After one year in government, many observers and opposition parliamentarians will feel surprised that Anthony Albanese has kept the Labor ship of state on an even keel. They shouldn’t. Albanese’s ambition is to position Labor as the natural party of government.
Those who have followed Albanese’s career from his days as a young adviser to left-wing minister Tom Uren and as a factional warrior in the New South Wales branch of the Labor Party might have expected a firebrand prime minister, fighting markets, big business, and the American military complex.
To have formed that expectation, these Rip van Winkles would have been asleep since the mid-1990s when Albanese entered parliament. From then onwards, he had worked with colleagues of the right faction and with business to achieve his ambition for a Labor government.
Had they been awake, these sleepers would have seen Albanese, as Leader of the House in the Rudd-Gillard years, working with his opposite number, Christopher Pyne, with whom he became good friends, to ensure the parliament kept working.
As a boy, Albanese witnessed the Whitlam-led Labor Party being elected in a landslide and three years later losing office in a bigger landslide. And in his mid-40s, Albanese experienced the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd turmoil that caused a minority Labor government, of which he was a senior member, to destroy itself. It was during this turmoil when Albanese expressed his dislike for fighting comrades in his beloved Labor Party, much preferring to be “fighting Tories”.
Whatever misgivings a young Albanese had about the Hawke-Keating era, he knew it had spanned 13 years, changed Australia for the better, believed in aspiration, and worked constructively with business. He watched the Hawke-Keating Labor government outlast the Fraser and Howard governments, but not the Menzies government that was able to capitalise of internal Labor brawling and dysfunction.
Albanese knew, too, that the best policies of reform and of responses to external shocks are developed through a cabinet government, with the prime minister at the helm but with ministers working collaboratively with each other and their public service advisers.
But now, progressive interest groups are complaining that Albanese, treasurer Jim Chalmers and finance minister Katy Gallagher didn’t do enough in the May budget to alleviate disadvantage and hardship. At the same time, some business organisations and academic economists continue to demand the immediate implementation of their versions of a sweeping economic reform program.
Their common refrain is that the Albanese government lacks the political courage to do what they demand.
Albanese’s view is that if political courage means making promises before an election and breaking them afterwards on the pretext that circumstances have changed, then include him out.
Circumstances always change. Suggesting that they have done so is the tired, old excuse for breaking promises that a leader had no intention of keeping.
Take tax, for example. The only prime minister in the post-war era to take a major tax policy to an election was John Howard. He’d said previously that he would never ever introduce a GST. But ahead of the 1998 election he said he had changed his mind and put his GST proposal to the Australian people who voted, narrowly, to accept it.
Yet voices of the left and right are demanding that Albanese adopts their favoured tax changes without having sought a mandate from the people.
Albanese knows the importance of not betraying the people’s trust. Tony Abbott learned it the hard way, promising before the 2013 election that he would make no cuts to health, education, the ABC or the SBS – only to break every one of them in the first year of his prime ministership. A year later he was gone.
As the Liberals cling onto keeping Baby Boomers happy – the only age cohort in which they now command majority support – they seem oblivious to or contemptuous of the views and aspirations of every younger generation, some in their fifties, in which Labor or the Greens have majority support.
As the Liberals stay hard right, Labor is capturing not only the sensible centre but also the second preferences of Greens voters. And the Teals and other independents threaten to swallow up the federal seats held by the few surviving moderate Liberals.
For decades, voters have considered the Liberals to be the natural party of government, electing Labor only when the Liberals have lost their way.
Albanese wants to make Labor the natural party of government by running a traditional cabinet government that keeps its promises, respects and rewards aspiration and welcomes the business community to the table.
Craig Emerson is managing director of Emerson Economics, director of the APEC Study Centre at RMIT University, visiting fellow at the ANU, adjunct professor at Victoria University, chair of the McKell Institute and chair of the Australian Alliance for Animals.