Some early down payments on reform would be helpful, perhaps starting with industrial relations where the parties had made good progress in 2020.
On Saturday, Australians elected as their new prime minister the only son of a single mother who lived in a council flat. How good is that? Regardless of how you voted, it’s cause for celebration of the egalitarian streak that defines our great nation.
No one held back and no one left behind has been Anthony Albanese’s mantra. That he is passionate about no one being left behind is easy to understand. He experienced hardship as a boy and witnessed his mother enduring it, riddled with arthritis, struggling to provide for him, assisted by the state through her entitlement to a pension.
But where along the way did the radical Sydney University student protester embrace the view that no one should be held back?
Albanese was a very influential cabinet minister in the Rudd and Gillard governments. Far from being inexperienced, as his Coalition critics sought to tag him, Albanese rose to the position of deputy prime minister.
He served as minister for infrastructure and transport and leader of the House of Representatives. It was at that time that Albanese developed close relationships with the business community, within which he became highly respected.
Albanese was an enthusiastic contributor to the Labor government’s effort to create a seamless national economy by getting rid of inconsistent and unnecessary state government regulation of heavy vehicles https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id:%22media/pressrel/MJ9X6%22
As Albanese pointed out to the Financial Review earlier this year https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/new-look-albo-i-m-comfortable-in-the-boardrooms-as-well-as-the-pub-20201217-p56ohc “I’ve always had a perspective about growth and about business. My first speech was about the creation of wealth, not just its distribution. And part of my personal story is a story of aspiration.”
Albanese’s critics in the media and in the Coalition complained he had adopted a small target strategy. Their frustration was that he did not present a huge tax-and-spend target that they could hit every day.
Instead, consistent with the recommendations of the ALP review that Jay Weatherill and I chaired, Albanese released a set of signature policies indicating the priorities of the government he would lead.
Importantly, while electorally appealing, Labor’s policies on childcare, training and energy transition are capable of helping to lift productivity growth out of its present torpor.
Albanese has indicated he wants to govern in the Hawke-Keating consensus style, bringing employer organisations, unions and civil society groups together to find common ground.
That this is achievable is evident in the National Reform Summit of 2015 supported by the Financial Review when all parties worked together for months to locate a surprisingly large amount of common ground.
Crucial to the success of the Hawke-Keating reform era was the identification of the economic problems Australia faced and explaining them at length to the Australian people rather than acting precipitously and breaking promises, as the Abbott government did in its disastrous 2014 budget.
Albanese’s Employment Summit can serve this purpose. Those impatient for reform will demand immediate action thereafter – forgetting that the Hawke-Keating reforms spanned a total of 13 years.
Nevertheless, some down-payments would be helpful, perhaps starting with a re-energised effort to achieve agreement on workplace reforms after the parties made good progress in 2020.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers has indicated he will bring down a budget later this year to begin the task of fiscal repair. In the meantime, a forensic examination of the Morrison government’s rorted grants programs and other wasteful expenditure will be on the agenda.
An exhausted prime minister Albanese is heading to a meeting of the Quad in Tokyo. Upon his return he will need to begin the process of re-setting the relationship with China, which has deteriorated to the point where for more than a year no dialogue has been occurring at ministerial level with Australia’s biggest trading partner.
Coalition ministers considered it a smart political move to talk up the prospects of conflict and even war with China during the election campaign. Chinese-Australians in the seats of Reid, Bennelong, North Sydney, Chisholm and Kooyong made it known at the ballot box what they thought about that cynical manoeuvre.
Labor will have a majority in the House of Representatives. Nevertheless, using his negotiating skills so evident when he was Leader of the House, Albanese will engage with the large crossbench of independents and Greens.
The moderate wing of the Parliamentary Liberal Party has been decimated. History has shown that when good independents are elected in previously safe seats they tend to enjoy long tenures. The Liberal Party’s shift to the right has been disastrous. But with the self-assured right dominating the party room it’s not clear how it will reposition to become more electorally appealing.
A clear lesson from this election for all parties is less party machine and more community engagement.
Craig Emerson is managing director of Emerson Economics. He is director of the APEC Study Centre at RMIT University, visiting fellow at the ANU and adjunct professor at Victoria University’s College of Business.