With just three sitting weeks left of the parliamentary year, a pollster says Anthony Albanese’s Labor government needs to stay hyper-focused on one thing: easing the cost of living.
That’s the message coming out of focus groups at the moment, according to Redbridge Group research and policy director Simon Welsh.
“The one and only thing that should be on Labor’s agenda at the moment is the cost of living,” Welsh told Crikey. “It’s as simple and obvious as that — at the moment, everything else is just noise.”
Welsh said he and his colleagues have heard some horror stories from voters struggling to make ends meet.
“People cutting back on food, people telling their kids they’ve already had dinner and going without so they can make sure their kids eat — it’s horrific stuff,” he said. “The government has to take pressure off the cost of living, particularly between now and Christmas, because their runway is running out.”
Between now and the end of the year, Parliament will sit for a total of 13 days. That includes the four days between November 4 and 7, when only the House of Representatives will sit, and November 8, when only the Senate sits. That’s the same week when Senate estimates — meetings where senators scrutinise how the government is spending taxpayers’ money — will be on.
Then, starting Monday, November 18, both chambers will gather for a final sitting fortnight of two four-day sessions, ending Thursday, November 28.
Some examples of bills that have been introduced to Parliament but not yet voted on include reforms to aged care, public school funding, cyber security, misinformation policy, and migration.
The big items on the agenda include the Aged Care Bill 2024, which was introduced in September with the promise of sweeping changes in the struggling sector. Also on Labor’s to-do list is passing the Help to Buy Bill, which is aimed at easing the housing crisis by allowing the government to co-purchase homes with first-home buyers. That bill has stalled in the Senate after opposition from the Coalition and the Greens.
There are also elements of the government’s “future made in Australia” package yet to pass, and a bill that would deliver “wage justice” for early childhood education and care workers.
That end-of-year legislative agenda will be prosecuted as Albanese gears up for next year’s election and an earlier-than-usual March budget.
Australian National University political historian Frank Bongiorno said the Albanese government came to office with a “pretty modest agenda” that it has mostly been able to implement.
“The centrepiece really was childcare support, and I think we’ll get another package for the 2025 election. I think broadly speaking, the government’s major policy agenda was probably implemented, but it needs to be recognised that it wasn’t an extremely ambitious one,” Bongiorno told Crikey.
“I think it would be fair to say there have been some disappointments, including around things like the National Anti-Corruption Commission and the housing issue … there have been distractions from the particular agenda it set when it came into office, which tends to happen to new governments, like the cost of living crisis, rising energy prices, and inflation.”
Bongiorno said the stage three tax cuts had been a surprise deviation from the agenda Labor was elected on, and a broadly popular one, which it had managed to “get away with” under cover of the cost of living crisis.
Welsh said that childcare reform and the stage three tax cuts tended to be mentioned by focus group participants as examples of policies that have been popular.
“I’d say the tax cuts have had qualified support, because most folks found the tax cuts were swallowed completely by increases in everyday living costs,” he said.
“On childcare, what we’re hearing repeatedly is: ‘Good idea, good on them, but my childcare provider just raised the fees by almost the exact amount of the subsidy, so it kind of wiped it out completely. I’d say there has been qualified support [for those policies] but the picture is that it’s not enough.”
The prime minister’s office was contacted for comment.
