When Anthony Albanese claimed victory on election night in May, he probably didn’t imagine he’d be ending the parliamentary year with Australia’s gas giants screeching apocalyptically about Labor’s Soviet-style nationalisation of the industry. I’m reasonably confident that wasn’t in the transition plan.
It’s also fair to say the government wasn’t fully aware of the multifactorial debacle that is Australia’s energy market – whacked by Ukraine and neglected in a domestic policy vacuum for a decade – until Chris Bowen, the incoming minister, received a volley of frantic texts from his staff as he was being sworn into the portfolio at Government House. Bowen started running at that point – and hasn’t stopped since.
The gas industry tantrum in response to the government securing the parliamentary numbers to redistribute a modest chunk of the industry’s war profits to households and businesses crippled by high power prices – while reserving rights to do more if necessary – is predictably operatic. And before anyone could say cry me a river, media outlets prone to confusing corporate self-interest and national interest picked up the loud hailer for the LNG sector, hollering Venezuela! with nary a factcheck. Anyone surprised? No? Good, let’s keep moving then.
Gasgate is a noisy end to a frenetic year. But pre-Christmas noise notwithstanding, Albanese will be both relieved and pleased with the opening six months of his government. It hasn’t been perfect, and next year will be significantly harder, but I suspect the initial transition to government after a decade in opposition has been more seamless than expected.
Key election promises have been delivered. As well as the whole cabinet cracking on with the policy agenda, Albanese and his ministers have invested in building relationships in parliament to keep the program moving with a minimum of argy-bargy. The latest example of strategic inclusivity is putting the Senate kingmaker David Pocock and the Greens environment spokesperson, Sarah Hanson-Young, on a plane to Montreal with the environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, as Australia attends the final days of the Cop15 United Nations Biodiversity Summit.
But as governments move from transition to digging in and fortifying positions for the long haul, the operation takes on weight. Governing is heavy work, and governments with substantive agendas beyond daily politicking and crisis management get pulled into the policymaking vortex in Canberra – the intricate work of increments and minutiae. The focus can narrow to the complexities of deliberation and delivery.
Albanese is first and foremost a political animal, not a policy wonk. He doesn’t like to get bogged down. Temperament and disposition is an automatic stabiliser on the risk of this prime minister being completely subsumed by Canberra’s wicked problems complex. But Labor’s campaign review, released in early December, seems to me to be written with this precise risk firmly front of mind. The review has a simple message: don’t get bogged down, don’t assume the next election is in the bag and don’t get complacent.
The review was informed by substantial post-election research. It congratulates Albanese and his backroom brains trust on winning an election. It notes winning federally is no mean feat given Labor has won government from opposition only four times since the second world war and five times in the past 100 years.
But it urges the Albanese government to keep looking outwards. While there has been significant focus post-election on the consequences of the Liberal party’s rout in its progressive heartland, the Labor party needs to be similarly worried about a rumble in its own base. The campaign review catalogues the structural weaknesses sitting underneath the May victory. The main one is the ongoing drift of the blue-collar occupational base to political actors other than Labor.
This is not a new phenomenon. During the Howard era, and in 2013 at the height of “Tony’s tradies”, a big chunk of blue-collar voters defected to the Coalition. In 2022, this disaffected once-were-Labor cohort sprayed their votes everywhere, including to populist rightwing candidates intent on harvesting pandemic alienation.
Labor’s campaign review says the government needs to engage with persistent voter dissatisfaction in parts of outer-suburban Melbourne and parts of western Sydney, and confront its “underperformance” in Tasmania. It notes Labor improved its performance in Queensland relative to the catastrophic wipeout in 2019, but says the state needs something bespoke. The review recommends “developing the approach for the Queensland campaign earlier, and plans and policies for the various regions, while connecting these to the national strategy”.
Losing the western Sydney seat of Fowler for the first time since its creation in 1984 also demonstrates the fallacy of “safe” and “marginal” seats – the binary mindset of traditional campaign thinking.
For years, Australian elections have been pitched more or less exclusively at soft or swinging voters in about 15 marginal electorates. But the realignment playing out in the electorate, with voters readily abandoning tribal allegiance if there are attractive alternatives, means the terrain has changed. No “safe” territory is safe. Fowler going independent in May demonstrates that voters are prepared to turn on major parties taking their support for granted (a phenomenon mirrored by the results in many of the “teal” contests).
The review says it is vital that research be undertaken to thoroughly understand the causes of the large anti-Labor swings where they occurred, and to inform remediation strategies. The new government needs to speak specifically to communities at risk of rusting off and deliver “demonstrable improvements” to services and infrastructure to improve amenity “in areas of longstanding support for Labor”. It also recommends the allegedly safe seat holders get off their backsides. “All seats must campaign continuously throughout the electoral cycle, and it is critical that parliamentarians emphasise Labor’s record on delivery in government,” the review states.
It recommends care in rolling out policies to address the climate crisis. The review says Labor in government has an opportunity “to bridge the political divide over this issue between inner-suburban and outer-suburban and regional voters by demonstrating that decarbonisation can protect and grow jobs, and create new economic opportunities, especially in regional Australia”. Policy needs to be developed in Canberra but the politics of the transition will be won or lost on the ground. The review notes the Coalition “will target Labor-held outer-suburban and regional electorates – a strategy that Labor must anticipate and counter” by communicating with communities in transition directly.
The review is implacable on the risk of broken promises. It doesn’t name-check the stage-three tax cuts, but the context is clear when the reviewers, Greg Combet and Lenda Oshalem, note that voters have placed trust in Albanese, and the government needs to reward that trust by “delivering election commitments, providing stable government, and restoring decency in politics”.
I’m speculating with this final observation, but the speculation feels reasonable. People with long memories will remember that Combet, as climate change minister in the Gillard government, had to front Julia Gillard’s broken “carbon tax” promise as he developed the government’s emissions trading policy in the 43rd parliament.
When Gillard said in 2010, five days before an election, “there will be no carbon tax under the government I lead” it wasn’t substantively a broken promise, because Labor had never proposed a carbon tax, and it didn’t ever seek to implement one. But Tony Abbott weaponised Gillard’s words as a broken promise, poisoning the subsequent policy development, and lending legitimacy to the genuinely terrible decision to repeal the clean energy package in 2013.
It feels reasonable to speculate that Combet, given this history, would have watched the economic ministers, Jim Chalmers and Katy Gallagher, out flying a kite about revisiting the stage-three promise in the run-up to the October budget with a certain amount of trepidation and deja vu. “No carbon tax” was an opportunistic beat-up by Abbott, but Labor was very clear before the 2022 election that the stage-three package would be delivered. No grey area there at all.
Regular readers know my view. The stage-three tax cuts – which make the system less progressive and predominantly benefit higher income earners – is bad policy that has become significantly worse policy because of deteriorating budgetary circumstances. I suspect the government could win that argument if it prosecuted it with care and with honesty. Chalmers and Gallagher are already making preparations for the May budget and a tweak to that $254bn package could help repair the fiscal buffers – a worthy enterprise – or fund a number of more pressing priorities.
But it’s risky to change course. I’ve never walked in Combet’s shoes, but I can see how toxic broken promises can be for governments still establishing their identity and bona fides with voters in an age when many people think major party politics is cooked. It’s going to be a tough call – one of many that await the government in 2023.
This is my final Saturday column for 2022, so I’d like to take the opportunity to wish readers a happy and safe Christmas break.
