28/08/2026
As members from across Queensland gather this weekend for the Labor State Conference to discuss policy and contribute to party platform, this post is a reminder that we come from across the professional background from labourers to lecturers, nurses to night shift workers, boilermakers to biologists. Labor’s strength is the breadth, passion and values of its membership, all contributing to policy, pushing its parliamentarians and wanting to create a better Queensland and a better Australia. We wish the delegates from Ryan a productive and successful weekend.
Barnaby Joyce reckons there are now “no labourers in the Labor Party” and that they’ve all been replaced by “university students with a chip on their shoulder” who became political staffers.
Took me all of about three minutes to discover that’s bo****ks.
• Dan Repacholi: fitter and turner, then coal miner.
• Anne Urquhart: process worker for more than a decade.
• Glenn Sterle: furniture removalist and truck driver.
• Matt Burnell: cash-in-transit worker and offshore oil-and-gas seafarer.
• Sam Rae: factory labourer.
• Tammy Tyrrell: farm and general labourer.
• Don Farrell: mail sorter and council worker.
• Steve Georganas: taxi driver for seven years.
And that’s using a pretty conservative definition. I’m not even counting nurses, hospitality workers, defence personnel, small-business owners or people who spent years representing blue-collar workers through unions.
Also, apparently going to university now disqualifies you from ever having had a working-class background. Sam Rae, for example, has degrees and worked as a factory labourer. Turns out human beings are capable of both reading a textbook and doing manual work during the same lifetime. Revolutionary stuff.
And while we’re discussing university graduates supposedly masquerading as workers, let’s inspect Barnaby’s own CV.
He spent much of the fourteen years before Parliament working as an accountant and rural banker. He went to the University of New England and is a CPA and FCPA.
Which makes lecturing everyone else about authentic working-class credentials while standing around in an Akubra cosplaying as a cattleman somewhat magnificent.
Apparently a university degree and white-collar career only make you an out-of-touch elitist when they belong to somebody in Labor.
But “there are no labourers in the Labor Party”?
Mate, I found eight before the kettle boiled.
