The graphs of polling of a government over time always resemble the profile of the head of a lizard. In the case of the Albanese government, it’s a frill neck: a thick enough base at election time, widening out as the government’s popularity and legitimacy extended for a year or so. It has now narrowed to a vicious little mouth, as the Coalition has regained support, the two-party-preferred now standing at 51-49.
If Labor is not careful, the lizard will snap come 2025.
With the polling and political progress, the prime minister has turned a little mean-mouthed too. That’s certainly the perception of sections of the electorate, both those to the left of Labor who lend it eventual support and the swinging voters in the outer suburbs and exurbs that it relies upon for government.
Many of the latter are bewildered and disappointed that the government they voted in to get serious about governing has proved, so far as the internal government of the country, and the condition of our everyday lives, haphazard, distracted and less than honest. By contrast, its commitment to international affairs, in the form of AUKUS, has been obsessive, focused and adamantine.
People have noticed this. Labor prime ministers always get eventually bored and irritated with the domestic policies they were elected to implement — all those poor people, all that penny-ante stuff about housing and wages and the baby’s got croup and I can’t get a GP — but the Albanese government set a new standard by pivoting from this almost immediately.
What we wanted, right across the political spectrum, was not just better and more honest governance and a concerted approach to the growing inequality and shrinking opportunity for a decent way of life. We wanted both of those synergised so that domestic politics would start to be a machine that worked for better conditions of life, thus creating a virtuous circle that would lift us out of the miasma of the Morrison years and the entire Coalition decade.
What we got instead was a prime minister who was almost immediately at the podium in front of a submarine. Whether or not most Australian people support the US alliance — and some polling suggests support is far weaker than the conventional account — they do not have an American view of global responsibility and presence. But the right faction of Labor do, and now so too perhaps do Albanese and Wong.
The result has been a widespread perception, and a reality, that as far as domestic policy and Australians’ lives go, Albanese Labor is dilatory, distracted, disconnected and gimmicky. The party’s economic viewpoint is now driven by centre-right public choice, Rawlsian types like Jim Chalmers and Andrew Leigh. Decent people perhaps, but everything that comes out of their mouths says they spend all their time looking at national aggregate graphs to conclude that the country overall is doing alright, without considering how it looks from the viewpoint of the lower 30-40%.
This has been added to by slick gimmicks that have the mark of being dodged up by twenty-something special advisors in brainstorm sessions oriented to finding announceable policy solutions to political problems, and not substantial evidence-based policy. The Housing Australia Future Fund bore the mark of this. There’s nothing wrong with having a housing fund using interest from invested state capital as one part of a comprehensive housing approach. But to announce it as a 10 billion dollar investment in 30,000 houses over five years, guaranteed, was just a lie. When Labor was caught out on it by a newly militant Greens party, their reaction was haughty arrogance, not of debate about the limits of policy possibility. How dare these double-barrelled upstarts question our virtue?
The same was in evidence in other areas, such as the environment. Tanya Plibersek announced the desire to end extinctions on this continent while rubber-stamping new coal and gas projects. She excitedly announced that Australia would use environmental bond trading to become a “Green Wall Stree”’, a disastrous image she had to later withdraw.
These things are more than strategic blundering. They’re an expression of a mild narcissism and arrogance that Albanese Labor has carried over from their more leftward political apprenticeships in student and youth politics. I’m sure Plibersek, living through decades of the continent being trashed, has dreamed of being able to stand up and say “no more extinctions” or something like it. But when she got to do it, it had to be accompanied by militant action, which proved politically impossible.
We would have respected the government more if Plibersek had announced a paced-up but not immediate phase-out of most coal and gas and admitted that the continent would be brown for some time yet. We would have felt less taken for fools by a government whose announceables sometimes approach the political equivalent of jangling keys. This was perforce the problem with, and political disaster of, the Voice and its handling.
Amid the mass public perception that little had been done for them, but something might be on the way, the government poured an enormous amount of political capital into the Voice, a woolly political proposal, incompetently advanced by its champions and added to by a government campaign that was more incompetent than that. The Albanese government’s insistent claim that the Voice was not a division but a unity — when it was (justly) recognising a fundamental division in Australian life — looked desperate; an excessive attention to the (virtuous) few at the expense of the many.
This failure to have a narrative, a big policy proposal, or an insistent plan over these two years has created a vacuum, one which has become the crucible for the mild degree of social disintegration we are now seeing. High immigration and multiculturalism work when a positive policy of successively opened opportunity and possibility is aggressively pursued. When there is no attention to this, the space is filled with resentment, disengagement, and the recourse to smaller group morality.
That is what is happening at the moment. Property crime starts to rise when there is a feeling — whether voiceable by its participants or not — that it is a rough form of economic redistribution, performed in the absence of any visible government action on such. This sense of disengagement has been ramrodded by Gaza and the government’s sickeningly sycophantic and performative show of loyalty to the US-Israel alliance, and its heightened attention to the claims of rising anti-semitism, while real people, people’s relatives, were being shredded by Israeli bombs.
It wasn’t just Arab-Australians who had their marginal status made visible to them by Labor’s policy on Gaza. Anyone who was (avoiding this admin phrase “people of colour”) black or brown, from those who were recently the colonised “wretched of the earth”, recognised that Australia and Labor’s words about building a new society, and the “great success of multiculturalism” were more spin. Both Parliament and Labor remain excessively Anglo-Celtic, and snap back to it when required.
Belatedly, the government announced its “made in Australia”, which appears to enjoy substantial support from a population who have always been protectionist and nationalist in their political-economic opinion. But they had already wrapped this expansion of our domestic production around the expansion of military production required for AUKUS.
Rather than putting the means of reproducing life at the centre of our renewed social economy, they had put the death pact they had signed with the US — that we would unnecessarily make ourselves an enemy to, and target of, our largest trading partner, and others, to assist the US in extending its unlimited global reach across the surface of the earth into a 21st century, in which such claims were an implicit incitement to war by those impinged upon.
This connected the military manufacturing build-up to the single most dispiriting thing that Albanese Labor has done in its term — its announcement of a $362 billion multi-decade commitment to the chimerical hardware demands of the AUKUS “pact”. This, we all knew, with a final melancholy flutter, was the end of anything approaching “social democracy” in Australia. And a Labor government had killed it. This was now a nationalist war party, funnelling the hospitals and schools of the future, the lost promise of tackling inequality, into the giant furnace of war, the red belly of Moloch.
This is where we are now. The social disintegration that the government suddenly identifies is a product of the lack of attention to the social whole — attention that they not merely promised, but which is the necessary and implicit promise of any Labo(u)r party. Absent that, and with the weight of a vast, outwardly directed security apparatus, the interior more or less caves in. Then the security motif is directed inward as increased surveillance and coercion. Thus to look responsive to the ghastly and, hopefully, freak event at Bondi Pavilion, Bill Shorten calls for full police presence at shopping malls, cops with the full rig out, guns and stunners and spray, etc.
They’ll have the attitude to go with it. The petty violence of swaggering cops in a Westfield — violence which will be racialised and gendered, which will construct the neurodivergent as incipiently criminal — will thus contribute to further social disengagement, fraying. Round and round we will go. Instead, Labor could turn towards the Australian people, and take up its side, on housing, on the price of food, on spiralling upfront medical costs and much more.
In the absence of that, we get a truly reptilian country — a nation of cop-filled Westfields from one coast to the other — and while the Coalition pursue deranged culture wars and obsessions, Greens and independents become the people’s representatives, making their most basic demands, gaining a wider audience, and a grudging respect. Which in turn piques Labor further, and makes them yet more contemptuous and disdainful of public mood.
There is still time in the final year for Labor to reverse this grim process, and set themselves up for what may well be minority government in their next term. Yes, yes, Albanese Labor has done many small good things. But I’m not inclined to catalogue them for a government so oriented to trashing realistic hopes. At the moment, they are missing the opportunity of history, and the lizard is about to snap.
