AUSTRALIAN POLITICS 2024 – JOE HILDEBRAND

As Australians came out of their holiday season for 2024, it was increasingly clear that the cost of living had become a nagging sore for the federal government of Anthony Albanese. With a backflip over the Coalition’s promised tax cuts due in mid-2024, there seemed to be a pause in the negativity flowing to the government. Would the year pan out to be a turn around of feeling or more bad news to come? To assess where politics might be at as 2024 began, Joe Hildebrand, Australian journalist and television and radio presenter, and Jennifer Hewett, National Affairs Columnist for The Australian Financial Review, addressed The Sydney Institute on 7 February 2024 to reflect on the year ahead.

AUSTRALIAN POLITICS 2024 

JOE HILDEBRAND

Thank you, Gerard. Thank you, Jennifer, for basically reading out my entire speech, because I agree with everything you said, as I often do with very smart people. Although, yours was far more economically literate than mine is going to be. What I might do is put meat on the bones of a lot of the points that Jennifer raised in terms of where Labor thinks it is going, or thinks it needs to go and, perhaps, the deeper thinking behind some of these pivots, backflips or lies – whatever you want to call them.

I agree that in 2024, it’s very difficult to see many pots of gold at the end of the rainbow. Although, 2023 was pretty hard to beat in terms of sheer disaster and misery. I like even numbers so that’s one thing 2024 has got going for it: it’s divisible by a lot of twos.

In my view, 2024 will be the year of Albo 2.0. I would stress that this is not the real Albo; this is not him saying “I’ve just been faking it until now”, as Julia Gillard did so disastrously in 2010. It will be Albo actually being and doing what he wants to be. I was writing that last night in my notes, when Dennis Shanahan’s piece on the front page of The Australian popped up saying the new PM is Albo unleashed, Albo in his natural habitat. I thought, if Dennis Shanahan’s agreeing with me, I must be on the right track. Again, if Dennis Shanahan is praising Albo, then you know Albo must be doing something right.

We all know that Albo went to the election in 2022 with a huge small target strategy, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. That was the right strategy; it had to be because Shorten, paradoxically, in 2019 exposed Labor to so many fronts of attack from the Coalition it cost him the election. In some ways, it was a political and moral come-uppance for Shorten and Labor’s Mediscare campaign in 2016, which I thought was pretty disgraceful. The point is Labor couldn’t really say what it was going to do, didn’t really know what it was going to do and, basically, said it was going to be business as usual; almost Blair-esque. Margaret Thatcher would say “Britain will be safe under Tony Blair.” Conservatives could say, “Australia will be safe under Anthony Albanese.” The way that was reached, paradoxically, is because Albo is the ultimate pragmatist and the ultimate fixer, despite some of the rhetoric from my beloved colleague on Sky News, Bronwyn Bishop. He is not – or at least no longer – the trot of old, or the socialist left warrior of old. Even when he was, he was a very clear-eyed, pragmatic fixer.

While people say Albo said crazy things, most of the time when he was working in the ALP he was telling the left how it was going to lose. The famous cliché is, “It’s the perfect result: the right gets to win, and the left gets to go down fighting.” The idea that Albo would be one of those people who are out painting a Palestinian flag on the Opera House is just completely and utterly wrong. And I say that as someone who knows him, as someone who has been schooled in Labor politics, blooded in Labor politics almost my entire adult life.

Touching on the Israel question, the Labor Party actually thinks it’s being incredibly pro-Israel. Albo and Wong think they are being so out there. But, of course, in all the mail they are getting from their own constituents, from the activist left and in south-west Sydney where many right wing MPs have their seats on the line, they’re being told they are a bunch of genocidal, barbarian, murderous, bloodthirsty scum who are going to go to hell. Someone in Wong’s office said that it’s almost 100:1 in terms of the volume of support for one side over the other. So, they feel they are holding the line, even though a lot of people on the right think they’re selling Israel down the drain. This is a party that wants to be at the centre.

Albo knows about power and how to get there. He is not like Bill Shorten who started sounding like a student socialist using class war rhetoric like “the top end of town”, and bringing in wealth redistribution policies like negative gearing and the rest of it. Whether Albo is emotionally, morally or ideologically invested, he’s a pragmatist, it doesn’t matter. He saw an opportunity for him to position himself as the pro-business, centrist, moderate face of Labor, and to outflank Shorten – ironically, given that Shorten is the kingmaker of the Victorian right – on the right. And this despite being a warlord of the left. I spend my life obsessing over Labor politics. It was a masterclass in how to outfox someone. Shorten was left spinning and thinking, “How did I lose the prime ministership by saying all this stuff that I didn’t even believe in?” So, this is a government that deliberately positioned itself as non-threatening and centrist in the lead up to the 2022 election. The result was that it won; it didn’t win a huge a primary vote, but it won as the safest option. Which is the beauty of two-party preferred politics.

The difficulty was when it came to election night, and Albo had to give a rousing speech in Canterbury-Hurlstone Park RSL Club. He came out to a cheering throng of supporters; Labor’s true faithful, true believers in front of him. He began, “I promise on my first day of government, I will…”, until he realised he had nothing in the can. He hadn’t promised to do anything, all he’d promised was what not to do. So, he infamously uttered the words “We will introduce the Uluru Statement in full”. This was something no one knew he was going to say, except a couple of people on the night. You can imagine as he took to the stage, the last thing his advisor said was, “Sorry, what?” That happened, and we all know the result of that.

It was disastrous but the economic cycle has been very generous to the political cycle if you’re Anthony Albanese. The cost-of-living crisis only really started to fully bite after he had already won. What little damage or hurt it was causing before that he could blame on Scott Morrison. Then, of course, it smashed everybody. We were right up against it with that massive run of interest rate hikes. But, as of this year, it looks like inflation’s coming down, rates are going to go down, and he’s going to get that beautiful plane right up until the next election. In political terms, they call that being kicked in the arse by a rainbow. It’s like the lucky general where the soldier gets asked “What sort of general would you like to serve under?” and he says, “A lucky one.” Albo has been very lucky.

The Voice was a debacle; all people heard was Labor talking about the Voice, which was very good politics on Dutton’s part because all he would do is ask Albanese about the Voice and say, “Why are you focussed on the Voice, and not the cost of living?” Then Albanese would say “No, we’re not focussed on the Voice, we’re focussed on cost of living”, and everyone would say “There he goes, he’s talking about the Voice again”. That was incredibly effective. The way the campaign was run cannot be defended. I was a supporter of the Voice; I was here with Warren Mundine about a year ago debating its merits. It’s fair to say that the merits that I subscribed to it were rather bullish, and Warren Mundine and Jacinta Price’s campaign against it was incredibly effective. Certainly, my personal fury is limitless.

The point is, as Jennifer astutely said, after that lost weekend of 2023, that wasted year where all the energy, debate, $400 million and the rest of it was thrown into the referendum, we come to the end of 2023 and we’re back to ground zero, back to the drawing board – and what have they got? They’ve got nothing. So, the thinking behind the reversal of the tax cuts is multi-fold. One is, the government already thought they were doing lots about cost of living; free childcare, free TAFE, $23 billion in the budget last year in cost-of-living measures, but nobody knew about it. Nobody thought they were getting anything, and that’s completely understandable, because if you’re still hurting, you’re not going to think, “It’s fine, the government’s really helping me out.” Of course, everyone’s hurting.

There was a poll at the end of last year in the weekend News Corp mastheads that 80 per cent of people thought the government wasn’t doing enough or anything for them on cost-of-living. So, that’s $23 billion and people think you’re doing nothing at all, let alone whether they like it. No one was listening to them. No one realised they were doing anything, or thought they were doing anything. The thinking behind the tax backflip was, “They’ll beat the shit out of us for it, but at least they’ll know what’s happening. Everyone will be saying it’s happening, and every single person will know that they’re getting a tax cut.” That is exactly what happened. It was brutal, pragmatic and arguably immoral depending on how much you believe politicians should keep their promises.

I had thought they needed to hold the line for the sake of Labor’s long-term credibility and economic integrity, to show that it was the party of aspiration. But they didn’t. I was a bit naïve in my thoughts. When I talk to people about it asking, “Aren’t you worried the Prime Minister broke a promise or that the Prime Minister lied?” they reply “They’re all liars. You trust them? You’re an idiot.” So, they have figured the political brand is tainted anyway. So, Labor received a huge tsunami of attention about what every single taxpayer is going to get. It’s being shouted from the rooftops by Peter Dutton, conservative media outlets; “Every single Australian? The average Australian is only going to get $16 a week”, and everyone’s saying, “$16 a week? Alright, that’s something.” At least they know what they’re getting. So, Labor’s enemies end up doing their publicity for them. The result of that, as in Monday’s Newspoll, is more than 2 to 1 in favour of the tax cuts. They don’t care about broken promises, they just want the money.

That resets Labor not just politically, but it also gives it something it didn’t have before, which goes back to even before the 2022 election. What does Labor actually believe or stand for? The problem is, if you go to any election proclaiming what the loudest – which are by necessity, mostly, left wing – voices of Labor say it stands for, you will never get elected in this country in a million years. You can’t say what all the activists on the left are saying. For so long, the right of the party has been cowed by those voices so that it hasn’t actually articulated a positive vision of what it stands for. Instead, the right just says, “We’re not going to go that far”, “We’re not going to do that”, or “We might do that in the long run, but we can’t say we’re doing it because we’d never get elected.” The right of the party lacked a cohesive idea of what it was and what it stood for. On top of this, you’ve got this bizarre thing where the left thinks that tax cuts are somehow the domain of conservatives; that tax cuts in themselves are a conservative or Liberal thing no matter who they’re going to, because we should be building the welfare state.

Ironically, if Albo had taken this tax package, which is better for working and middle Australians, to the election he might have actually gotten a higher primary vote. But they were so scared of tax cuts generally that they ended up backing tax cuts for wealthier people than the people they would actually help. Which brings us to the other point.

So, it’s starting to help Labor think about what it is, what it wants and who it stands for. That’s something that is very much at the heart of both Chalmers’ and Albanese’s thinking, whether they’re talking to each other or not. They insist that the relationship is fine when they talk to me. But both of them are personally very heavily invested in being like Mary Queen of Scots before her execution: whipping off the black dress, showing the red underneath. Saying “You know what? I don’t care anymore. This is what we believe in.” It’s electorally very strong, as we’ve seen. I think it will save Dunkley for them; which is based around the suburb of Frankston. I grew up in Dandenong and they used to call Frankston “Dandenong by the sea”. That was not a compliment. But it’s very aspirational now; it’s got Mount Eliza on the way to the Mornington Peninsula. So, it’s got of a bit of money now, and tradies that earn more than all of us combined.

So, then there’s the political tactical matters. Wealthy voters who lean to the left and who are missing out on the promised tax cuts, if they’re voting left at all, they’re voting Teal and Green. They’re not voting for the Labor Party. So, this takes 2024 right to the outer suburbs, to the outer regions. Dutton doesn’t need to worry about the Teals anymore. Albo doesn’t need to worry about the Greens anymore – and that means they’re going to be putting mainstream, suburban, middle Australian values or, more importantly, economics needs, right at the centre of politics. That makes me, as a pragmatist, very happy. So, maybe there is some good to be said for 2024 after all.