A government spruiker was walking the parliamentary halls on Monday, building anticipation for what would become a deluge of deal-dependent legislation passing into law by week’s end.
Following some unwelcome commentary, including from this columnist, that the government lacked a clear message that could draw all of its activity towards a single purpose, there seemed a special emphasis on plain speaking as he summed up the plan for the coming week.
It was concise, direct and made effective use of the vernacular.
“Getting. Shit. Done.”
The tidal wave of legislation that rolled into the Senate on Thursday was the execution of a plan Anthony Albanese devised a few weeks ago. Frustrated that so much of his government’s agenda was stuck in a dawdling and difficult Senate, the prime minister decided it was time for recalcitrants to be forced to the table.
Negotiations with the Coalition, the Greens and the crossbench over recent weeks (and especially the past fortnight) had identified the government’s highest-priority bills and divided them into two piles. The smaller pile – with some of the biggest-ticket bills – contained the legislation they could pass with Coalition backing. That included the social media ban for under-16s, electoral reform and the migration changes.
The other, bigger, pile contained the first part of the government’s Future Made in Australia legislation, the new structure for the Reserve Bank, the proposed buy-now-pay-later system overhaul, the second of the housing bills for the Build to Rent program, and changes affecting Customs and legal protections for midwives.
On Wednesday evening, negotiations were under way over applying the guillotine – a parliamentary mechanism to short-cut debate and hold votes very quickly – focused on these two neat-ish piles.
At about 7.30pm the Senate manager of government business, minister Katy Gallagher, circulated the proposed list of bills for guillotining. The crossbench was blindsided. The list of what the government wanted put to a vote the next day was much, much bigger than expected. There were 36 separate bills on that list, with one more – on taxing superannuation balances above $3m – possibly to be added.
Legislation that had been languishing on the Senate notice paper for up to a year and never getting to a final vote had been included.
Albanese had decided to play hardball. He was fed up with the Senate and he wanted to, as he put it less bluntly on Friday than the spruiker had done on Monday, “get things done”.
The processes in the upper and lower houses of parliament are not identical and the Senate program has a lot more room for non-legislative activity. There are meandering debates to take note of answers that were given in question time, opportunities to lodge demands that the government produce certain documents by specified deadlines and debates about referring issues to committees followed by debates when those committees report.
There is a lot of time that is spent not talking about legislation and whether or not to vote for it. Albanese decided that as the parliament drew to its end for 2024, and with the possibility that it may not even resume before the election is called, it was time to bring things to a head.
The element of surprise was deliberate. He didn’t want his opponents – across the parliament – to have time for significant sabotage. It didn’t all go strictly to his plan either, with the opposition suddenly withdrawing support for the electoral reform bill as the final Senate sitting day was dawning on Thursday.
But through a series of frenetic negotiations that Albanese drove, deal after deal was done.
In the end, it worked. With the exception of the electoral reform bill, the legislation Albanese wanted passed was passed. What he wanted ditched, at least for the time being, met that fate. Tanya Plibersek was unceremoniously overruled after spending hours and hours negotiating a deal on her bill to introduce an environment protection authority because Albanese didn’t want to invite a deep-pocketed anti-Labor campaign from the mining industry – especially when he was trying to retain seats in Western Australia.
In a further brutal slap to Plibersek on Thursday night – and warning to any other minister who might overreach in his eyes – when asked about overruling her, he told the ABC’s 7.30 program that as prime minister, he was “the negotiator”.
The treasurer Jim Chalmers’ proposal to tax big super balances that would have hit unrealised capital gains and risked a franking-credits-style campaign a la 2019, also did not proceed, quietly evaporating into the background.
Despite that, Chalmers had some significant wins, especially on his RBA plans, securing passage for 11 bills in all. The attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, secured passage for his contentious privacy overhaul, a crackdown on money laundering, significant reforms to family law and changes to how courts handle the testimonies of sexual assault complainants. There was legislation on regional broadcasting and Sydney airport’s landing slots and many other things. They also secured the full suite of Future Made in Australia bills. All of it went through.
In the wash-up, the Senate passed 45 bills this week – 31 during Thursday’s marathon session. Whether, from the outside, it ends up looking like chaos or “making Australians’ lives better”, as Albanese characterised it, is yet to be determined.
On Friday, Chalmers called it all “the triumph of outcomes over politics”. They certainly achieved outcomes but there was a bit of politics too – and from Albanese, perhaps just a touch of “who’s weak now?”.
“What we’re doing is getting things done,” Albanese said on Friday, trumpeting his achievement. “We were determined to get things done.”
His ebullient mood was a contrast with last year, which he ended in a much more downbeat state, after staking so much political capital on what became a disastrous result in the voice referendum and having detention law overturned by the high court. This time, the notably more upbeat prime minister closed off the 2024 political year musing on governing and the inherent tension between handling immediate challenges and trying to shape the future.
“You have to deal with things as they are but always focused, as well, on the horizon, always looking out at that and where we want the country to go,” he said on Friday.
Back in the halls, there was a vernacular version of that too.
“Shit done. Shit to do.”
• Karen Middleton is Guardian Australia’s political editor
