The moniker “true believer” could almost have been invented for Kim Carr. Indeed, he began his almost 30-year Senate career at the very election, 1993, that Paul Keating claimed had been a “victory for the true believers”.

His career was devoted to the proposition that if Australia embraced new technologies and developed the right skill base, it could still make things – an idea that seems to be fashionable in federal Labor government circles again.

It, therefore, matters that he has joined the growing number of former senior Labor politicians who have become increasingly critical of the direction of the Albanese government.

Carr is critical of the small target strategy that Anthony Albanese used to get into office, his policies being “more like running repairs than substantial reforms”. The party, says Carr, has become alienated from low-income voters, leaning in to an “identity politics” that has caused it to lose touch with its traditional support base – whose welfare was really Labor’s raison d’être.

Carr could fairly be described as “old school Labor”. His memoir, A Long March, published this month by Monash University Publishing, does nothing to dispel that impression.

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Carr, the product of a working-class family – his father was a boilermaker........

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