Yesterday, the Oz ran the headline “Labor fails to win the middle ground”, reporting the unsurprising Newspoll result that high income earners[1] on $150000 or more mostly vote for the LNP.
Today, it’s done a backflip, quoting Joel Fitzgibbon as saying that Labor is losing its working class base.
Nothing too surprising here, but its worth remembering that the two-party preferred vote in the May election was 51-49 for the LNP, whereas the polls predicted 51-49 for Labor. If Labor were losing badly among both the well-off and the working class, this would be impossible.
[1] Recall that in Ozspeak, “middle” means “upper”
John Quiggin 
And by “working class base” Joel Fitzgibbon means coal miners rather than climate alarmists. In his view there’s a very clear line between the 60% of the voters who are concerned about the problem and the 90% who (charitably!) vote on other issues. Sadly he appears to be correct to do so. The real question is whether there’s room for the ALP to outflank the Coalition with more vigorously pro-heating policies.
The base of the Labor Party is low income voters. Always has been.
It’s true that Labor held on to the great majority of its low income voters. But that is beside the point.
It lost because a big enough fraction of low income voters, mostly in Queensland, voted LNP either directly or via Palmer or ON second preferences. To win elections it has to get these voters back (unless, very implausibly, it starts winning over large numbers of high income voters in marginal seats.)
Labor wasn’t thrashed in the election. 51-49 is a respectable loss, viewed in isolation. But given that expectations were that Labor would win very easily, and given the turmoil in the LNP in the previous term it should have won very easily, and so the loss was devastating. Labor figures like Fitzgibbon are quite right to ask why a slab of their base swung against them.
Joel Fitzgibbon, and others in the Hunter, are mindful of the power that coal has in the Hunter. Without coal whole towns would literally die.
With the ALP being somewhat wishy washy over coal et al Fitzgibbon suffered a huge swing against him, to some unknown electrician who works on a mine and met his wife at a tattoo convention in Thailand. So much for party loyalty.
It doesn’t matter if the mines life is 30 years, or that the particulate pollution is at or beyond dangerous levels, or that the coal is contributing to climate change – the workers pay is far greater than elsewhere and with that they can afford all those little extras.
Mining has always been in the Hunter, t’s the industry that is supported.