Australians have kicked over into summer mode, but major party strategists have their eyes firmly on outer suburban Melbourne. A byelection in commuter country set the scene for politics in the first quarter of 2023 and the same thing will happen in 2024.
Labor secured an upset – a once-in-a-century victory – in the Aston byelection in April. Voters were still angry about the deficiencies of the Morrison government and Anthony Albanese was enjoying his post-election honeymoon. Now, in the opening months of 2024, the government will face a byelection in the electorate of Dunkley – a contest triggered by the death of Labor backbencher Peta Murphy. Holding the marginal seat in the first quarter of 2024 will be a much tougher ask.
In April 2023, 52% of respondents in the Guardian Essential poll approved of Albanese’s performance as prime minister even while inflationary pressure prompted 61% of respondents to say they were either squeezed or struggling to pay for groceries and food. But more than half a year later, Albanese’s approval is net negative in Guardian Essential and 76% of respondents are frustrated with what they see as a lack of action on food and grocery prices, while 77% want more done to reduce power bills.
The major party contest has also become more of a contest in the last few months of this year. Labor’s primary vote has declined. In the Newspoll, it’s gone from 39% in December 2022 to 33% in December 2023. Back in September 2022, the Coalition’s primary dipped as low as 31%, but it is back up to 36% this month. The major parties were neck-and-neck in that poll’s two-party-preferred measure in November. In December, a positive movement inside the survey’s margin of error put Labor back in front of the Coalition, 52% to 48%.
Polls aren’t predictive. They capture the national mood at points in time. But the trend tells a story: Albanese and the government are measurably post-honeymoon. Because post-election approval held up for such a long time, this transition felt like a fall to earth, a sensation fanned by some breathless coverage. But one law of politics is immutable: no government defies gravity forever. The longer incumbents remain airborne, the harder the thud can feel on re-entry.
Unfavourable conditions
The negative poll trend in part reflects tough conditions. Humans have felt off-balance since the pandemic reminded people we are mortal and vulnerable to global shocks. That was followed in short order by global inflation.
Inflation in Australia peaked later than in other advanced economies and is not expected to fall below 3% until 2024-25. Its return is a nasty shock in a country that largely managed to ride out the shock of the global financial crisis before enjoying an extended period of low inflation, low unemployment and low interest rates. As the cost-of-living squeeze has persisted, interest rate rises have been relentless; the official cash rate is now at a 12-year high.
Because of the unfavourable conditions, some Australians have felt out of sync with Albanese’s priorities in the second half of this year. While people were head down battling material pressures, the prime minister prosecuted the case for an Indigenous voice to parliament.
The cause was just, and a prime minister keeping his promise to First Nations people was the right thing to do. In this country, that doesn’t happen very often. But the timing was bad. Albanese hoped to win the referendum despite the absence of bipartisan support by building a coalition of the willing – churches, community groups, corporates. His judgment – a triumph of hope over experience – proved to be incorrect.
Then there’s travel. Albanese travelled a lot in 2023 for one reason – the relationships he is tending, and the coalitions he is building, serve Australia’s national interest. The world is a dangerous place. There are wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Australia sits in another hot zone – at the epicentre of strategic competition between the United States and China.
Over the past 12 months, Albanese has rebalanced the relationship with our biggest trading partner while deepening personal rapport with our most important security partner. Australia is also seeking to win a soft power war in our sphere of influence – the Pacific. But the government reaped limited domestic political reward for the painstaking labour because Australians were hunkered down in their own travails. The travel was weaponised as a symptom of a prime minister being out of touch.
Then there is Albanese’s radical experiment in governing. This experiment is mission-critical to democracy, but ephemeral for people focused on life.
Brought back to battle
After winning the election, Albanese sought to reset the equilibrium of the polity, a quest that every prime minister since Tony Abbott has attempted in one form or another. Albanese wanted to disrupt algorithmic-fuelled anxiety and aggression – the cultural bequest of globalised social platforms, propagandising cable news conglomerates and rolling live coverage – by putting his head down and getting on with things. The values he wanted to project were empathy and order, and he sought to do this institutionally, by leveraging the ramparts of democracy.
Transparency was not as significant as hoped. But cabinet government returned; prime ministerial power was decentralised. Officials were respected. There was no faux distancing from the vocation of politics – all that tactical othering vanished – no “Canberra bubble”. Interestingly, for a lifelong progressive and a radical leftwinger in his youth, Albanese harbours a deeply conservative streak when it comes to institutions.
But it is very hard to subdue the animal spirits.
Prime ministers wanting to embark on a civics project need deep wells of capital, the skills of a lion tamer to subdue a raging media cycle fuelled by spectacle and confirmation bias and a public interest-adjacent ally in the combatant sitting across the dispatch box. Peter Dutton was unlikely to help.
Dutton is a polariser. An outer-suburban narrowcaster. He’s a stop-the-boats, hard borders isolationist; a powerful political insider with the populists’ shtick of expressing contempt for elites.
There’s an alignment between Dutton’s political brand and a mulish national zeitgeist. But he is starting a trek back to government from a long way behind because the party’s metropolitan heartland went teal in 2022. Tranquility doesn’t serve his short-term objectives – as Australians learned during the voice referendum. The Liberal leader pulled his base close, set his cruise control to partisan ruthlessness and went full Dutton. Albanese, chasing the ideal of his unifying national moment, played a very dead bat to the provocations. Dutton won that battle decisively, first dividing the country, then gaslighting Albanese as the bringer of division.
In the week before Christmas, the prime minister was asked by a radio host whether he would spend the summer recess tracking down his missing je ne sais quoi. The ABC’s Sabra Lane noted “the public perception has been that you’ve been off-kilter since the referendum result and the government … has been flailing”. Lane wondered: “How will you regain your mojo?”
I understand the question. But this is not so much a mojo problem as a midterm government washing up at a new strategic crossroads. Albanese and his colleagues have implemented most of their election promises but the government is yet to define its decisive second act.
Even though the government has been powering through its to-do list, in the court of public opinion, there’s been a sense of drift, an absence of sharp definition. As exhaustion levels increased towards the end of the year, frustrations surfaced internally too. Albanese is transiting between being marked up for being decent and because he’s not Scott Morrison, and marked down as voters deliver their verdict on various judgments they don’t care for.
The prime minister is now reportedly being derided as “beta” and “bland” in some focus groups – a narrative that suits Dutton’s desire to make political leadership less an exercise in civic renewal and more a test of manhood. If this simplification reads like overstatement, listen to any of Dutton’s interviews on 2GB.
Dutton’s positioning has certainly given him some traction in the second half of 2023. But his strategy is not without risk. Whether Dutton is on to a winner or not, the sharply contested atmospherics require Albanese to re-enter the fray – on his own terms and decisively, because like it or not, the fight has come to him. In an environment of anxiety and adversity, incumbents need a clear agenda and dividing lines otherwise they become magnets for disaffection and ennui.
If you can’t rise above the fight, your only option is to win it.
Crossing no man’s land
In opposition, Albanese often used a sporting analogy to try to explain his strategy. Rather than focus on winning the day, the cadence would be different. The objective would be to kick with the wind in the final quarter.
While progressives always want Labor governments to deliver more progress faster, the government has been rapidly assembling building blocks that it hopes will be the bedrock of its re-election pitch for 2025. Wages are creeping up after years of stagnation. Labor has delivered a surplus and there is a possibility of two. Senior players hope the cycle of interest rate rises is over, or close to over – with potential reductions possible in late 2024 or early 2025.
Industrial reforms are making their way through the parliament and will be bedded down ahead of any election contest. The government has a roadmap to reform the National Disability Insurance Scheme and a handshake from the states to share some of the costs. Environmental reforms and climate regulations have passed, with more to come. The riven legislature in the United States has also managed to pass legislation necessary to put the Aukus pact into operation.
But to reach the sunnier uplands of late 2024 and early 2025 without having sustained life-threatening political injuries, the government must first cross the no man’s land of early 2024. Senior figures acknowledge this period will be politically difficult because of the high probability voters are enduring the peak of the cost-of-living squeeze.
Because of this, both Albanese and the treasurer, Jim Chalmers, are leaving open the option of providing more relief to households in the May budget – as long as the help doesn’t fuel inflation. Responding to Lane’s mojo question, Albanese was very specific, saying: “We’ll continue to examine ways of taking the pressure off Australians whilst not also adding to inflation.”
As well as the discomfort of inflation, there’s that byelection. The electorate of Dunkley has three distinct areas – a tealish cohort near Mount Eliza and Mornington, a solid Labor-voting cohort around Frankston and classic swingers in the adjacent mortgage belt suburbs. Labor holds the seat on a margin of just over 6%. Murphy, a diligent and popular local member, gained a positive two-party preferred swing in 2022 of 3.5%.
Senior figures feel it is possible for the government to hold the seat with the right campaign and candidate. But possible is about as high as the boosterism goes. A defeat feels more probable than a victory.
If the government loses the seat, the aftermath will be parsed in gladiatorial terms. A victory for the Liberals – the reverse Aston – will be proclaimed a harbinger of Dutton’s national political fightback. A loss for Albanese will animate a government-in-crisis narrative.
This is how coverage of byelections tends to go. But one point can be made: Labor’s victory in Aston in 2023 was also framed apocalyptically as the death knell for Duttonism. Turns out it wasn’t, because Duttonism gained ground in the second half of 2023.
Espirit de corps
Which brings us back to Dutton and winning political battles in 2023. He has. But taking the long view tells you winning the day, the week or the month doesn’t mean you win the war. Ask Scott Morrison, winner of days, master of the optics, until all voters could see was performance. Ask Bill Shorten, who set the daily agenda and helped blast Liberal prime ministers out of the Lodge before losing the 2019 election.
Dutton can land blows, but thus far he’s failed to flesh out how things would be different if he were prime minister. There is no substantial opposition policy in the public domain beyond a passing interest in small modular nuclear reactors.
Being agenda-lite doesn’t have to matter in the post-truth, post-substance era. You can certainly win an election as a blank slate; Morrison circa 2019 can attest to this. You can also win government from opposition with a knockout blow – Tony Abbott is the exemplar case. But Abbott didn’t win without help. Labor’s civil war helped propel an unpopular opposition leader into government.
Thus far, Labor’s internal discipline has held. It might not, of course, if the terrain gets tougher. But esprit de corps has held up through the accumulated frustrations of late 2023, which have been plentiful. Beyond opposing the lion’s share of government policy, inflicting damage on Albanese, and appealing to the cultural alienation and material anxiety of suburban blokes, it’s also unclear how Dutton intends to build an electoral coalition for victory.
In the run-up to the 2022 election, Albanese was very obviously courting women, young people worried about global heating and Chinese Australians alienated by Morrison and Dutton’s weaponisation of Australia’s relationship with Beijing. Albanese also courted Western Australian voters using the springboard of former premier Mark McGowan’s popularity. In times when the vote for major parties appears to be in structural decline, leaders and strategists engage in this level of minutiae.
Dutton is very obviously courting suburban disaffection. It might catch; narrowcasting to the everybloke who imagines himself provoked and oppressed by creeping wokeism certainly wins you one voting cohort.
But it’s an open question whether the pitch persuades the majority of the country. Dutton has a gender gap when it comes to voter approval.
He’s a regular visitor to the west, judging Labor’s overperformance in the state in 2022 will not be repeated in 2025. Observers minded to be cynical, given his domestic messaging about the Middle East war, might also speculate he’s courting Jewish communities the Liberals lost when their capital city heartland turned teal in the last contest.
I suspect this analysis is a bit superficial. But there is one obvious curiosity about Dutton’s pro-Israel, no limits positioning – how that aligns with his ambition to take back the outer suburbs. The million-strong Islamic-Australian communities identifying viscerally with Palestinian suffering in the Gaza Strip are heavily represented in the electorates Dutton is trying to court. That one is a genuine head-scratcher.
Albanese has been telling colleagues forging a path across no man’s land involves staying positive, sticking to the core business of households, health, the climate transition and the economy, and making sure voters understand that a cash splash would cause more problems than it solves. People say he wants to walk a line between landing a sharper definition of Dutton’s deficiencies while not becoming obsessed with his opponent.
Concluding his mojo conversation with Lane, Albanese said 2024 would be about building on the government’s agenda with some “fresh ideas”. It would also be about putting his opponent under some pressure as the political cycle moves to the business end. “I note that during 2023, whilst our opponents opposed our measures to provide support on cost of living, they haven’t come up with a single proposal,” Albanese said. “They have nothing positive to offer.”
