger Cook and the state’s mining lobby expressed their opposition to the move. When asked by reporters what a re-elected Albanese government would do for Indigenous communities, who feel let down by the referendum’s No vote, Albanese stuck to generalities..
