Labor’s release of a limited number of signature policies makes not only good political sense. It is economically responsible at a time of great uncertainty.
Allegations that Labor has adopted a small target strategy for the coming election are incorrect but more importantly, a big target strategy would be against the national interest.
Labor had released more than 240 policies ahead of the 2019 election.
A central finding of the Emerson-Weatherill review of the 2019 election loss was that Labor put before the people a cluttered policy agenda that looked risky. Our review recommended that while Labor’s policies for the next election could be bold, they should form part of a coherent Labor story, be limited in number and easily explainable, making them less capable of misrepresentation.
Rather than being a big target, we recommended that Labor should release a limited number of “signature policies” that signalled the sort of government Labor would form if elected.
Labor leader Anthony Albanese has assiduously followed the review’s recommendations. This is frustrating for many in the media, who would prefer a new policy release almost daily, and for the Coalition, which wants to re-run scare campaigns about “death tax”, “housing tax”, “retirees’ tax”, and “carbon tax”. But Albanese is sticking with the plan with a smart-target approach that makes good political and economic sense.
With the subsequent, unforeseen intervention of a once-in-a-century pandemic, how many of Labor’s big-target policies would or should have been implemented?
On the Coalition’s side, apart from lots of small projects in targeted seats, its big promise at the 2019 election was to get the budget back in the black. So insistent was the government that it had already delivered on its promise that prime minister Morrison stated: “We brought the budget back to surplus next year.”
Three years of budget deficits totalling $320 billion attest to the folly of that promise. Much of this cumulative deficit was support for businesses and workers during the pandemic, but by the standard of broken promises it’s a doozie.
On the eve of the 2013 election, Tony Abbott promised no cuts to health, education, the ABC or the SBS and no changes to pensions. In his government’s first budget he broke every one of those promises, a big contributor to his removal by his party room just two years later.
A modern myth is that Bob Hawke set out a detailed program of spending ahead of the 1983 election. He promised the reincarnation of Whitlam’s Medibank as Medicare but not a lot more. Instead, he pledged the three Rs: recovery, reconciliation and reconstruction.
Consistent with the Emerson-Weatherill review’s recommendation to release a moderately sized set of signature policies to indicate the sort of government Labor would be, Albanese has released a modest number of policies reflecting Labor values.
They are on childcare, women’s safety, free TAFE, more university places, wage theft and related industrial relations reforms, climate change, housing, an anti-corruption commission and proper recognition of Indigenous Australians.
Several of these, particularly the childcare and TAFE policies, would lift labour force participation and labour productivity – essential to achieving stronger and sustainable economic growth.
The climate-change policies have the potential to facilitate a big new Australian export industry of low-emissions energy products such as hydrogen and clean-energy processing of Australian minerals such as iron ore, bauxite and lithium.
More policies will come. But they won’t be expensive.
Albanese has ruled out the sorts of tax changes Labor took to the last election.
Labor’s election polices will be fiscally responsible.
As Labor critics amp up their demands for a big-target policy package, they might reflect not only on an unforeseen pandemic striking only months after the 2019 election, they should also ask whether they feel confident in predicting how events in Eastern Europe and China will unfold.
A far more responsible approach is to resist demands for a big-target strategy and to bring employers, workers and civil society groups together to cooperate in lifting productivity growth and ensure it is fairly shared.
Hawke’s National Economic Summit of 1983 demonstrated this was possible, a scene-setter for the most ambitious program of economic reforms in the post-war era.
Indeed, the National Reform Summit of 2015, supported by the Financial Review, showed the same representative organisations could again find common ground.
This is what Albanese plans to do at the Jobs Summit he has announced for the early post-election period if he becomes prime minister.
Rather than pretending he can predict the future and possesses all knowledge of economic reform possibilities, Albanese, like Hawke before him, wants to draw on the experience and wisdom of the business community, the trade union movement, civil society groups, academics and the public service in developing reform proposals.
That’s a smart target not a small target. It is economically responsible we could sure use some of that in the coming three years.
Craig Emerson is managing director of Emerson Economics. He is director of the APEC Study Centre at RMIT University, a visiting fellow at the ANU, adjunct professor at Victoria University’s College of Business and a former economic adviser to prime minister Bob Hawke.