VICTORY: LABOR’S RETURN TO POWER

Victory for the Australian Labor Party, at the 2022 federal election, has been resounding and sweet, but it comes with caveats. Both major parties now have to look over their shoulders at the minor parties and independent challengers. Peter van Onselen and Wayne Errington went inside the campaigns of all the players in the 2022 election to reveal how Labor orchestrated its fifth ever election victory. They wrote Victory as a result. On Wednesday 9 November 2022, Peter van Onselen addressed The Sydney Institute to speak of some of the highlights.

VICTORY: LABOR’S RETURN TO POWER

PETER VAN ONSELEN

It’s great to be here. Thank you to those of you who are here, as well as those of you who are joining us remotely.

I appreciate the chance to have a chat about this new book by Wayne Errington and me. We’ve stolen the title from Pamela Williams. Some of you would remember her book in 1997 about the 1996 election called The Victory. It’s one of the best books about political campaigning I’ve read, at least in Australian politics. So, we decided, after a quarter of a century, we could get rid of the ”the” and steal the rest of the title and try our best to do a version for the last election.

This book originated as one that we were going to write no matter who won, but we were going to make it broader if Scott Morrison made a comeback and found a way to do what he did in 2019, and surprise people, including myself, by winning again. If so, we would have written the book about a decade of the Coalition in power. Instead, as the polls were telling us for a while, Anthony Albanese won the election and, hence, it’s his victory and his picture on the cover of the book.

I’m always a little nervous when I try to refer to political facts in the company of Gerard Henderson; they can become political fiction very quickly if I get it wrong. But I think I’m right when I say this. Anthony Albanese, at 59 years of age, is the oldest opposition Leader to win his way into the Australian prime ministership since Federation, for the first time. That surprised me, because that’s not all that old. He’s certainly seen as a progressive rather than a conservative. Yet, here is somebody who, at the last election, I would argue, appealed more to younger voters than Scott Morrison did. But he is the oldest opposition leader to win his way into the prime ministership in the history of our country. In fact, in the post war years, he is the longest serving member of parliament to win their way into the prime ministership. John Howard held that title prior to Anthony Albanese winning the last election, after 26 years or thereabouts in parliament.

Those of you who follow politics closely would have known Anthony Albanese over many years – factional operative, leader of the house, briefly deputy prime minister, long serving infrastructure minister, wannabe opposition leader over the course of six years (2013-2019), before he got that title after the 2019 election defeat, and he had a long serving political career in opposition for most of the time before all of that. Yet he was not that well known to the public. One of the things that we found challenging when we were writing the book was trying to unpack the significance of that, and why that was the case.

A large part of the story is that Anthony Albanese was opposition leader, federally, during the pandemic, that we’re still technically in. The pandemic pantomime became the prime minister and the premiers, rather than the traditional federal dog fight that you see between the prime minister and the opposition leader. That probably lowered his profile amongst the non-politically astute broader mass community. Even though insiders well and truly understood who he was. That was an interesting feature that we get to in the book when we talk about the campaign itself and that first day stumble that he had on the way through.

We’ve divided the book into three sections. The first section is, essentially, the entirety of the last term of government prior to the campaign being called. The middle section of the book, which is probably the meatiest, is the week-by-week campaign itself. By meatiest, I mean it is the longest section. We do a chapter per week of what was a six-week campaign. That’s the real insider story of the book where we had excellent access, certainly to Anthony Albanese, but also to both campaign directors and to other political insiders on both sides.

Scott Morrison didn’t give us an interview, probably because our last book about him How Good is Scott Morrison? had a question mark in the title. But we did have good access on both sides. The book is largely about the Labor Party and its journey into government. The third section has the colour and movement of the election night. The rest of it covers “Where to from here?”; what kind of Labor government can you expect, what does the Liberal Party – the Coalition – do now that they’re in Opposition, in terms of how they rebuild, and what might some of the policy debates look like?

We have attempted to do a real insiders account and match what I believe Pamela Williams did really well in The Victory, where she got excellent access to both sides to be able to give the reader a sense of what it was like on the inside during the campaign. As well as some of the key moments leading up to the campaign. We have a prologue at the start where we talk about how Anthony Albanese almost quit politics in the context of the break-up of his marriage, which had occurred just as he was looking at taking over as opposition leader if Labor lost the 2019 election campaign. That prologue is a human moment in the life of a politician to start the book off. Here is somebody whose marriage had collapsed, who offered, if he could save the marriage, to give up the rest of his political career. It wasn’t enough to save the marriage and he stayed in politics and then went on to try to build his career towards its next stage from there on.

Anthony Albanese is an interesting new prime minister – whether you like or dislike him, whether he ends up being a one term wonder (which the economy might make of him) or whether he finds a way to become some version of a consensus politician, like Bob Hawke, perhaps without the economic reforming elements to go with that. One way or the other, what I find really interesting about Anthony Albanese, in contrast to other prime ministers, is that he is not somebody who was ever touted as a prime minister earlier in his career. He didn’t even believe in himself until relatively recently in the interviews we had with him across the writing of the book. I can remember in one of these interviews, asking the question, “When did the kid from housing commission first think he could become prime minister?” He took a break before answering. He came back – and I believe him on this – saying that the first time he seriously thought that was an option for him was when he was considering a tilt in 2013 to take the opposition leadership after the Labor Party’s defeat. Until that point in time, he thought he might be a spear carrier for Greg Combet as the left wing candidate.

Albanese briefly had an opportunity to be deputy prime minister under Kevin Rudd. But he really didn’t see himself as somebody who was a future prime minister. It certainly wasn’t something that people saw in him when he entered parliament in the class of 1996. That is unusual amongst prime ministers. Most people who become prime minister have either wanted the job from when they were a child, or certainly thought they were going to be one or had a chance of becoming one when they entered parliament, the ministry or the cabinet. But Albanese is unusual because that wasn’t on his radar. We have tried to unpack what that means about the nature of Albanese in opposition as well as his time during the election campaign, and what he might be like as a prime minister going forward.

It is easy now that the election is done and dusted to do two things. One, to assume that a Labor victory was a lay down misère; Scott Morrison was on the nose, the Liberal Party had been in government for nine or so years, the election win looked inevitable after some of Morrison’s stumbles during the pandemic. That was not always the case, far from it if you go back in time.

Anthony Albanese, when he took the leadership, was a certainty to get the leadership. There was talk about Tanya Plibersek after 2019 running, but ultimately, that was never going to happen. She didn’t have the numbers on the left, because Albo had the numbers. Chris Bowen announced that he was going to run and then 24 hours later announced that he wasn’t. Obviously, Kevin Rudd was going to walk off into the sunset. So, there weren’t any other realistic contenders. Anthony Albanese was the obvious candidate to become Labor leader.

But at that time the Labor leadership looked like a poisoned chalice. He packed up his office ahead of the 2019 election campaign, his shadow ministerial office in the back bench corridors with certainty. He knew that one of two things would happen. He would either move into a ministerial office under Bill Shorten’s prime ministership, or he’d move into the opposition leader’s office. So, his office was packed, boxed and ready to go one way or the other. But once he became opposition leader, Albanese’s colleagues did not see him as a future prime minister. They thought that he was somebody who was filling the chair, either to get rolled before the next election, or to lose the election while they blooded a potential future leader for the election after that. So, he was seen as an unlikely prime minister, including even by himself at that stage.

It is our contention that whilst Albanese came to terms with the fact he was a viable Labor leader after 2013, when he narrowly lost to Bill Shorten and then won the leadership in 2019, he acted more like a Labor leader than an opposition leader. Proud to have reached that pinnacle rather than hungry to take the next step. The bushfires gave him an impetus early on. But, realistically, he looked like he was going to take the hits until such time as they moved on from him, after an election defeat or before the possibility of an election victory. Because of the pandemic, we didn’t think much about the Eden Monaro by-election. However, it was very significant because key Labor figures told us that if the opposition lost the seat after Mike Kelly resigned as the incumbent Labor MP, Anthony Albanese was gone as opposition leader.

It was put to us by most Labor figures we spoke to that, one way or the other, they would have found a way to remove him. There may not have been an obvious candidate. In a sense, his biggest advantage was that there were multiple candidates, so they offset each other, and he might hang on. But that by-election was crucial. Governments are not supposed to win seats from oppositions in by-elections so I’m not giving him a big tick in terms of the significance of it in managing to hold onto the seat. However, it was significant in terms of him managing to hold onto his opposition leadership. It was also significant in Albanese having the confidence to then take the next step.

An interesting fact – and I ran the numbers to confirm this is true – John Barilaro may be the person more responsible for Anthony Albanese becoming prime minister than anyone.

John Barilaro was campaigning at that by-election for people who voted Nationals not to preference the Liberal candidate number two. If you put the votes side by side from the general election – that is the flow of Nationals preferences to the Liberals in 2019 next to the flow of Nationals preferences at the by-election – if those Nationals preference flows at the by-election had matched what happened at the 2019 general election, then Anthony Albanese and Labor would not have won the seat of Eden Monaro after Mike Kelly’s departure. John Barilaro’s state seat overlapped Eden Monaro. Barilaro spruiking not to preference the Liberal candidate may have been enough, in and of itself, to save Anthony Albanese’s opposition leadership and therefore deliver him the prime ministership by the time of the last election. But I don’t know that he’ll get a Christmas card from Anthony Albanese for that. It’s just one of the many stories that we tell in the book.

One of the interesting things about Anthony Albanese as a political character is that he likes to talk a lot about his background from public housing, and the impoverished background he came from. But I think the most significant factor in understanding him as a political leader is that he was, essentially, an only child. He’s got brothers from Italy that are half-brothers, but he grew up as an only child. That becomes important to understanding the way that he then functioned as a political leader, because he was a bit of a loner. That was one of the morphoses that had to happen in his career, once he became Opposition Leader he had to learn to be more than just a loner. It works when you’re in the shadow ministry or a leader in waiting, and it can work when you’re a minister, even a very senior minister. But when you become a leader, being a loner becomes a disadvantage. He had to overcome that. We talk about that process in the book. His ability to overcome that Day 1 gaffe was, in part, part of him making that transition from the loner only child into somebody who could actually take a bit of advice if it was given in the right way. Albanese doesn’t necessarily take advice well when it’s delivered orally. A lot of his colleagues talked to us about how they would often send emails or texts, giving him a chance to reflect, to be able to properly absorb the advice he’s given.

The central chapters in the book are all about the campaign, and we try to get inside the campaign units. We have a blow-by-blow description of what happened on both sides, daily tactical meetings and weekly strategic meetings during the course of the campaign. Who said what and where. We try to give a sense of what was really happening on the campaign hustings in those chapters.

Then, with election night, we take you inside Anthony Albanese’s home. Penny Wong was the only politician there with him. Other than that, it was his son and some friends, and political staffers. He was cooking pasta; nobody else wanted to eat it, they were too nervous. His son was online looking at the betting sites and found that he could get 13:1 if his dad wore a Rabbitohs tie. Anthony Albanese then rang Paul Erikson, who was at an important moment at campaign headquarters as the early results were coming in, standing there with the party president, Wayne Swan, and others. He showed his phone to Swan and said, “I better take this call”, thinking it was a very important phone call. But it was Albo just joking with him, “Maybe I should wear a Rabbitohs tie, and we should put whatever funds we have left on it, so that we can make up for the cost of the campaign.”

I’m surprised at how relaxed he was, because I wasn’t relaxed that night in terms of thinking that I had a book almost ready to go, assuming Labor were going to win. In the first 30 minutes or so, it wasn’t clear to me that this election was going the direction it ultimately did. Even though the Coalition resoundingly lost the election – really the Liberals, because the Nationals didn’t lose seats – Labor didn’t resoundingly win it. Labor won with a very slim majority, 77 seats. They should have done better than that; they know that. Not winning seats in Queensland or Tasmania for example. What happened was, the Liberal Party lost the election because they were fighting a war on two fronts. They were dealing with the Teals at the same time they were trying to fend off Labor in key marginal seats. The issues were somewhat different; it was a drain on the party’s resources.

We knew on the night, relatively early, that Labor were guaranteed to win in some form. But it took a long time to be certain whether Labor was or wasn’t going to form a majority in its own right. As opposed to having to find a way to cobble together a minority government with crossbench support. This is all part of that third section of the book; how will Labor govern and what’s likely to happen to the Liberal Party and the Coalition in opposition? The rise of the Teals might have been a more short-lived phenomena if they were required, in some form, to be party to a minority Labor government. Some traditional Liberal voters in those Teal seats, who voted Teal and had a frustration for various reasons at the Liberal Party, might have had acid reflux if the Teals had supported a Labor government in minority. The fact that Labor has its own majority means that those Teals, whilst they might feel a little bit disempowered not controlling the balance of power, aren’t as likely to be held accountable for potentially going against what Liberal seats might naturally want from major party governance. The teals not securing the balance of power in a minority Labor government might elongate their time in power, which might, by extension, also elongate Labor’s time in power beyond this term.

It wouldn’t surprise me at all if this Labor government ends up electorally mirroring what happened to the last Labor government. I don’t mean changes of prime minister. Rather, winning a majority before finding a way to only win as a minority government at the next election. I can see that happening; 77 seats is very hard to defend. Alternatively, Peter Dutton might fall off a cliff electorally with the Liberal Party. There’s not as much talent in Coalition ranks as there could or should be – they’ve got all manner of issues. But if they find a way to carve seats off Labor, even if they don’t pick up seats from the Teals, I can see a scenario where Labor loses its majority but the Coalition’s number of seats are too small to be a realistic alternative minority government. So, Labor cobbles together minority government. That might involve a few Teals. It might not need to, because of a combination of Greens and other Independents such as Andrew Wilkie.

But if a minority Labor government does involve Teals, or if Teals entertain supporting a Labor government, or even if during the course of this term, the Teals unveil themselves in a way that some more traditional Liberal voters don’t like in those seats, all of that will be interesting viewing. If the Liberal Party doesn’t fall off an electoral cliff.

This book is in part a leadership study on the nature of who Anthony Albanese is, how he manufactured the victory that he did, and we attempt to dispel, what I think is a myth, that the result was always inevitable. Wayne and I really do believe that the way Labor conducted itself during its last three years in opposition played a profound role in the unravelling of Scott Morrison. Anthony Albanese, even though he’s a rugby league tragic, had a saying that he wanted to be kicking with the breeze in the fourth quarter – an AFL analogy – of the electoral cycle. I do think it’s true that the Labor leadership rules protected him to some extent during that period in opposition, so that he could play the long game planning where he wanted to be closer to the calling of the election.

Those leadership rules gave him the confidence to try and structure things around where they wanted to be by the time the election came around, as opposed to doing what Bill Shorten did a lot of his time as opposition leader. He was winning week to week, or month to month but, ultimately, didn’t win when it mattered on election day. Anthony Albanese took a longer view. Some of that was good fortune for him, and bad fortune for Scott Morrison. Other elements of it were sound tactical and strategic considerations he made. But on a depressing note I’m not convinced this is going to be a reforming Labor government. Unfortunately, we need big reforms.

Howard did some important reforms, Hawke and Keating did some important reforms. We’re overdue for what needs to come next. At one level, the adage “Never waste a crisis” can give you some hope, because we’re about to enter that period now and we need some big reforms. I don’t see that in Anthony Albanese, in terms of his interests. I also don’t see it in Jim Chalmers. I also don’t see the hints in the opposition that would emulate Liberal Party in opposition in the 1980s supporting some of the big reforms. Which were just as important to policy outcomes as Hawke and Keating going down the path that they did in the first place. I don’t see that happening with Peter Dutton’s leadership.

What happens when pragmatism collides with ideology during this term of government? Does the old firebrand in Albo return? Or does the pragmatist who won the keys to The Lodge continue to dominate? And how does Labor react as a party to whichever version of Albo we see rise up? Do the careerist politicians in Labor’s ranks rise up and say, “that’s good enough for us now?”, after the debacle of the Rudd and Gillard years? Or do the Labor idealogues rise up and say, “we’re not governing in a way that we think Australia should be governed?” These are fascinating tensions. They will all play out in a period of significant economic unrest, with a slender majority for Labor, with the rise of third parties, not just the Teals, but the Greens as well. Let’s wait and see what happens next.