THE ALBANESE GOVERNMENT: WHAT TO EXPECT

As the Albanese government settled in following Labor’s win at the 21 May 2022 federal election, The Sydney Institute held a series of talks on what the new government might reflect and what the election had meant for Australia generally. On Tuesday 7 June 2022, two of Australia’s best political commentators – Troy Bramston, Senior writer at The Australian and author of Bob Hawke – Demons and Destiny and Parnell McGuinness, Managing Director Strategy and Policy at Agenda C and columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald – addressed The Sydney Institute to offer their view of the new government and its direction.

THE ALBANESE GOVERNMENT: WHAT TO EXPECT

Troy Bramston

Thanks very much Gerard and thank you to Anne. It’s good to be back at The Sydney Institute. I want to pay tribute to the role that the Institute plays in fostering good discussion and debate about political, policy, historical and cultural issues. Let me acknowledge Parnell as well.

I’m going to make some observations about the election campaign, talk a bit about Labor and the Coalition and other parties, and then where to next.

Let me start by saying that at the outset of the election campaign. I sat down, face to face with Anthony Albanese for an interview for The Australian. He was very calm, very collected, and confident. In fact, he was so confident that he drank a can of Albo pale ale beer right in front of me with a younger looking Albanese on the can.

So, I looked at young Albo and old Albo at the same time during the interview. I don’t think there has actually been a political leader who has transformed their beliefs more than Anthony Albanese. He was once a hard left political warrior, in the Cold War but, today, he’s a centrist who preaches consensus and wants to bring Australians together.

I sensed in that interview that he knew that victory was in sight. He had to change, and so he did shed his hard left image. He also had a personal makeover to show that he was match fit and ready for the job. He promised not a revolution, only to make things better. He was a small target. And he was derided as a weak leader, but , more importantly, he made the campaign, somehow, about leadership and about character.

He’s not inspirational, he’s not an intellectual, but he is a strategist. I think his victory was, in many ways, a masterclass in political strategy. I do think we’ve just seen a political earthquake, at the 2022 election, and the ramifications are still being fully understood. It will take some time until we do.

There has long been a dealignment taking place in Australian politics; that’s voters leaving the two major parties – the National Party and the Liberal Party, being the Coalition, and Labor. But it has accelerated at this election. Labor looks like it has one government with just 32.6 per cent of the vote, The Coalition got 35.7 per cent, and 33 per cent went to minor parties or Independents. Labor won a net eight seats, just enough to win government, but its primary vote is absolutely dismal. It has never won government with a primary vote so low before.

There are some warning signs for Labor in that it lost the seat of Fowler to an Independent, and it also lost the seat of Griffith to the Greens. We have six seats won by so called Teal Independents, one seat won by Dai Le in Fowler – who doesn’t identify as a Teal – three seats won by the Greens; Melbourne and Griffith which were Labor and Ryan which was Liberal. The Australian electoral survey at the ANU does show this long term dealignment of the major parties, with the relationship between education and ideology reversing. So, both parties now win votes across the traditional left-right axis. The big message, in the election, is that tribal loyalties are breaking down and we are seeing a fragmentation of the two-party system, which has served us well in the post war era.

To Labor, it is a narrow win, with a record primary vote. It’s not like 1972, 1983 or 2007. Labor looks to have a two-seat majority after allocating a speaker. Labor did suffer some swings in its traditional heartland seats. It did lose, as I say, Griffith and Fowler. I think the low primary vote reflects reservations that I had, and many others did, about Anthony Albanese, about his appeal as a political leader, and also about Labor’s small target strategy. I don’t think Labor did enough to encourage people to vote Labor. So, Labor actually wins government having achieved fewer votes than it did at the last election.

It’s been a rapid start, first with a quintet of ministers sworn in, just two days after the election; the fastest political transition in Australian history. There’s now a 30-person ministry in place; 16 from the right faction, 14 from the left faction. The NSW right group is the largest faction in the Labor caucus with 19 members. It is the most experienced ever Labor ministry. Albanese is a 26-year parliamentary veteran; he has served in parliament longer than any new prime minister since John McEwen. He has more experience in government than Rudd, Hawke or Whitlam.

Now, Labor people have said to me, again and again, during the campaign and after, that they have learned the lessons from the Rudd-Gillard period, which was chaotic, shambolic and often dysfunctional. We shall see a very different governing culture this time around, in terms of the caucus, the Cabinet, the party-union machine and the public service, in terms of how they’re treated. There’ll be no gang of four like there was during the Rudd government, which made decisions to the exclusion of the full Cabinet. There is an emphasis on robust Cabinet debate. There’ll be no gang of four like there was during the Rudd government, which made decisions to the exclusion of the full Cabinet. There is an emphasis on robust Cabinet debate.

When I interviewed Richard Marles, the new Deputy Prime Minister, the week before last, after being sworn in, he said to me that going back to the Hawke approach for robust Cabinet debate was really important. Rudd, in many ways, is the anti-model for this Labor government; Hawke is the model. I think Anthony Albanese does understand this, and it is something he emphasised to me.

I also think there’s no such thing as a “green left” in Australian politics. If you watch Sky News, some of the commentators – who are my friends and I go on their programs from time to time – talk about a “green left” in Australian politics. In fact, Labor hates the Greens, and the Greens hate Labor, and Anthony Albanese has been fighting the Greens for decades. In fact, Labor is more likely to agree with the Coalition parties on legislation than they are with the Greens. The ALP and the Greens are competitors; we can see that in Melbourne and Griffith, seats won by the Greens. There are close contests around the country between ALP and Green candidates in places like Cooper, Grayndler, Macnamara, Richmond, Sydney, Wills and Canberra.

Let’s talk about the Liberal Party. Peter Dutton is the fifteenth federal Liberal leader, and the first from Queensland. He does break the leadership strangle hold from Sydney and Melbourne; the past five-year Liberal leaders have been from Sydney. It’s a tough challenge. I noted today in The Australian, that being the first opposition leader after an election defeat usually means that he’ll never be prime minister. The last person to do that was Andrew Fisher in 1914, and he was previously a prime minister. Dutton, though, is a tough operator; I don’t think he should be underestimated. He’s politically clever, but he has an image, and he has, to his credit, identified his image, which goes beyond superficiality, such as how he looks, but more about his style and approach in politics.

This election represents an existential challenge for the Liberal Party, that goes to its identity, its values, its constituency, its members, its candidates and its campaigning. Some of the commentary from people in the Liberal Party – former prime ministers, members of parliament – suggesting the Liberal Party should just give up on Teal seats, such as North Sydney, Wentworth, Mackellar, Kooyong, Goldstein and Curtin, and try to regain government by winning seats from Labor is bonkers.

There is no pathway for the Liberal Party by ignoring those seats and focusing on Labor seats in western Sydney and western Melbourne to come into government in the next election, or probably the one after, or the one after that. The Liberal vote, in those western suburb seats are in the teens or in the twenties; they’re a long way away from winning those seats. More importantly, what does it mean about the Liberal Party’s 30-40,000 members who still live, predominantly, in these Teal seats? And their donors that are clustered in these seats as well? The party can’t just abandon them and start to look elsewhere; it needs to support, encourage and maintain those members and those donors. I’ve argued repeatedly that the Liberal Party was founded as a party representing the middle and upper class – well educated, affluent, professional, community-minded people, which sounds very much like Teal voters.

I don’t think the Liberal Party should abandon those voters, because to appeal to less educated, lower income working class Australians, means a very different party from what Robert Menzies created, with the help of others, in 1944. Menzies wanted a liberal, not a conservative, party, on the centre right, of course, but a broad church. Broad looking. What he called progressive and not reactionary. So, I think the answer to the Liberal Party, for its revival, is to look to this Menzies model; not to move left, but to move back to the centre, where elections are run and won in Australia.

We’re going to see a very different parliament, with three Greens MPs, a lot of Independents a very large crossbench. It’s going to be hard for these Teal seats to be won back by the Liberal Party. Labor MPs have told me they’ll do everything they can to support them and entrench them to hold those seats at the next election. Albanese, being a former leader of the House in the Gillard minority parliament, is very attuned to this. So, that makes it very difficult for the Liberal Party to return to power. It’s 18 seats behind a majority at the moment. Labor might only have a majority of 2 after a speaker, but 18 is a long way back.

Let’s look at the Greens. They’ve been very successful. I was a bit surprised, frankly, about the success of the Greens. I knew they were on the radar; I knew they were in with a shot in a number of seats, but I was sceptical. They did seem to have stalled for a number of years, but they’re on the march now. They threaten not only Labor seats, but Liberal seats. We saw the seat of Ryan, for example, fall to the Greens from the Liberals, and also the seat of Brisbane fell from Liberal to  the Greens. The Greens have a lot of seats in the Senate in the crossbench there. They’ll have a majority of members on the crossbench and Labor will have to negotiate with the Greens if the opposition is opposed to Labor policies.

A couple of other minor points. David Littleproud is a very good leader for the National Party. The National Party has its own challenges; they held their seats, but they still suffered some swings in them. Barnaby Joyce was bad for the National Party. Not only bad from a Liberal perspective, with Liberal Ministers saying he was terrible for their brand in the suburbs and cities. But he was gaffe prone, and scandal prone. He was an embarrassment to the National Party. As well as to its great tradition of leaders like Doug Anthony, Tim Fischer and John McEwen. Littleproud will be much more effective, and we should be encouraged that he said his party will look to the sensible centre and will not be moving further to the right.

Finally, some brief comments about looking forward. The government has a triple whammy that they’ve got to deal with at the moment – inflation, interest rates and an energy shock. They’ve got huge budget deficits and record debt. It’s going to be very challenging.

Labor has a big agenda, which includes things they want to do this term, like a Voice to Parliament, an integrity commission, a national reconstruction fund, Jobs and Skills Australia, their energy plan – which they call Powering Australia – near universal childcare and reform to aged care. It’s a big agenda; it’s a lot. But it’s not particularly overly controversial, and there will be a lot of public support for many of those ideas, and many of those policies. Although, I do think the Voice will be particularly challenging.

Finally, let me just conclude by saying, the biggest test for the new government will probably be something that we cannot foresee – as it was for the last government.