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

Parnell McGuiness

From a governing perspective, the first fortnight of the new Albanese Labor government has gone very well. Albanese has launched into the prime ministership like a man with a clear idea of what he wants to do and how he’s going to do it.

He’s had plenty of time to observe the mistakes made within his own party and contemplate the failures across the aisle. He’s come to the conclusion, he says, that he will need to unite Australia and “change the way politics is done” by “avoiding sound bites and actually answering questions”. How novel! And how very promising.

He made the right move by having himself sworn in early in order to head to the scheduled Quad meeting. It was an early and important reaffirmation of his commitment to the alliances that Australia relies on to secure its place in the world.

His foreign minister, Penny Wong, popped over to the Solomon Islands to intercept China’s attempt to build a Pacific power base. The disappointment of the Chinese in the region suggests she has been effective, or at least that there are grounds to hope she will be listened to. In a situation that looked like it was rapidly getting away from Australia, even small steps are important ones.

Meanwhile, Treasurer Jim Chalmers, who is an unfolding talent, is rolling out his plan to steal from the Coalition the mantle of better economic managers.

All in all, from what we’ve seen so far, participating in two terms of regicidal government, followed by nine years of political exile, is a pretty good kiln in which to prepare a party of government.

Albanese’s government is identifying clear problems and seeking solutions.

If Albanese were content to provide this type of competent government, even allowing for the fact that many on the right will disagree with some of his proposed solutions to growing problems such as energy security, he would stand a good chance of establishing an uncontroversial – dare I say Angela Merkel-style – government which could hold power for years and years to come.

But there is an ideological vein – perhaps an ideological vanity – in the freshly minted government that inclines to grand gestures.

Good government is not the be-all and end-all of the Albanese government’s ambitions.

The fact is, as well as making a number of solid decisions in this short space of time, the PM has also hit the ground signalling.

One of biggest puffs of smoke the new prime minister has sent up regards a promised referendum to enshrine an Indigenous Voice to Parliament in the constitution. Now, I’m not against Indigenous constitutional recognition, or even the Voice proposal, but it is a solution which doesn’t directly address any problem currently confronting Indigenous Australians.

Until it is clearly articulated how the many and desperate problems confronting Indigenous Australians would be addressed by a Voice to Parliament enshrined in the constitution, it remains a luxury, otherwise known as a virtue signal.

Naturally, Albanese’s signal has been greeted rapturously by activists and advocates and it will continue to be greeted rapturously, no doubt, until the romance of the idea of a Voice congeals into the pragmatism of a referendum question. At that point, unless the connection between the promise and the problem has been made clear, the success of the referendum will rely on the number of Australians willing to sign up to virtue and vapour.

Because at the same time as the Indigenous Voice has become a symbol of the new government’s aspirations, the cashless welfare debit card has become a symbol of diabolical realities. It should be said that many users of the card have found it stigmatising and difficult to manage and the evidence around the effectiveness of the card in reducing drug and alcohol in trial communities has been inconclusive. Welfare group activists and advocates object to it on principle and have campaigned for it to be discontinued. Inconveniently for the symbolists though, their campaigns to get rid of the card have been in direct conflict with what some Indigenous communities, especially the women within them, want.

Luckily, the Indigenous Voice to Parliament has not yet been enshrined in the constitution, because otherwise the government would have had to listen to Indigenous people. And that could have meant not abolishing the cashless welfare card. So, thank goodness for symbolism. Activists and advocates in the Indigenous and welfare spaces can have fuzzy feelings without encountering the yucky contradictions of reality.

The prime minister has also committed to making his chief residence The Lodge in Canberra. That symbolically situates him as King of the Public Servants. I suppose you could also say that, by moving back to the capital, he is signalling that he is the prime minister for Australians of all states. Unfortunately, around the same time as he made his move to The Lodge, a group of Indigenous traditional owners used the 30th anniversary of the Mabo decision to announce their plan to lodge a native title claim over the ACT. So, they lodged a claim on The Lodge, while the PM took up lodgings at The Lodge.

There are so many fuzzy feelings in all that, that the line between who’s doing right and who’s doing wrong is getting downright fuzzy. And because you can never have too many symbols, Albanese also named an island in Canberra after the Queen of England (and Australia) while practically in the same breath swearing in an assistant minister for a republic. As an aside, introducing some unintentional symbolism, the island is a fake island, located in the fake lake at the centre of the fake city which the PM has symbolically committed to inhabiting, at least until his symbolic commitment to listen to Indigenous people has to be converted in actual action.

It’s not very charitable of me to make fun of this jumble of clashing signals. But, since we’re speaking of charity and of symbolic contractions, I should mention that the Albanese government’s response to receiving the resignation of charities commissioner Gary Johns was decidedly uncharitable.

Dr Andrew Leigh, the economist responsible for charities, called Johns’ resignation the end of “the Liberals’ nine-year war on charities”. A new commissioner will be “transparently” appointed to allow charities to once again undertake political advocacy that is coincidentally charitable towards the Labor government. Which just goes to show that sometimes an act can combine both symbolism and a solution to a well-defined problem. In this case, the problem of insufficient charity towards one’s own political party.

The key to the Albanese’s success will be finding more such happy coincidences, if he wants to run a symbolism-heavy government that doesn’t dissipate into a puff of contradiction.

To be fair, there are signs that there are such initiatives underway. It would be a mistake to dismiss all the warm fuzzy terminology of this government as just woke smoke. Take for instance Treasurer Jim Chalmers. As I mentioned earlier, Dr Chalmers is quite a talent and one to watch carefully. He is on a mission to take the mantle of better economic managers for Labor and yet he has foreshadowed a “wellbeing budget”, which sounds like debt-laden theoretical crap. So how does this marry up?

I’ll tell you how.

The wellbeing budget is a carefully concocted snow-job. To conservatives it sounds like nothing to be worried about, something that can be easily dismissed. To Labor ears, it sounds like nothing to be worried about, something that can be easily embraced. What actually hides within it is the intention to measure the bang for buck of tax dollars better.

Chalmers calls it “measuring what matters” and has identified health and education as two areas which will be measured by the well-being budget. These are two areas in which increasing spending has historically not necessarily translated into better public health and education outcomes. The Liberal Party has been saying this for years, of course, but nobody on that side of politics had the wit to adorn a program of spending reform with a “well-being” ribbon.

It remains to be seen whether organisations such as the Teachers’ Federation will recognise that the new government is regifting them the same proposals for improving teacher quality, which report after report has found does not require yet more spending, with a love-heart on top.

Maybe, as long as they are being told they are being “measured because they matter” and are part of a Labor government “well-being” strategy, they might just lap it up. If so, I say more power to the Treasurer for harnessing his side of politics’ penchant for symbolism and “feels” to get through desperately needed and overdue reforms, while shielding the budget bottom line against new harebrained schemes.

All of this points, I think, to one very important conclusion: The ability to use symbolism to sell solutions to real problems will mark out successful ministers in this government from the ones who struggle to deliver.

It is as yet unclear to me whether Albanese will himself be able to tell a sales strategy from a virtue signal, let alone deploy symbolism for something more than its own sake.  If he is able to use symbolism to deliver substance, we may be in for a very long Labor reign. If he isn’t, this government will go up in a puff of extremely virtuous smoke.