Anthony Albanese’s consensus politics and deep divisions in the Liberal Party mean Labor may no longer just fill the interludes between Coalition governments.
With the passing of Queen Elizabeth II, Prime Minister Albanese will be urged to announce a referendum for an Australian republic. He will not do so. He will prioritise a Voice for First Nations people. And he knows he must achieve consensus among Australians on responses to the problems confronting our nation.
Albanese is an avowed republican. He has even appointed in Matt Thistlethwaite an assistant minister for the republic. Nevertheless, his tributes to the Queen and his welcoming of Charles III to the throne were warm and fulsome.
Observers of Albanese’s past as a Sydney University student radical and his lifelong history of “fighting Tories” might have predicted he would be a highly partisan, combative prime minister. They are wrong.
Those who expected Albanese to be a divisive, hard-left prime minister overlooked his philosophy as Labor leader of “no-one held back, no-one left behind” and the strong relationships he built with Australian business leaders as infrastructure and transport minister in the previous Labor government.
Albanese told the Financial Review’s business summit in March 2022 https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/comparisons-come-with-pitfalls-as-business-pines-for-workplace-reform-20220310-p5a3cm that “We must rediscover the spirit of consensus that former Labor prime minister Bob Hawke used to bring together governments, trade unions, businesses and civil society around their shared aims of growth and job creation.”
Reassured by the success of the Jobs and Skills Summit, Albanese has an opportunity to make Labor the natural party of government – a term that since World War II has been associated with the Liberal Party.
It is an expression of the view that the Liberals keep the ship of state moving forward, slowly and steadily, but when they eventually lose direction it’s time to give Labor a go. The “It’s Time” Whitlam government lasted only three years. And while the 13-year Hawke-Keating era proved the exception to the rule, the six year Rudd-Gillard-Rudd period reinstated it.
Now Albanese can change the political rule book. Although Labor has a majority of only two seats, the Coalition is 19 seats short of a majority.
Moreover, the Liberals are in the throes of an identity crisis. Most of the moderates lost their seats in the 2022 election, leaving mainly the hard right of the parliamentary Liberal Party to run their show.
The hard-right Liberal playbook has been to identify outsiders, real or concocted, as a threat to Australian voters, and campaign to protect us from them – the post-war Soviets, the North Vietnamese communists, the illegal boat people, too many Asian immigrants, the Muslims, the Sudanese gangs that Peter Dutton warned had frightened decent Melbourne Aussies from going out to dinner, and at the 2022 election, the Communist Party of China.
While the Liberal Party continues to pursue the politics of division, Albanese will press ahead with the consensus model, judging that the Australian people want politicians to solve problems cooperatively not create more of them.
The Jobs and Skills Summit was just the beginning. As the summit’s afterglow dims, as inevitably it will, the foreshadowed employment white paper and the government’s policy response to it will determine whether Albanese Labor can become the natural party of government.
Just as Paul Keating rang the national alarm bell with his 1986 warning that Australia risked becoming a banana republic if it didn’t change course, the employment white paper, unvarnished, must lay out the challenges confronting Australia.
To give one example, the Morrison government’s intergenerational report assumes annual productivity growth over the next four decades of 1.5 per cent – equal to the average rate achieved over the last three decades. But those three decades include the stellar productivity growth rates of the 1990s generated out of the Hawke-Keating reforms that fashioned Australia’s open, competitive economy.
In the years preceding the COVID-19 pandemic, Australia’s productivity growth slowed until it finally ground to a halt. A continuation of anything resembling that abysmal effort would be catastrophic for Australian living standards and social harmony.
It's not much use trade unions and businesses arguing over who gets the bigger share of productivity growth if there’s none to share.
Australia has slipped further behind the rest of the world in school educational attainment.
We have plunging fertility and an ageing population, massive debt and a shockingly large structural budget deficit.
We agree on the need for a well-educated workforce, yet we deter mothers with university degrees from taking on extra paid work by inflicting upon them punishing work disincentives.
The decarbonisation of our industrial sector has been delayed by a decade of climate wars.
And we must deal with our new-found vulnerability to supply-chain breakdowns associated with rising geopolitical tensions.
The employment white paper must set out these challenges candidly, forming a policy platform for a re-elected Albanese Labor government.
If Labor accepts that responsibility, taking Australians into the government’s confidence, the white paper can lay the foundations for a re-elected Albanese government, setting Labor up as the natural party of government.
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.