The Australian Labor Party has lurched even further to the left with the appointment of a Sydney MP as Shadow Minister for Agriculture and Resources.
With no real country options available, Labor has chosen Ed Husic – the Member for Chifley who describes himself as “Blacktown, through and through” – to be their spokesman on farming and mining.
That would seem to be at odds, however, with his own mission statement: “My whole working life has been about speaking up and working for Western Sydney and its residents,” Mr Husic proclaims on the NSW Labor website.
It seems strange to make an inner-city MP a spokesman for an industry like mining let alone agriculture, but perhaps the elevation has more to do with factional deals inside the Labor party than finding the right person for the job.