The Labor faithful assembled on Thursday for the first day of the party’s national conference in Brisbane.

Some coverage compared its debates unfavourably to the freewheeling conferences of the ALP’s glory days decades ago.

But while there were no embarrassing spats on hot-button issues of foreign or defence policy, controversies still emerged on day one.

Mineral wealth

Few issues have been so fraught for Labor governments than moves to exercise more control over Australia’s natural resources.

Raising taxes on minerals usually exposes a divide between the branches of the Labor Party representing the workers employed to dig them up and those who use them to make stuff.

Earlier this month, the government batted away suggestions from the crossbench that its new tax was soft on gas exporters.

(MPs from Western Australia delivered Labor victory last year, and its slim majority in Parliament).

But the powerful Australian Workers Union which represents miners, among others, has called for change.

The secretary of its Queensland branch, Stacey Schinnerl, noted that all but a tiny fraction of Australia’s vast reserves of resources such as lithium are sent to China.

She called for Australia to develop its industry for refining the resources needed to make batteries for renewable energy.

Her amendment to Labor’s platform, describing the international market as an uneven playing field and requiring the government to consider whether the Australian industry would lose out when deciding whether to approve applications for resources projects, was adopted as party policy.

Housing

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese this week brokered a deal to pay states and territories up to $3.5 billion in incentives to build more homes.

The Labor government is also involved in a stoush with the Greens over the Housing Australia Future Fund.

But a bid at the ALP conference to push Labor into intervening more directly in the housing market failed.

The national secretary of the construction union, Zach Smith, called for a tax on mining profits, which he said would raise $500 billion that could fund 750,000 new homes.

“We’ve been told since the ’80s to sit back and let the markets decide,” he said. “This is nonsense, the state has a role to play and it must play this role.”

A compromise amendment carried the day instead, calling for a less definite investment and an increase in tax reforms.

It suggests the housing issue could still have a way to run for Labor.

Australian jobs

Debate on foreign policy issues is scheduled for Friday (whether AUKUS makes the agenda remains to be seen).

But on day one, anti-American sentiment was nowhere to be seen.

On the contrary, President Joe Biden seems to be as popular as penalty rates among Australian trade unionists.

Speakers praised Mr Biden’s mantra of “good, union jobs” and a drive to re-industrialise America, and programs like $110 billion of investment in clean energy manufacturing, as examples that Mr Albanese could follow.

The government has announced a $15 billion fund to promote Australian manufacturing and renewable energy development.

But Peter Ong, the secretary of the Queensland division of the Electrical Trade Union, said a recently passed immigration labour agreement would see some of these jobs filled by lower-paid overseas workers.

The Labor government had previously criticised the way immigration was run when Peter Dutton was in charge of the Home Affairs portfolio.

“It’s about time this government started calling out good union jobs in this country,” Mr Ong said.