Wow, Albanese’s Labor really seems to be screwing this up. Politically, at any rate. Governmentally, it appears to be rational, efficient, honest and hard-working, dedicated to dozens of small and mid-size reforms to make the country a little less unfair, and addressing the backlog of willed decline, incompetence and duplicity displayed by 10 years of the Coalition.
Its reward for that is that its primary vote has collapsed, to 31, and its 2PP to an even 50-50. It’s being shellacked from the right by the Daily Tele and others in the Nude Corpse stable, and it faces a right-shifted Nine Network. One would guess it lost about 2% of primary to the right on the Voice to Parliament — both its content and the obsessive focus on it for months on end, as people watched the cost of living get worse. On the left, it has lost to Greens, socialists and minors on, well, everything: the duplicitous Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF) and the lack of real action, not cancelling the stage three tax cuts, the unlimited commitment to AUKUS, the bizarre “green Wall Street” proposal for the environment, and, thunderingly, the unlimited support for the Netanyahu government’s destruction of Gaza.
The right shift has gone fairly directly to the Coalition, and most of it is unlikely to come back. The left shift may not come back to the degree it once did. Some socially conservative Muslims may vote Green or community independent and then Coalition, just to hurt Labor for its betrayal of non-European Australians. So it is quite possible that, over six months or so, Labor has really wrecked itself for 2025.
The third element in that process has been Anthony Albanese and his distinctly mediocre leadership. Labor seems to have made every political mistake in the playbook. It has been bizarrely bad at this. One assumed, on its election, that it would have some program to put in place. Not a grand Rudd-style thing, offering multiple separate targets, but a simple theme about making life better and attaching various piecemeal reforms to it. Such a program would have included plain talk about how difficult it is to make real change on this, citing global conditions, as well as the failure of the previous governments to address it, etc, etc.
There has been nothing of that sort. The core economic/class initiatives have been the comprehensive labour law reform, the HAFF, and supporting a minimum wage rise in the Fair Work Commission. That’s really about it, apart from tinkering. Getting a good chunk of the Secure Jobs, Better Pay Act through the Senate is a substantial achievement, will improve many lives and is something for the party to be proud of. But the melancholy fact is that it remains sectional. Many people, including many working people — many of them swinging seat voters — won’t receive any advantage, compared to a more comprehensive attack on more widespread challenges of everyday life. The HAFF, even at its most optimistic assessment of 30,000 homes, would have a marginal impact on the housing crisis. And the minimum wage boost was a straightforward support of cases in the commission.
None of this adds up to a program, even a minimal one, and there appears to be nothing in the pipeline. The two major initiatives got snarled on difficult politics, with the crossbenchers chopping up the jobs bill that Labor wanted unified to keep gig employers and the like on the hook. The HAFF was 50% a con job, was pinged by the Greens (which pushed for actual housing funding), and won wide public support. Labor and its tame intellectuals really lost the plot in responding, out of personal animus towards the Greens.
That’s been about it, as far as a social democratic government goes. Net-zero initiatives have been pursued, but undermined by fossil fuel grants; there is a commitment of hundreds of billions to a sycophantic US alliance; pointless mass death in Gaza has been endorsed. Leaving aside fantasies of a left social democratic government, one could expect more from a centre-left Labor government. Labor pleads powerlessness to implement popular/populist ideas like price controls, because they’re unconstitutional and also distorting. But they have no appetite for the things that could be done to lower costs and prices, such as challenging the power of the various oligopolies that run our lives. Given the establishment of the national cabinet during COVID-19, they could have created a more substantial and integrated federal/state housing plan to mount a scaled-up attack on affordability.
The failure to propose anything big, simple and sustaining is all the more bewildering given that there is already an example of how Labor can do this and win. Dan Andrews has shown that a series of big projects, and a theme linking them — “Victoria’s Big Build” — allows a government to resituate attacks and scandals arising from smaller issues that have to be dealt with. That worked and it kept working. It would obviously have to be modified for a federal government, but it would be a hell of a lot more effective than what the party is doing now. Why didn’t it do something like that?
The strong suspicion is that it was not merely the desire to maintain the “small target” strategy in a hostile mediascape that dictated this approach. Labor no longer has any strong institutional desire to tackle inequality of opportunity and condition at its root. The right has abandoned even the bread-and-butter form with which it once did this, to run the narrowest of compensatory regimes for those stuck within the limits of class-based lack of opportunity or — in the case of the benefits-dependent — stuck in unending, grinding, hopeless poverty. The “National Left” leadership offers no alternative and seems very pliable, largely grateful simply to have not ended their careers in permanent opposition.
That it has abandoned such programmatic acts can be seen in the success of the Greens’ class and economic attacks, which the party has successfully recentred itself around. If Labor were doing even the most basic muscular things to address the housing crisis, then the Greens would have no line of attack that was simultaneously radical but also basic. If they had been forced leftward by a real Labor program, then they would have had only the most deliberately expansive demands, such as the national rent freeze. Instead, all they had to argue was that a housing program should involve actual money to build actual houses, and politics caught fire for a while. Part of Labor’s primary vote collapse surely occurred in that messy encounter.
When a government derived from a historically social democratic party abandons all but a vestige of such a program, and simultaneously creates an alliance with a belligerent megapower to which hundreds of billions of dollars — essentially most of the country’s ongoing social fund — must be devoted, then it crosses very rapidly from one side to the other. The Albanese government is not here to materially liberate people from class oppression, but to enforce discipline on a population. One usually calls this nationalist. But in this case, it involves a surrender of much of our sovereign power to wage or not wage war to another larger power, to whom we are connected through our white racial heritage.
With no real program, and no wellspring of desire to have one, Labor projects a vacuum. In that vacuum anything at all can appear and become a key issue, and that is what is happening to Labor now. Had it an Andrews-style approach — and it is entirely possible that it doesn’t for no other reason than the National Left’s personal hatred for the leaders of the Victorian Socialist Left — the detainee release issue would not have been as poorly handled as it was, and would not have become a central issue, symbolising the capacity of the government to keep us safe. Instead it, and anything else, can become the main issue for a while, since nothing else of any size occupies the public square.
Would it be possible for the Albanese government to reboot itself in the new year and create some form of synthesised attack on the forces that are making life less and less livable for millions, and close to unlivable for a section of those people? Unless there has always been some cunning plan waiting in the wings, any such program would look ersatz and improvised. But there is no sign that there is sufficient leadership within the government to regroup and offer even that meagre consolation prize. The stronger likelihood is that the vacuum at the heart of the governmental purpose will be expressed as an absence of assertive governmental action. Labor will fight on the defensive all the way to the 2025 election.
There it will face swing voters in 25 or so key outer-suburban electorates that feel that the Albanese government put a lot of inner-city energy into causes of possibility like the Voice on one side, grim military command on the other, and very little in the middle, except for enforcing the discipline of the market. In 2022, I thought that this marked a sort of “left Howardism”, with its commitment to military strength and toughness on refugees and the poor, while offering very little by way of economic transformation. But with its full commitment to the Voice campaign, and not much more than the Voice campaign for several months, it could not even maintain that discipline. It has combined the worst of both worlds, aligning itself with the (deserving) few, and against the many, who feel ever more disregarded by that. If Labor can’t give the appearance of turning the screw, as it were, in this term, it can kiss an era goodbye. And if it can’t perform the reality of that operation, and turn towards some muscular social democratic traditions, should that happen, it won’t matter anyway.
