Why Albanese is in trouble

Where’s the urgency from Labor? Unfortunately, Albanese doesn’t do urgent. In fact, it’s hard to point to any Labor achievements that haven’t been incremental, minimal, indexed or unavoidable.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: if Australia’s stuck with a choice for PM between Albanese and Dutton, surely the former is the only reasonable and moral option. For all the attempts in the media to frame Dutton as a strong, strategic and decisive leader, there’s little evidence of these qualities. Dog-whistling isn’t tough, slogans aren’t signs of strategic skill, and he’s not been decisive on any issue at all, except in culture warring, where his instincts for white nationalism trump all else. Even on key policy areas such as nuclear power and immigration, Dutton’s positions are inchoate. He doesn’t seem to have any other significant policies, only banal aspirational statements: “We need to tackle inflation”, “We will deliver more affordable housing” etc. There’s no meat on these bones. Dutton’s a policy skeleton, and frankly, a scary one.

This is not to say that Albanese’s a great option. It’s debatable whether he deserves another shot at majority government – and perhaps also theoretical, because he probably won’t get it. Albanese’s rusted-on supporters, including in caucus, point to his government’s many minor achievements as if they’re major ones. Few can identify anything memorable it has delivered. To give credit, Labor’s IR changes seem to have been well managed. (You’d be pretty worried if it didn’t even deliver in this area.) It has raised subsidies for childcare, some healthcare and medicines, cut TAFE fees. Its stage three income tax changes were very welcome, but it’s odd that Labor’s signal achievement is not fully implementing a Liberal policy that it earlier promised it would. It’s not exactly inspirational.

In fact, it’s hard to point to any Labor achievements that haven’t been incremental, minimal, indexed or unavoidable. They haven’t completely wrecked anything yet; their managerialism has done little more than maintain the status quo. And this is Albanese’s big problem.

Everything in his nature, and everything he has worked to build, now seems unsuitable for the current moment. He has assiduously worked politics from the inside his whole career, with little aptitude for public presentation. He’s a backroom guy, a strategist, a schemer and a planner. He’s got a way of working within the system, and to date it’s worked for him. He’s the prime minister, after all, so why change now? In recent months, though, the brittle nature of his political persona has become obvious. He often seems irritable, is loath to admit fault, gives the appearance of inflexibility, and doesn’t seem to understand that the public don’t want a leader intent on quietly pursuing incremental change and not rocking the boat. The times call for something else entirely, and it’s not clear he’s capable of recognising this, let alone delivering it.

When Albanese led Labor to power, his team made two things very clear: they weren’t going to embark on any large or risky reforms; and they planned to be in power for a long time. Several terms, that was the plan. Inherent in this was the idea that they could calmly establish their credentials as Sound Economic Managers, and not be a threat to business, and wouldn’t do anything – literally anything – that might irritate anyone (except the ‘Greens Political Party’). With the exception of the Voice, which arguably threatened First Nations interests rather than his anyway, Albanese’s government has steadfastly aimed for the middle (or centre-right) ground, and simply refused to do anything brave or contentious. It is minimalism and reviews all the way down. On many of the big policy areas, Labor are in a bipartisan embrace with the Coalition. They will argue endlessly over details, but this is mostly window-dressing, the appearance of conflict in an attempt to convince themselves that they actually are different. The rhetoric is often different, but in practical terms it is just the narcissism of small differences.

Labor insiders may point to divergences, but the public has seen no genuine shifts in defence, housing, emissions reduction, resources, education, media, environment policy. While the cost of living soars, the Albanese government offers band-aids and bromides. Multinationals and fossil fuel companies continue to exploit every imaginable tax loophole; the wealthy continue to enjoy unfair tax breaks of many kinds; Australia’s economy is dominated by profit-gouging cartels (banking, retail, transport, consulting etc etc), while toothless regulators do nothing to curb them; schools, universities and the health system are straining at the seams; decades of Howard policies have reduced real wages and inflated housing costs and insurance premiums; and social services and welfare rates have been degraded to the point of humiliation. Where’s the urgency from Labor?

Albanese doesn’t do urgent. It’s hard to know what his government is trying to do, let alone how they plan to do it. It’s also hard to know what Albanese will fight for, because we’ve never seen him fight for anything before, other than power.

Meanwhile, the list of things a progressive, moral and fair government would have done becomes more evident by the day. Long-promised environmental protections have been shelved, along with plans for gambling advertising, local content quotas and superannuation tax; reforms of the school and university sectors have also stalled. The NACC introduced by Labor has been a dismal failure so far, spending $140m and employing 200 staff without launching a single successful corruption investigation. Labor’s response to the genocide in Gaza has been pathetically timid. Its emissions reduction policy is a charade, entirely based on sham offsets and other accounting tricks, while it ramps up the extraction and export of fossil fuels. The construction sector is in crisis, when new housing is desperately needed. Dental and mental health remain critically unsupported. And at a time when we could really use the money for emergency services, emergency accommodation, insurance plans and other climate adaptation measures, the Albanese government seems intent on pursuing the utterly ridiculous $368 billion-plus AUKUS submarine deal. Has there ever been a worse time to commit to a long-term partnership with the US, on a technology that we don’t own and have no capacity to support, that may or may not arrive in two decades?

Albanese’s Labor have thrown away a term that offered the perfect opportunity for major progressive reforms. Both the upper and lower house offered ample opportunities to support any brave proposed bills. Unfortunately they never arrived. Instead, Albanese chose to pick fights with the ‘Greens Political Party’ at every opportunity. Instead of launching bold policies with left/progressive support, he has negotiated them down with Dutton’s Coalition. This approach, we are to believe, is because Albanese is a sensible centrist, definitely not a radical, and would never do anything to harm the business community. As everyone in politics knows, Labor insiders hate the Greens more than they hate the Liberal party.

Albanese’s penchant for back-room deal-making is admired in some political circles, but if he thought he’d get any public credit for quietly negotiating with the Coalition, he was kidding himself. Did he really think that News Corp would grudgingly concede that the Albanese government was actually good and “safe”? Did he think that Dutton would somehow run out of things to attack him over? Did he think Greens and teals voters might switch in respectful favour of his practicality? Without a strong policy program, it was an arrogance for Albanese to believe he could set the tone and the terms of public debate, especially given he’s never had any experience shaping public conversations. And if you’ve said and done nothing that anyone remembers, a safe pair of hands quickly starts to look like a do-nothing pair of hands.