Joel Fitzgibbon's vocal exit from the opposition front bench this week left the door open for the Coalition to target Labor's climate agenda, and on Friday Barnaby Joyce marched straight through it.
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The former Nationals leader, whose New England electorate includes the upper reaches of the Hunter Valley, contacted the Newcastle Herald to challenge Labor to demonstrate where people would find work in the region if it pursued a more ambitious climate target.
"You guys can't just have an economy that runs along the beach," he said.
"You've actually got to have a hinterland.
"If you took coal out of the economy of Newcastle, Newcastle is going to be a pretty miserable sort of town."
Mr Fitzgibbon, who almost lost his once-safe seat of Hunter to a One Nation coalminer last year, has lashed the "cheesecloth brigade" he believes is making Labor too ambitious on energy policy at the expense of its blue-collar base.
Shortland MP Pat Conroy, Labor's junior shadow minister for climate change, said on Thursday that the party's climate stance was popular with voters and Mr Fitzgibbon's position would leave Labor in "permanent opposition".
Labor has set a 2050 net zero emissions target and is mulling over announcing an interim target for the 2030s.
But, like the government, it has embraced gas as an interim power source and vowed to preserve existing jobs.
Mr Joyce said he disagreed with the government promoting gas-fired plants in the Hunter because they were too expensive.
"If I was going to build a power plant, I wouldn't make it gas; I'd make it coal," he said.
"I'd build a coal plant at Liddell. You've got a rail line going right past with coal on it.
"You can't have blue-collar jobs without cheap power, and you can't have cheap power without a cheap power source."
He said the Newcastle economy was vulnerable to losing the mining industry, though Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show education, health and other sectors dwarf coal as a major employer in the Hunter.
"I don't think the big accounting firms are there; I don't think the solicitors' firms are there; I don't think there's a big services sector there; there's no international banks there; and there's no headquarters of big corporate Australia," Mr Joyce said.
"Pragmatism and commonsense say you should stand behind the industry that is actually there.
"Take me by the hand and show me the green jobs. Where are they? And they've got to be at the same pay rate.
"How are we going to work? Where's the money going to come from?"
Labor says the Hunter needs a plan to shift to being a leader in green technologies such as hydrogen.
Mr Conroy and Newcastle MP Sharon Claydon told the Herald that decisions made in Japan, South Korea and China, Australia's biggest coal customers, would dictate the industry's future.
New Japanese prime minister Yoshihide Suga announced recently that the country would be carbon neutral by 2050.
Japan has not updated its modest 2018 plan to cut coal's share of the power mix from 32 to 26 per cent by 2030.
It plans to build a host of cleaner coal-fired power plants with life spans of 40 years.
Mr Joyce said the global market for coal could change considerably in the next 10 years "but it may not". He said India was another potential new market.
"The idea that there's no demand out there is patently absurd.
ALP national president Wayne Swan said public spats over internal policy were damaging Labor.
"Joel has got a point, but [it] would be better if he kept it in the tent so we could sort out the difficult policy issues," he said in an interview with the Nine Network.
"It is certainly a challenge. We don't need people like Joel going rogue."
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