Witnessing the metamorphosis of his own party in the early 1970s, Kim Beazley Senior famously quipped: “When I joined the Labor Party, it contained the cream of the working class. But as I look about me now, all I see are the dregs of the middle class. When will you middle-class perverts stop using the Labor Party as a cultural spittoon?”

With much water under the bridge since the elder Beazley’s lament, it is heartening to see that some in Labor remain in touch with the party’s roots planted over a century ago by trade unionists inspired more by Methodism than...