“Would you please send me one of your pipes that you may have laid aside and you will not be likely to be using again,” wrote Mr Reece. “If it should be a bit strong, no matter. I know of a process that will overcome that. I have not been able to get a decent pipe for years.”

A quick glance was enough to tell me that this was not what I was looking for. But I printed the letter out for a closer look anyway. The writer was an aged pensioner, he said, twenty days short of seventy-five years, living alone in New Norfolk, Tasmania. He has raised a family of six daughters and three sons. All of the sons had served in the recent war, he added, with one still with the occupying force in Japan.

Reece had “battled for Labour” since he joined the Amalgamated Miners Union in 1889. “I started in poverty and I’m ending ditto, but I’ve no regrets and have no apologies to offer for my support of the ‘Grand Old Labour Movement.’”

If Mr Chifley were to visit Hobart during the forthcoming federal election campaign, and if Reece is spared that long, he promises to be in the audience. He is very optimistic that the Chifley government will be returned with a strong majority (it was). “I wish you and your good colleagues all the good luck that wishes can express.”

I was busy that day and so, having studied the letter for a few minutes and enjoying a giggle about the pipe thing (what was that all about?) I tossed it aside and moved on. Fortunately, the pile I tossed it into was the “do not throw out under any circumstances” pile, where it stayed until the inevitable desk clean-up late last year when, at last, Mr Reece finally had my full attention.

This is my favourite thing, the deep study of a single archival record. It could be a letter, a telegram or a bunch of postcards discovered in a junk shop. It is remarkable what can be gleaned from seemingly insignificant clues, especially now that these clues can be run through so many newly digitised sources. Becoming deeply immersed in someone else’s life, trying to see the world through their eyes, must be my form of meditation.

Why this Mr Reece though? What is it about him in particular? Partly it was his surname that guided my hand that day towards the “do not throw out” pile rather than the recycling bin. I grew up in Tasmania and I remember my parents talking about the redoubtable Eric Reece, a former long-time Labor premier known as “Electric Eric” because of his ardent support for hydroelectric projects. Surely it had to be the same family.

But mainly I was captivated by what I perceive as a yearning on Reece’s part to stay connected with the world. It’s unintentionally expressed, but it’s there. Looking back over his long life, this proud and, I think, lonely man tells of the things that most matter to him: his work, his family and the labour movement. Not only that, he also imagines Labor’s next victory even if he is not alive to see it.

And the pipe thing? Chifley made his pipe a signature accessory and was rarely seen without one, but it does seem awful cheek to expect him to simply hand one over on request. Chifley wrote back: “Dear Mr Reece, thanks for your letter… I am sorry that for the present I haven’t a suitable pipe to send you. As you say, good pipes are very scarce these days.” (Actually Chifley usually had several on hand, gifts from family and well-wishers.) “I was interested to read of your lengthy support of the Labour Movement. You must have many memories to look back on.” And he signed off with best wishes.

Reece didn’t get his pipe but I doubt he was disappointed. Pipe smoking was a companionable habit the two men shared but Reece’s request, I suspect, was just an opening gambit. It has been said of Chifley that he used the lighting of his pipe as a stalling tactic while he thought through a response to a problem. And so, preliminaries over, Reece felt perfectly free to address his prime minister as an equal, one Labor man to another, to tell his story.

The letter wasn’t really about the pipe, and — fair warning — this essay is not really about it either.

William Henry Reece (often known even in official records as Will Harry Reece) was born in 1872, and he was indeed an uncle to Eric Reece. Fortunately for me, there is a biography of Reece the younger, Jillian Koshin’s Electric Eric: The Life and Times of an Australian State Premier (2009).

Koshin’s book begins with an examination of the Reece family’s working-class origins in mining towns in the northeast and west of Tasmania. The discovery of minerals — gold, silver, copper, tin — in the 1870s brought a sudden and massive economic boom to the colony based on interstate investment, higher export income, higher wages and increased incoming migration. In his 2012 history of Tasmania, Henry Reynolds describes the 1880s as one of Tasmania’s “sunniest” decades.

Patriarch Owen Charles Reece established himself as a miner in the 1870s but was frequently on the move looking for work. Koshin is at pains to show how the wealth that enriched investors and beautified the cities rarely trickled down to the poorest folk who had laboured to produce it. Across three generations, even in so-called good times, little changed for the Reece family.

Owen and his wife Jane had fourteen children but the first three, triplets, died in infancy. Jane was thirty-eight when she died in Scottsdale hospital giving birth to twins, who also died. Owen was left a widower with nine children to raise; our man Will (“I started in poverty…”) was the eldest. A few brothers down the line was George, eventually to become the father of Eric, who was born in 1909.

The Reeces’ lives were characterised by insecure and dangerous work and the strain and expense of constantly moving from one primitive slab-and-shingle hut to another in remote and isolated settlements. Because these clusters of dwellings were expected to be temporary, authorities would rarely invest in public amenities. Close-knit families relied on one other.

Out of these struggles emerged a writer, Marie E.J. Pitt. Originally from Victoria, she was married to a miner, William Pitt, and for about a decade beginning in the 1890s went with him to mining settlements in the northeast and west of Tasmania. They had four children, one of whom died.

Scribbling by lamplight, Pitt wrote of “an austere land of mountain gorges of ice and snow, and raging torrents of creeping mist and never-ending rain.” The land spoke another language, “superb in its silence, appalling in its melancholy grandeur.” Her pen was also driven by anger. This is how she begins her poem “The Keening”:

We are the women and children
Of the men that mined for gold:
Heavy are we with sorrow,
Heavy as heart can hold;
Galled are we with injustice,
Sick to the soul of loss —
Husbands and sons and brothers
Slain for the yellow dross!

Over nine more bitter stanzas she attacks mine owners, politicians and churchmen for having averted their gaze from the misery right in front of them. “The Keening” was published in 1911, but by then the Pitts had moved to Victoria because William had contracted miner’s phthisis. He died in 1912.

Will Reece, his siblings, nieces and nephews were among those children of the men that mined for gold. All the Reece men became union men. Poetry aside, trade unionism was the practical agent of change, the structure within which to advocate for safer working conditions, better wages and political representation.

Reece was a seventeen-year-old apprentice blacksmith at the tin mine in Ringarooma when he joined the Amalgamated Miner’s Union in 1889, the year of its formation in Tasmania. For some reason, though, he broke away from the family and left the mines behind. His parents were married with Baptist rites but Will appears to have converted to Catholicism, a most unusual thing to do in those sectarian times, and certainly enough to cause a family rift.

From the late 1890s he roamed through several agricultural districts in the northeast and in 1909, at St Mary’s, he married a woman named Catherine Cannell. In 1912 they went south to New Norfolk, a town nestling in the Derwent valley thirty-five kilometres northwest of Hobart. The landscape was far kinder than anything Will Reece had known growing up, and here the family settled for good.

Literate, articulate and gregarious, Reece would join anything. He played cricket and football, would swing an axe at a local woodchopping event and was always ready to chair a meeting, MC a church fundraiser or write a letter to an editor about some local grievance. Forced in 1915 to give up blacksmithing because of an accident, he opened a photographic studio; it failed, and he was declared bankrupt in 1921.

Clearly this man had bucketloads of self-belief. He stood twice, unsuccessfully, for the municipal council and then, undeterred, turned to state politics and was a candidate for Labor in the elections of 1919, 1922, 1925 and 1928. He failed each time.

Meanwhile he became an organiser for the Australian Workers’ Union, and here he found his métier. His nephew’s biographer noticed Will Reece signing up shearers, shed-hands, miners, labourers and roadmen across the state, including in mining centres on the west coast. New heavy-industry projects provided fresh fields for the AWU, and there was Will Reece, visiting the new carbide factory at Electrona in the south and the hydroelectricity works at Waddamana in the central highlands. With regular reports (this one is typical) he made himself well-known to the readers of the AWU’s national paper, the Australian Worker.

But the 1930s brought reversals. In 1931, more than a quarter of Tasmanian trade unionists were unemployed because of the depression. All the Reece men let their union membership lapse. Will Reece returned to manual labour and in 1934, aged sixty-two, was severely injured in an explosives accident while quarrying for gravel. He sustained burns to his face and temporarily lost his sight. In 1935 his wife Catherine died suddenly, leaving him with a clutch of children and teenagers.

In 1939 Will’s fifty-year commitment to the labour cause was celebrated at a special meeting of the New Norfolk branch of the Labor Party. Local MP Jack Dwyer spoke Reece’s work to “uplift” the condition of the masses. Many of the privileges now enjoyed by the workers were due to his efforts, Dwyer noted, and the party was much indebted to him.

At about that time Will’s nephew Eric was embarking on his own (in his case spectacularly successful) political career. After failed attempts in 1940 and 1943, Eric was elected Labor member of the state House of Assembly in November 1946. He was in office as premier between 1958 and 1969, and again from 1972 to 1975, and was federal president of the Labor Party between 1952 and 1955.

His formative years had been similar to his uncle’s: he’d worked in mines and on farms from his early teens — joined the AWU at fifteen — spent most of the 1930s depression unemployed — got a job at the Mount Lyell copper mine in 1934 — was appointed organiser for the AWU there in 1935. Strangely, there does not seem to have been a strong association between uncle and nephew. In his 1946 letter to Ben Chifley, Will could have mentioned Eric as a promising youngster to keep an eye on, but he does not.

Still, Will and Eric Reece — and Ben Chifley as well, of course — were haunted by memories of hardship, and all strove for the same things: economic growth, full employment, increased standards of living, and social welfare for those who needed it.

There was nothing in Eric Reece’s makeup to prepare him for the social upheavals and cultural shifts of the 1960s and 1970s. He had grown up believing that the state’s natural resources — its water, timber and minerals — were there to be used for the common good. Famously, he rode roughshod over opposition to the hydroelectric scheme in southwest Tasmania that was to flood Lake Pedder in 1972–73.

Where some people wept at Pedder’s beauty, Eric Reece was belligerent and autocratic. In 1966 he taunted his opponents with the remark that Tasmania’s southwest contained only “a few badgers, kangaroos, wallabies, and some wildflowers that can be seen anywhere.” (Badgers? Did he mean wombats?) Tough old trade unionists like Reece knew what destitution looked like and were lit with a determination to do more than just overcome personal hardship; they were committed to structural reforms to improve the lives of all working people.

By this time, however, there had begun a great grinding of gears in progressive politics as young, idealistic, tertiary-educated people drifted away from Labor to the green movement. While this also happened elsewhere, perhaps the grinding came earlier in Tasmania.

Will Reece didn’t live to see any of this. Perhaps, as promised, he made it to Hobart in September 1946 to hear Ben Chifley’s two-hour campaign speech given to a capacity crowd at the town hall. “The whole country is prosperous,” Chifley declared that night. “That is the first ideal we have, and we go to the people on that record.”

Labor’s election loss in 1949 and Chifley’s death in 1951 must have saddened Reece. He died in 1953, with his boots on (so to speak) I hope, and his certainties still intact. •

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As it happens, I don’t think we did ever find a story the Rudd government could tell the Australian people. Nor do I recall hearing anything further about this grand mission afterwards. A year or so later, of course, Rudd was gone and, at the 2010 election, so — almost — was the government itself. Julia Gillard, who led Labor to minority government, called Rudd’s “a good government… losing its way.”

It has recently been hard not to wonder: is Albanese’s going the same way?

In many respects, the comparison is unfair. This Labor government has plainly learnt a great deal from the last and has gone out of its way not to repeat its errors. Many of its ministers were there, in more junior roles, last time. Albanese himself, as a rising figure during that era and leader of the House for almost the entire period before ending up as deputy prime minister, sometimes seemed traumatised by the infighting that more than anything wrecked Labor in government.

The differences matter. Rudd wanted to win the media every day. Albanese often seems more like Malcolm Fraser in his aspiration to keep politics off the front page. Rudd talked a big game in opposition about keeping government accountable but then failed to follow through by calling inquiries into the grand failures and scandals of the Howard era such as the Iraq war and the Australian Wheat Board affair. Albanese’s government, by contrast, has called one inquiry after another, most of them exposing the sheer badness of the Coalition on issues ranging from immigration policy through to robodebt.

Barely six months into the life of his government, Kevin Rudd was being called Captain Chaos by the Australian’s John Lyons. Albanese has gone out of his way to emphasise the careful, orderly and process-driven nature of his government. Albanese probably intends such remarks as a rebuke of Scott Morrison, but they often sound equally applicable to Rudd.

The Albanese government has a right to consider itself a good government, even allowing for the fairly low standards we have so often seen this century in Canberra. It has fulfilled many election promises. It has grappled effectively with key areas of Coalition failure and neglect, including stagnant wages and a shambolic immigration policy. It has responded to the general challenge of rising inflation and the particular one of spiralling energy costs. It has conducted that bewildering range of inquiries — not, seemingly, just to kick a can down the road but with the apparent aim of consulting widely and doing good policy — which gives substance to its commitment to evidence and process.

If good government receives its due reward, you might imagine that this is a government coasting to a comfortable election victory next time round. It is remarkable to consider that Labor won a resounding victory in the Aston by-election as recently as 1 April 2023; at the time, it seemed unassailable.

But politics is rarely so simple, and it tends not to be terribly fair either. Recent opinion polling has been discouraging for the government: Newspoll had the two-party-preferred vote at 50–50 in November, and then Labor at 52 to the Coalition’s 48 just before Christmas. That’s not disastrous — the middle of a term often looks grim for incumbents — but it would have given Labor Party strategists plenty to worry over.

Three issues have figured in the commentary. Almost everyone gives significant weight to the cost of living, which is hitting lower- and middle-income families hard. Pollsters and pundits argue that Labor’s support in the outer suburbs is fragile and it needs to do more to show it is on the side of struggling families. Peter Dutton and the Liberals, meanwhile, see these same voters as their only serious pathway back to government. November’s Victorian state election gave signs that Labor’s vote on Melbourne’s suburban frontiers might be a little more fragile than many assumed at the 2022 federal election. The forthcoming Dunkley by-election will test some of the claims made in recent months.

The second issue was the defeat of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament. Labor championed this cause: it became part of the government’s brand from the moment of Albanese’s victory speech on the evening of 21 May 2022. When, therefore, it went down, it was inevitable that the government’s reputation should go down with it. Governments have not historically been thrown out of office on the back of such a defeat, but failure at a referendum can wrong-foot a government struggling under other pressures — as the defeat of its attempt to ban the Communist Party in 1951 did to a Menzies government grappling with 20 per cent inflation.

Third, there is the Gaza war. The horrors that have occurred in Israeli border communities, in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and in Gaza will move anyone with a sense of humanity, but the political reality is that they have tended to move different groups of people in rather different ways. Labor’s problem here is that for large parts of the left, the Palestine issue is the defining cause of the age; for them, it divides pretend progressives from real ones.

There are parallels here with the Spanish civil war of 1936–39, which was also a divisive issue for a Labor Party that contained secular leftists and others who supported the Republican government, and Catholic right-wingers who leaned towards Franco and the Nationalist rebels. It was a part of John Curtin’s achievement as federal Labor leader that he was able to steer a course through these turbulent waters, largely by committing his party — then in opposition — to isolationism.

That kind of approach isn’t available to Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong. But they still must steer a course that takes into account Australia’s alliance commitments, its support for the so-called rules-based order and international law, the pressures of the domestic political scene and challenges of electoral politics, and its attachments to basic decency, humanitarianism and justice. The government’s hostility to Hamas is taken for granted everywhere except among the unhinged populist right, whose extremism nonetheless now often finds a platform in parts of the commercial media.

But we can be equally certain that it gives Australia’s Labor government no great pleasure to be seen as too close to the present government of Israel, a regime that is for very sound reasons deeply unpopular in Israel itself as well as among many Australian Jews. There is little doubt that in negotiating these pressures, which it has actually done with fair success, the government has nonetheless at times sounded windy and looked wobbly.

By Christmas, I would not have been alone in wondering if this government was going the way of Rudd’s and Gillard’s amid these pressures. A great part of the difficulty has seemed to me the particular combination of policy wonkery and electoral opportunism that has come to hold too much sway in the Labor Party this century. We all like good, evidence-based policy, and we all like electoral professionalism. Successful political parties need both to get anywhere.

But politics is also an aspect of culture. Otherwise highly intelligent Labor politicians can sometimes appear very naive about such matters. The Rudd and Gillard governments are a case in point: who in the Gillard government, for instance, came up with the idea of appointing a former Liberal Party leader, Brendan Nelson, as director of one of the country’s leading public institutions, the Australian War Memorial — in the lead-up to the centenary of the first world war, of all times? And under this government, which seems to support a new direction for the memorial on the issue of representing frontier warfare, it reappointed to the council a former Liberal prime minister, Tony Abbott. Such statesmanship!

These matters might seem trivial beside the problem of ensuring that millions of Australians can pay for their next power bill. But the political right has fewer illusions — Coalition governments stack boards as if their very existence depended on it. Labor shouldn’t follow that lead, but it should pay much closer attention than it does to the points of intersection between civil society, cultural authority and state power.

The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci developed the concept of hegemony to explain how power and culture work in capitalist societies. The “common sense” of the ruling class — coinciding with its interests — comes to be seen as that of society as a whole — the “national interest,” to use some contemporary parlance. Conservatives apply Gramsci’s ideas faithfully in their relentless efforts to dominate culture. Their success in the recent Voice referendum was testament to such efforts. Labor governments imagine that so long as they can get that cost-of-living relief through the parliament next week, winners are grinners. That notion rests on a remarkably shallow understanding of how power operates in a society of any serious complexity.

This is why January has been a good month for the Albanese government. Two things happened almost at the very same time, one in “the economy,” the other in “the culture.” In the economy, it recast the stage three tax cuts to ensure that there was a redistribution of benefits towards low- and middle-income earners. Alan Kohler, so often a devastatingly astute commentator on such matters, was right to point out that this was somewhat of an argument over loose change: the tax system as a whole continues to favour those who are best-off. Yet it was something. Albanese, in a National Press Club speech and elsewhere, has framed the shift as a response to changed circumstances, and especially the cost-of-living crisis. A bolder leader would also have said that social democratic governments support progressive income tax and oppose massive hand-outs to those who already have enough.

At the same time as the upholders of national political integrity were launching philosophical disquisitions about Albanese’s “backflips,” “lies” and “betrayals” — often the same journalists and politicians who met far worse from Scott Morrison with vigorous shrugging or lavish praise — Labor was also attending to the culture. The appointment of Kim Williams as new chair of the ABC suggested a government that has an interest in ensuring that one of the country’s most influential public institutions is led by someone who has not only impeccable professional credentials but also sufficient commitment to public culture, the arts and the goals of excellence, independence and balance to align with values supposedly supported by the government itself.

The government can’t expect an easy run over the second half of its term. Media hostility has been increasingly uncompromising and will be relentless on the issue of tax cuts. The cost-of-living crisis, moreover, doesn’t lend itself to easy solutions.

On broader issues of policy, Labor’s Achilles heel seems to me to be housing. It has acted, but it has not done enough, and the Greens have made this one their own. It is ideally calculated to appeal to anyone under forty, and others too. The Coalition will also continue to pretend it has the solution, which involves allowing people with virtually no superannuation savings to use the little they have for a home deposit. The real estate industry will be delighted.

Labor would be well advised to craft a radical solution to housing in the spirit of the 1945 Commonwealth–State Housing Agreement — one that involves not only bold solutions to private provision but also a renewed emphasis on social housing. Even more than the “backflip” on taxes, a bold, evidence-based, well-costed housing policy could set Labor up for an extended period in office and a genuine opportunity to reinvigorate social democracy in this country. •

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Evatt’s move from court to federal parliament was considered “a most regrettable precedent” by Menzies, who was by then prime minister. (While it may have been regrettable, it wasn’t much of a precedent, never being repeated over the ensuing eighty-three years.) Evatt responded in kind, suggesting that Menzies would lose the next election. (That, too, proved a less than accurate prediction.) As Anne Henderson sees it in her new book, Menzies vs Evatt: The Great Rivalry of Australian Politics, battle was joined from that time.

Reading Henderson’s opening chapters it’s hard not to be staggered by Evatt’s workload as external affairs minister and attorney-general. No minister today would take on these dual roles, and Henderson highlights the difficulties the combination caused for Labor in government, especially at a time of war.

It would have been a punishing load for the best-organised minister (which Evatt clearly was not), and was exacerbated by his frequent absences overseas in the pre-jet age, including a year as president of the UN General Assembly. As an often-absentee attorney-general, he was unable to contribute fully to vital tasks, including defending the government’s bank nationalisation plan before the High Court.

Evatt became Labor leader after Ben Chifley’s death in June 1951. His role later that year in defeating Menzies’s referendum to ban the Communist Party is seen by many as his finest moment, but Henderson downplays the victory. Support for the ban was recorded by polls at 73 per cent in early August but by polling day, six weeks later, it had dropped to just under 50 per cent. (The referendum was carried in only three states.) Henderson cites the history of defeated referendum proposals and asks why the Yes even got close — as if falling support for the ban followed a law of nature regardless of effective political campaigning.

It’s true that early support for many referendum proposals has evaporated by polling day. But it is difficult to think of a question for which Yes campaigners enjoyed more favourable circumstances than this one. The cold war was in full swing, Australian troops were fighting the communists on the Korean peninsula (under a UN flag), and communism was seen as an existential threat, broadly detested within the electorate. Menzies had warned of the possibility of a third world war within three years; strong anti-communist elements within Evatt’s own party supported the ban.

Indeed, one might equally ask why Menzies couldn’t pull it off. I suspect that he would have appreciated the irony that it was the internationalist Evatt, not the Anglophile Menzies, who campaigned by citing British justice’s onus on the state to prove guilt rather than (as the anti-communists proposed) on the accused to prove innocence.

As with most failed referendums, the loss did the prime minister no harm. In fact, Henderson makes the interesting suggestion that it saved him from having to enact legislation that may “have been as divisive and unsettling to civic order” as the McCarthy hearings were in the United States. It’s impossible to prove of course, but Australia definitely didn’t need that kangaroo court–type assault on individuals’ reputations and lives.

Henderson’s account of the Petrov affair and the subsequent royal commission — a disastrous time for Evatt — traverses territory that is probably less contentious than it was a generation ago. On the Labor Party’s 1955 split, she quotes with approval the claim by former Liberal prime minister John Howard that Labor’s rules afforded too much power to its national executive: a more genuinely federal structure (like that of the Liberals) would have rendered Evatt’s intervention more difficult and a split in the party less likely.

Whether a Victorian Labor branch left mostly to its own devices would have sorted out its problems is unclear, but the opportunity was unlikely given the hostility of Evatt and his supporters to the group of Victorians they saw as treacherous anti-communists. Ironically, it was this capacity to intervene that would facilitate a federal takeover of the moribund (and still split-crippled) Victorian ALP fifteen years later. That intervention eventually reinvigorated the state branch, establishing a Labor dominance in Victorian state elections and in the state’s federal seats that persists to the present day.

Henderson also poses the question of whether a different Labor leader could have avoided the split. What if deputy leader Arthur Calwell had been installed after the 1954 election loss? She speculates that Calwell might have been able to offer concessions to the anti-communist Victorians and stresses an absence of intense ideological fervour among many of those who would soon be expelled from the party.

While it is hard to envisage a leader handling the crisis less effectively than Evatt did, Henderson quotes Labor MP Fred Daly’s view that Calwell at the time was “hesitant, uncertain and waiting for Evatt’s job” — hardly the stuff of firm leadership. Arthur was always prepared to wait.

It may be true that most of the anti-communist Labor MPs, even in Victoria, were not fervent ideologues, but possibly more relevant was the ideological predisposition of the powerful Catholic activist B.A. Santamaria, who was able to influence state Labor’s decision-making bodies and preselections from outside the party. Santamaria boasted in 1952 to his mentor, Archbishop Daniel Mannix, that his Catholic Social Studies Movement (the infamous “Movement”) would be able to transform the leadership of the Labor movement within a few years and install federal and state MPs able to implement “a Christian social program.”

This may have been overly ambitious nationally, but Santamaria’s undue influence over Victorian Labor was already a concern for some. Moreover, the party Santamaria envisaged might be viewed as essentially a church or “confessional” party, at odds with traditional Australian “Laborism,” not to mention with the main elements of a pluralist, secular democracy.

Henderson’s most interesting observation, for this reviewer, is her contention that Evatt’s lack of anti-communist conviction owed much to his being “an intense secularist.” It is certainly the case that critics of communism in this era often preceded the noun with the adjectives “godless” or “atheistic.” In a predominantly Christian society like Australia, communism’s atheistic nature was a damning feature, especially among Catholics, including Catholic Labor MPs. Presbyterian Menzies also held strongly to this view.

If this review has focused more on Evatt than on Menzies, this reflects the enduring questions Evatt’s leadership raises — including the state of his mental health, which is seen by some as helping to explain his erratic and self-destructive behaviour. (Henderson doesn’t consider this question, but it was well covered by biographer John Murphy.)

Menzies, having survived the referendum result, was also undaunted by his narrow election victory in 1954, secured with a minority of the vote, a lucky escape to be repeated in 1961. He went for the Evatt jugular whenever it was exposed — which was often, as Henderson shows vividly. John Howard would later claim, on his own behalf, that the times suited him. Menzies had that advantage in spades, and he exploited it artfully.

If there is a central theme to Menzies’s approach to his battle with Evatt, it is his characterisation of the Labor leader as a naive internationalist, oblivious to the emerging threat of monolithic communism, especially to the north of Australia. This is a criticism endorsed by Henderson. A cynic might suggest that the communist threat was not only electoral gold for Menzies but also provided a convenient pretext for him to maintain his unwavering support for European colonialism. Better the colonialists than the communists.

Neither character was a team player by instinct, but Menzies adapted better and learned from mistakes. Among other flaws, Evatt’s lack of self-awareness was both crucial and crippling. There is no doubt that the winner of the “great rivalry” was Menzies.

As a known partisan, Henderson runs the risk that her book will be seen in that light, and that her put-downs of Evatt’s admirers — “a collective of scribblers,” “the Evatt fan club” — will be viewed accordingly. Her failure to acknowledge any merit in Evatt’s referendum victory will seem churlish to some. But Henderson can’t be faulted on the book’s readability: it’s a one-sitting job for those fascinated by the politics of that era.

I was left wondering about the depth of the personal animus between the two men. Henderson quotes Menzies accusing Evatt of being too interested in power — as “a menace to Australia” to be kept out of office “by hook or by crook.” Prime ministers and opposition leaders routinely find themselves in settings where some form of civil, non-political conversation is virtually unavoidable. What on earth might these two have talked about? Well, both of them loved their cricket. •

Menzies vs Evatt: The Great Rivalry of Australian Politics
By Anne Henderson | Connor Court | $34.95 | 236 pages

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But Albanese was also that very modern species: the student politician who came to parliament via a career as a political staffer and party official. His only experience of paid work outside of professional politics occurred while he was a student. After university, he was employed as a staffer by that doyen of the Sydney left, Tom Uren. He married Carmel Tebbutt, who would also become a politician and rose to the position of deputy premier of New South Wales. He spent more than a quarter of a century in parliament before becoming prime minister. His was a long game, and there was nothing inevitable about where it led.

These were the outward expressions of Albanese’s rise: prominent in campus politics at the University of Sydney; NSW Young Labor president; rising political staffer; NSW Labor assistant general secretary at twenty-six, and therefore de facto leader of the left in the party machine; member for Grayndler at thirty-three. He would go on to hold senior positions in the shadow ministry during the Howard era and cabinet office under Rudd and Gillard, as well as being leader of the House. But Albanese’s more private world disclosed a complexity barely hinted at in these impressive career landmarks.

Albo — the nickname that attached to him from boyhood — was born in Sydney on 2 March 1963 and raised by his mother, a disability pensioner and Labor Party member, in public housing in Camperdown. The official story was that Anthony’s father, an Italian ship’s steward named Carlo, had died in a car accident soon after marrying his mother. They had met while Maryanne was travelling on an ocean liner to Britain.

Early in his teenage years, Anthony learnt from Maryanne that she had never married Carlo, and that he had not died. Nonetheless, Anthony made no attempt to find his father for many years. He was close to his mother, who held lofty ambitions for her son: she told friends Anthony would one day become prime minister. In the meantime, she had a short-lived and unhappy marriage to another man, whose surname Anthony briefly adopted before reverting to that of a father he had never met.

Albanese attended Catholic schools and then the University of Sydney, where he studied economics. The university had a broad left that took in a wide range of ideologies and affiliations, and Albo, a charismatic figure, got on well with people across the spectrum of radical politics. His affiliation, however, was with the ALP Club, and he was best known on campus for organising a successful campaign to defend the teaching of political economy, a program that offered a left-wing, Marxist-inflected alternative to neoclassical economics.

But Albo regarded grown-up Labor politics as the real game. He had joined the party in 1979, still at school, and would later rise through the ranks of the Young Labor organisation, which, unlike the NSW Labor Party, had a left majority.

Albo was determined that NSW Young Labor would remain left, and he displayed an early ability to round up the necessary numbers. The origins of the NSW Labor left, also known as the Steering Committee (and from 1989 as the Socialist Left), stretched back to the Labor split of the 1950s. Of its sub-factions, the “soft left” was closely associated with the Ferguson family: Jack, who was Neville Wran’s deputy premier, and his sons. The alternative and rival “hard left” was the group to which Albanese gravitated. While the right was their mutual foe, there was no love lost between the two left sections.

Anthony took over many responsibilities connected with his mother’s precarious health and finances. While mother and son were devoted to each other, the absence of his father shadowed Albanese’s life. Even the pronunciation of his name was unsettled, then as now.

Tom Uren, a former boxer, prisoner of war and leading minister in the Whitlam government, took him on to his staff and became a mentor and even something of a father figure. Uren was by this time an elder statesman of the NSW left but on the outer in the Hawke government, which had little interest in taking up the kind of ambitious policy associated with Uren’s time as urban and regional development minister (1972–75). A deep affection developed between the older and the younger man. Before the decade was through, Uren was publicly describing young Albo as a future Labor leader.

In 1989, Albanese won the position of assistant general secretary of the NSW Labor Party. This was no bit part. Having emerged in the early 1970s out of a power-sharing arrangement between the majority right and minority left factions, it was one of the toughest gigs in backroom politics. As the left’s man in the Sussex Street party office, the assistant general secretary could expect relentless obstruction, and not a little hostility; there was no pretence of comradeship across factional lines. On one occasion, while Albanese was overseas, his rivals from the right faction turned his office into a library and changed the locks.

But Albanese was already a tough political operator. For many ordinary Australians, their first encounter with him would have been in a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the 1994 election for mayor of Leichhardt, Rats in the Ranks, even though he remained off-screen. Albanese was alone among the main players in refusing to cooperate with the filmmakers and appear on-screen. In this, he showed an astuteness about the damage that might have been done to his political career if he had been seen as centrally involved in the plotting of what proved to be an unseemly struggle for a minor local office.

The future prime minister won preselection for the safe Labor seat of Grayndler ahead of the 1996 federal election that saw the defeat of the Keating Labor government by a resurgent Coalition under John Howard’s leadership. Normally, preselection would have been a near-guarantee of election. On this occasion, there were predictions that it might be more difficult because of the controversy aroused by the building of a third runway at Sydney Airport. Albanese faced a candidate from the No Aircraft Noise Party, who won enough of the vote to reduce the Labor candidate to a bare majority of the primary vote.

In his first speech to parliament, Albanese began by thanking his mother, who had raised him “under very difficult economic circumstances” and instilled in him “a strong sense of social justice and fairness.” His “politics as a democratic socialist,” he said, had “been developed from my experience in life.” He defended the public sector and criticised “strict adherence to dry economic philosophies.”

These were noble words, but he soon showed on the floor of the House his fighting instincts, honed in Sussex Street and party conferences at the Sydney Town Hall. In April 1998, he made a memorable attack on Howard: “You can trim the eyebrows; you can cap the teeth; you can cut the hair; you can put on different glasses; you can give him a ewe’s milk facial, for all I care; but, to paraphrase a gritty Australian saying, ‘same stuff, different bucket.’” The usual phrase would have been “same shit…” but Albanese was sufficiently familiar with parliamentary rules to know that he would not have got away with that.

He continued: “Here is a man who lived at home until he was thirty-two. You can imagine what he was like. Here were young Australians demonstrating against the Vietnam war, listening to the Doors, driving their tie-dyed kombi vans, and what was John Howard doing? He was at home with mum, wearing his shorts and long white socks, listening to Pat Boone albums and waiting for the Saturday night church dance.” It was very impolite but contributed to Albanese’s image as a bomb-thrower.

There was more to Albanese than such fun and games. He opposed a bill that Liberal parliamentarian Kevin Andrews introduced to overturn voluntary euthanasia legislation in the Northern Territory. He pursued reforms to allow same-sex couples to gain access to each other’s superannuation on the same basis as heterosexual couples. These years also provided Albanese with an opportunity to demonstrate his devotion to another part of that Sydney working-class trinity: he was centrally involved in the successful campaign to save South Sydney from the National Rugby League’s effort to get rid of it.

As Albanese’s standing in the party grew, his views on matters such as the leadership came to count for a great deal. He supported Kim Beazley in both of his periods of leadership (1996–2001 and 2005–06) and Simon Crean (2001–03), until the latter decided, without consulting him (or, indeed, the caucus), that Labor would oppose a new airport for western Sydney. He opposed Mark Latham’s ill-fated ascension to the leadership in December 2003 and three years later supported Beazley against Kevin Rudd while maintaining a strong relationship with the man who would take Labor to victory a year later.

He also gained increasingly important shadow ministries. After Labor lost the 1998 election, he was shadow parliamentary secretary for family and community services. Later, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs and the arts were added. He arrived on the frontbench as shadow ageing and seniors minister after the 2001 election loss, followed by education and training, and then the environment. When Rudd became leader, he got the infrastructure and water portfolios. Having come to be seen as a skilled tactician, he rose to become manager of opposition business in the House.

Here was the story of a man playing to his own strengths and interests, rising steadily rather than as a shooting star (in contrast with Latham), building trust with straight-talking, discretion and competence, and wielding power and organising numbers in the party as an old-school factional leader.

Albanese’s marriage to Tebbutt, the birth of a son, Nathan, and the devastating death of his beloved mother in rapid succession in the early years of the new century mellowed him. He enjoyed warm friendships with some members of the opposition. And he commenced a search for the father he had never known. In a highly emotional encounter, he met an elderly Carlo on a visit to Italy in 2009. A missing part of his life fell into place.

Albanese was a heavy hitter in the Rudd government that came to power in 2007. With ministerial responsibilities covering infrastructure, transport, regional development and local government, he had an important role in a government that said it wanted to renew nation-building after years of neglect under Howard-era market fundamentalism.

The establishment of Infrastructure Australia was integral to this effort: there were major investments in road and rail, but the global financial crisis distracted the government from its larger ambitions towards everyday survival through quick, smaller-scale spending projects. Albanese, as a member of the left long sceptical of inflated claims for the value of markets, supported the thrust towards a more ambitious role for government.

Albanese was leader of the House — and therefore responsible for the smooth running of parliament — as well as a loyal Rudd supporter, despite his misgivings about some of the prime minister’s bad calls, notably the abandonment of legislation for an emissions trading scheme. He was dismayed as Rudd’s critics moved against the prime minister in mid 2010 in favour of the deputy, Julia Gillard. Albanese and Gillard had an association going back to student politics but had never been close. Albanese believed the switch ill-judged, but he took on the task of talking with Rudd to persuade him that he should not run in a leadership contest that he was destined to lose badly.

While known to be a loyal Rudd supporter, Albanese continued as a senior minister in Gillard’s government both before and after the 2010 election that sent Labor into a minority government facing a resurgent opposition led by Tony Abbott.

Unlike many of his colleagues, Albanese managed to avoid the impression that he was a plotter. Trusted on both sides of the bitter Rudd–Gillard rivalry, his reputation as a party man, his astute leadership of the House and his capabilities as a minister made him valuable to whoever was in office.

His factional leadership was another reason why he was to be taken seriously. Albanese’s value only increased when Labor, lacking a majority in the House, depended on the support of Greens and independents. He formed excellent relations with the independent parliamentarians on whom Labor depended for continuation in office. Some 561 pieces of legislation were passed during Gillard’s prime ministership, and each required someone to reach beyond the Labor Party to gather the numbers needed. That someone was often Albanese.

He also had the melancholy duty of engineering the replacement of Harry Jenkins as speaker with the Queensland Liberal National Party member Peter Slipper, a manoeuvre Albanese had devised to get Labor an extra vote in parliament. While many regretted the idea when Slipper became mired in scandal, it seemed like a good idea at the time, and Albanese conceived and executed the plan well.

Rudd’s destabilisation of Gillard’s leadership couldn’t but draw a figure of Albanese’s standing into the fray. Just how involved in the decline and fall of Gillard he became remains contentious. But when Rudd challenged Gillard’s leadership in February 2012, Albanese held a media conference in Sydney at which he shed tears for what the government had become. There were references to his mother and her three great faiths and to the values on which he had been raised. What the party had done in June 2010 in replacing Rudd with Gillard was wrong, he said, and he would now be voting for Rudd. “I like fighting Tories — that’s what I do,” he added.

It was a supreme performance of the party man, an old-fashioned demonstration of tribal loyalty in an era of fluid identities and shifting allegiances. Gillard had refused his offer to resign, she won the leadership vote, and Albanese continued as a minister in a tired, staggering government.

Rudd defeated Gillard in a second bid to return to the leadership on 26 June 2013. Nobody accuses Albanese of doing the numbers for Rudd, yet few doubt that his involvement behind the scenes must have been significant. Those who recalled Rats in the Ranks might have been reminded of Albanese’s presence during that drama, always off-screen but a player nonetheless. Albanese’s reward came with the office of deputy prime minister. He was conscious of the honour. As so often at significant moments in his career, he would return to where he had come from: “It says a great thing about our nation that the son of a parent who grew up in a council house in Sydney could be deputy prime minister.”

That was true, but he would have only a few weeks in the job. On 7 September, the government was swept from office and Abbott became prime minister. There were small consolation prizes for Albanese: an inner-city pub had named a beer after him, and he had been given the chance to host the ABC’s music video program Rage.

Rudd had left a parting gift. The parliamentary leadership was now to be decided, in part, by a vote of the ALP’s rank and file. Party members’ votes would count for half the weighting; those of a diminished caucus would make up the other half. Bill Shorten, a figure from the Victorian right, contested the leadership; so did Albanese, representing the left. There were weeks of speeches and debates. Most agree that the ritual was a positive one, generating friendliness and goodwill, and engaging ordinary members in a novel outbreak of party democracy. Indeed, the experiment was seemingly so successful that it has never been repeated.

Albanese won the rank­and-file vote easily, but Shorten gained sufficient support in caucus to win the contest. Several members of the left voted for Shorten; Albanese was left to lick his wounds just ahead of a final, emotional visit to his dying father in Italy.

In running for the leadership, Albanese had formally announced that he regarded himself as a potential future prime minister. Inevitably, and even allowing for the protections that Rudd’s reforms offered an incumbent leader between parliamentary elections, that also made him the most obvious alternative to Shorten. Whenever Shorten was faring poorly in public esteem, there would be chatter about the possibility of an Albanese leadership.

Meanwhile, Albanese worked hard to raise his public profile, to show that he was neither just a Sydney brawler nor a man destined to rise no higher than second-rank portfolios. His profile was raised by a regular slot on Nine’s Today with his Liberal Party friend Christopher Pyne. He cooperated with a biography written by leading journalist Karen Middleton, which was published in 2016. (I have relied on it, among other sources, for information.) A photograph of a young and handsome Albanese from 1985 — dubbed “Hot Albo” — circulated widely on social media from the time of the leadership election of 2013, quite obviously with his cooperation.

Albo also cultivated an image of retro hipness as “DJ Albo,” performing the role of disc jockey at pubs and clubs — sometimes for charity, sometimes as a party fundraiser — with an emphasis on 1980s and 1990s numbers. He assured journalists that it was “part of who I am” and not a publicity stunt aimed at winning over younger voters. In truth, it was likely something of both.

Labor’s strong performance at the 2016 double dissolution election largely put paid to chatter of a change of leaders. Shorten had almost edged out Malcolm Turnbull, who seemed a beaten and bitter man on election night. In the circumstances, Albanese quickly ruled out any challenge to Shorten, who therefore retained the leadership unopposed.

In the years ahead, prominent members of the political class found it increasingly hard to visualise a future Albanese prime ministership. Some considered him worthy of it but thought that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Others believed that he had kept too many of his old left-wing sympathies. Inevitably, new prospective leaders gained attention, notably Tanya Plibersek, a fellow member of the NSW left. But Albanese had the virtue of patience. His views might have become milder over the years, but he had the lodestar of his upbringing. It was hard to accuse him of believing in nothing, of being a mere careerist. He could also sound the right note at the right time. His 2018 Whitlam Oration was widely perceived as a call for the party to “engage constructively with businesses” at a time when Shorten’s rhetoric seemed likely to alienate “the big end of town.”

He was entering an era, too, in which the political insider was on the nose. Albanese celebrated twenty years in parliament in 2016, managing in that year to hold off a challenge in his electorate from the Greens after a redistribution in their favour. The Greens challenger professed radical ideas of a kind that might once have been close to those of a younger Albanese. Albanese’s marriage to Tebbutt ended in early 2019 — they had been together for three decades and married for nineteen years.

Both personally and professionally, Albanese seemed to have reached a crossroads. As the Coalition government lurched from one crisis to the next, and from one leader to the next — Malcolm Turnbull to Scott Morrison in 2018 — a Shorten Labor government seemed more likely than not. A Labor victory at the 2019 election would have ended any prospect of an Albanese prime ministership.

Since September 2013 Albanese had been shadow infrastructure and transport minister, also covering tourism — responsibility for cities was added in 2014. But the best he could look forward to in a Shorten government was a role of secondary importance, doing the kinds of things he had done before. He was not close to Shorten and was never part of his inner circle; Albanese was only brought onto the tactics committee in 2016, ahead of that year’s election.

Shorten and Labor’s shock loss at the 2019 election changed things entirely; Morrison retained the prime ministership and Albanese assumed the Labor leadership without a contest. The Victorian right’s Richard Marles was his deputy. Albanese had secured the prize he coveted in vain in 2013, but the pathway to the prime ministership, even in the third term of a deeply mediocre government, looked treacherous. Morrison’s majority was, like Turnbull’s had been, a small one, but the margins needed to win many seats had blown out, especially in Queensland.

Labor jettisoned the policies that were seen to have created trouble at the recent election, working hard to counter a perception that its environmental policies were a danger to job opportunities without alienating too many voters committed to countering global heating. And it waved through income tax cuts that would, when they reached their third stage in 2024, involve large gains for high-income earners.

Morrison’s ill-judged response to the devastating bushfires during the summer of 2019–20 gave Albanese and Labor their first chance to gain ground. Morrison was taking a family holiday in Hawaii while the fires raged. The poor impression created by his absence was compounded by his office’s decision to obfuscate about his whereabouts.

Albanese, meanwhile, was on duty and conspicuous in the media, giving interviews, visiting bushfire sites and serving meals to firefighters. He avoided an aggressive partisanship, allowing Morrison to make, and then suffer for, his own errors. Albanese also called for volunteer firefighters to receive financial compensation for their efforts. It was a masterly performance.

After the bushfires came the Covid-19 pandemic. These were dark days, but an unexpected opportunity for Morrison to rebuild his credibility. The government instituted measures that helped avert both mass death and economic disaster. The formation of a national cabinet that included leaders of all state and territory governments excluded Albanese as opposition leader.

Inevitably, the decision-makers hogged the limelight, Morrison’s own approval rating recovered, and Albanese disappeared from public consciousness. Disruption of the normal schedule of parliamentary sittings also reduced visibility. But in retrospect, Albanese’s low profile was advantageous. It allowed him to maintain a decent distance from the government, which was beneficial when things eventually went wrong.

In the meantime, Albanese was able to offer bipartisanship on most major matters and to appear constructive while his party quietly went about developing new policies. Labor’s victory in a by-election in Eden-Monaro in July 2020 might have helped his leadership survive in dark times. He had formed a new romantic relationship, too, with Jodie Haydon, which boosted his personal happiness.

But a month after that by-election, several leading colleagues had a meeting with him that was also a warning: the party would be defeated if an election were to be held then, and he needed to improve his performance. In the wider commentariat, too, were several who thought Albanese not up to it. Even in May 2021, when Labor’s prospects looked rather better, political historian and journalist Chris Wallace thought Albanese “a bloke past his prime.”

At the end of 2020, Morrison appeared to be coasting towards another victory, and some suspected he might call an election sooner rather than later. In January 2021, Albanese was badly injured but fortunate to survive a car accident when a young driver hit his car in Sydney. The year that followed, however, saw Albanese recover both his personal health and his political fortunes. Morrison muddled pandemic management; Albanese stepped up his criticism, arguing that the prime minister had “two jobs,” quarantine and vaccination, and that he had failed at both. A new round of restrictions became “Morrison’s lockdowns.” Meanwhile, Albanese and Labor benefited from the perception that the government was hostile to measures to counter global warming, to women’s rights, and to clean and accountable government.

Labor entered the campaign for the 21 May 2022 election ahead in the polls and modest favourites to win. Albanese seemed to many to lack star quality, but he looked good, having lost weight and acquired stylish glasses. While no one could discern any great wave of enthusiasm, Labor seemed to have a fair prospect of at least minority government. Albanese has a reputation for an excellent memory, especially for figures, so it was remarkable that early in the campaign he found himself unable to recall the Reserve Bank’s cash rate during a media conference. The unemployment rate also eluded him. The media were ruthless, and Morrison pounced, presenting this lapse as evidence of Albanese’s unfitness for the prime ministership.

When, later in the campaign, Albanese responded to another question from a journalist that he believed the minimum wage should be increased at the same rate as the present level of inflation, 5.1 per cent, there was initially adverse media reaction, with Morrison now calling him a “loose unit.” In reality, Albanese’s response helped to provide Labor’s campaign with some much-needed ballast amid the activities of a media pack that seemed more interested in testing his memory than his policies.

Albanese performed effectively in the three formal debates. Labor ran a professional and disciplined campaign under national secretary Paul Erickson and, notwithstanding the occasional setback, by election day Albanese had every reason to be hopeful.

Election night began at Albanese’s Marrickville home with Penny Wong, a factional colleague, close confidant and shadow foreign minister. She would later introduce Albanese when he made his victory speech. As he had done on several occasions in the campaign, Albanese spoke feelingly of his mother, and he committed his government to the full implementation of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which called for a First Nations Voice to Parliament, a treaty and truth-telling.

Labor had won a narrow majority, with a primary vote in the low thirties. Independents and Greens had taken seats, mainly from the Liberals, but the size of the crossbench was widely interpreted as a symptom of disillusionment with the old parties and an old politics. Albanese, a factional warrior from way back, in some ways seemed an unlikely herald of a new order. But he had come a long way since his 1998 excoriation of John Howard as the latest in the Liberals’ “pantheon of chinless blue bloods and suburban accountants.” Albanese could now have passed for a suburban accountant himself.

Still, he hit the ground running. He and four colleagues were sworn in the Monday following the election, just ahead of an overseas visit to Tokyo for the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (“the Quad”) with Japan, India and the United States. High in the government’s early priorities was repairing Australia’s international relationships, including with France — which resented what it saw as Morrison’s dishonesty over the purchase of submarines — and with China, which had placed relations with Australia in the deep freeze.

Albanese — as well as foreign minister Wong and defence minister Marles — spent a good deal of time overseas in the early weeks of the new government, during what was a period of considerable international turbulence following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Wong visited several Pacific nations in an effort to counter Chinese influence in the region. Albanese undertook a tightly controlled visit to Ukraine himself.

Rising inflation, accompanied by climbing interest rates, contributed to the most serious cost-of-living crisis in three decades. Energy prices were particularly troublesome, especially in light of Labor’s pre-election commitment to get prices down. In December 2022, after a tussle between the minister, Chris Bowen, and energy companies extending over several months, the government used its powers to intervene directly in the energy market to cap coal and gas prices.

An October 2022 budget delivered by treasurer Jim Chalmers advanced the implementation of election commitments in areas such as the extension of paid parental leave, higher subsidies for childcare, and more social and affordable housing. A May 2023 budget would offer further cost-of-living relief for the most vulnerable and a boost to Medicare bulkbilling. The parliament also agreed to industrial relations reforms intended to strengthen enterprise bargaining and boost wages, especially for women. A bill for the long-anticipated and long-delayed federal anti-corruption commission passed before Christmas 2022.

In the first year of the government, there were consultations and inquiries across a wide range of areas, including a royal commission into robodebt, the Coalition government’s illegal effort to extract money from welfare recipients by raising fictional debts against their names, created by averaging their income over a year. The Reserve Bank, criticised for its recent interest rate hikes when its governor had previously given the impression an increase was unlikely before 2024, was also the subject of an inquiry, as was Australia’s immigration system and the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

A consultation was launched on a proposal for an Australian Universities Accord, and another led to the launch of a new cultural policy, Revive, followed by a major financial boost to the national collecting institutions. And amid all this, the parliament found time for a two-week period of mourning following the death of Queen Elizabeth II. Albanese attended the coronation of Charles III in May 2023.

The emphasis was on order, regularity and trust — a rebuke to the Morrison government but also, arguably, to the Rudd and Gillard era. Albanese had some of the instincts of the “lone wolf,” as journalist Katharine Murphy put it, but his approach in both opposition and government had become increasingly collaborative. He relied on the competence of a strong frontbench, and he made it clear that he wanted to re-establish Labor as the natural party of government.

Like Hawke, even in his first year Albanese was criticised for being too moderate, too cautious in pushing back on Coalition-era initiatives, too attached to old ways. Several of the new independent parliamentarians expressed outrage when the government reduced their staffing entitlements. There were also criticisms, from the outset, that Labor’s middle path on the shift from fossil fuels to renewables lacked sufficient ambition.

In its defence policy, the government added crucial detail to the bare bones of the Morrison government’s AUKUS agreement, with expensive plans for nuclear-powered submarines. Critics argued that the government was surrendering Australia’s sovereignty to the United States, an accusation that Albanese and Marles denied.

The government introduced only modest increases to JobSeeker — the unemployment benefit — in its May 2023 budget, which delivered a small surplus that the treasurer said was likely to be a one-off. Yet it was committed to fulfilling its pre-election promise not to dismantle the Morrison government’s stage three tax cuts, despite the windfall they would offer the wealthy. Albanese wanted to avoid accusations of breaking a core election promise, or of profligacy.

In one area in particular, however, his approach seemed to owe more to Whitlam-era idealism than to the more cautious and pragmatic Hawke tradition. The Albanese government’s commitment to holding a referendum on the First Nations Voice to Parliament before the end of 2023 remained steadfast, even as an otherwise demoralised opposition, led by Peter Dutton, did its best to use obstructionism as a means of reviving the Coalition’s political fortunes.

These had declined to alarming levels for the Liberal Party especially, and voters were unimpressed by its attempts to lay blame for the nation’s difficulties, such as the rising cost of living, at Albanese’s feet. At a by-election on 1 April 2023 for the outer-suburban Melbourne seat of Aston, long held by the Liberals and recently vacated by scandal-plagued ex-minister Alan Tudge, Labor won a two-party-preferred swing of more than six percentage points. It was the first time since 1920 that a federal government had managed to win a seat in such circumstances.

It was hard not to read into that result a wider verdict on the performance of the government. Commentators wrote of a sense that the country was being run by “adults,” and Albanese’s own image as a likeable, trustworthy and competent leader contributed something to that impression. We do not yet know if Anthony Albanese will be a short- or long-term leader — the last in the procession of two-to-four-year prime ministers that we have had since Howard, or a more lasting proposition. His age works against Howard-like longevity, but he could well emulate Hawke’s eight years. •

This is an edited extract from the new edition of The Good, the Bad and the Unlikely: Australia’s Prime Ministers from Barton to Albanese, by Mungo MacCallum and and Frank Bongiorno, published this month by Black Inc. Inside Story readers can order a copy at a 30 per cent discount by using the code InsideStory at checkout here. 

The post The making of a prime minister appeared first on Inside Story.

Many saw the election result as a tipping point, signalling that Australia’s longstanding and very stable two-party system was finally on its way out. Its dominance had been gradually eroding and, this time, more than 30 per cent of voters looked elsewhere to cast their primary vote. As it transpired, Labor won government with a majority of seventy-seven seats in the House of Representatives but a lower primary vote than it had achieved in 2019. It optimistically attributed this to “strategic voting” by supporters temporarily shifting their primary votes to non-Labor candidates deemed capable of beating Liberal incumbents. Labor polled exceptionally strongly in Western Australia, winning four seats from the Liberal Party.

While the Coalition parties made much of their primary vote being slightly higher than Labor’s, the Liberal Party also had a historically low primary vote. In other democracies, the Covid-19 pandemic shored up some faith in the “wartime” governments dealing with it, at least initially. By 2022, though, the same incumbency benefit was not enjoyed by the federal government in Australia. Nor did the lowest unemployment rate in almost fifty years save the government from defeat (or the treasurer from losing his own seat in Kooyong). Prime minister Scott Morrison, who had become the most unpopular Liberal leader for more than thirty years, was targeted relentlessly during the campaign. The “miracle” of his 2019 electoral victory, in the face of opinion polling predicting a Labor win, did not occur twice.

The longer-term trend in Western democracies — reinforced by the Australian election result  — is that the major (or traditional) parties can no longer rely on lifelong voters. The success of Australia’s teal independents reflected widespread reaction against major parties perceived to be operating in the interests of the political class and donors, and ignoring substantive policy issues — such as climate change — that mattered to Australians. Political scandals over sexual misconduct contributed to this disenchantment and to the increased salience of gender issues.

If the 2022 election could be seen as a watershed moment for Australian voters, the extraordinary events that transpired between the 2019 and 2022 elections certainly increased the importance of certain policy issues and voters’ critical stance on the government. The Morrison government, like its counterparts across the globe, faced the daunting task of dealing with a global pandemic. Significantly, the 2022 Australian election campaign coincided with a period in which the country had the highest daily infection rates in the world.

Climate change also loomed large in the wake of record-breaking bushfires and floods since the 2019 election. Between September 2019 and March 2020 the Black Summer bushfires burned an unprecedented 18.6 million hectares of bushland. “Once in a century” floods in March 2021 severely affected communities in greater Sydney, the Hunter region and the mid-north coast of New South Wales, and around Queensland’s Gold Coast. These events were repeated a year later, with severe flooding affecting Brisbane, the NSW Northern Rivers and Sydney. The Insurance Council of Australia reported almost 200,000 claims from the 2022 floods, or more than $3.3 billion in insured losses.

Despite the severity of these events, the theme of climate change was not prominent in the campaigns of the major parties, although the prime minister’s apparent lack of empathy with flood and fire victims became part of the negative campaigning against him. The Coalition government was particularly vulnerable on climate change, and its attempts to reframe the issue were singularly unsuccessful. One discursive tactic tried well before the campaign proper was that climate change would “ultimately be solved by ‘can-do’ capitalism, not ‘don’t-do’ government.” This attempt at free-market framing was no more successful than the ubiquitous “freedom” ads of the United Australia Party funded by billionaire Clive Palmer.

Voters were looking for alternatives to the two-party system and they were also engaging in politics in new ways, both online and offline, in the community organising of the “Voices for…” movements. The election campaign moved further online, and citizens creating and sharing memes were as visible as more traditional party efforts. Within this landscape the visual elements of campaigning were more important than ever. Digital disruption and disinformation — so prominent in 2019 — were also a feature, but so were more concerted efforts to deal with them.

Not only did the election bring a change in government; it also saw the lowest primary votes for both major parties and the election of the greatest number of independents to the lower house since the formation of the Australian party system. The success of the teal independents and the Greens, and the appetite voters showed for “doing politics differently” suggested the dominant model of electoral competition might no longer be the two-party system. At the very least, the continued usefulness of the two-party-preferred vote as a way of conceptualising and predicting Australians’ voting behaviour has been cast into serious doubt.

A key outcome of the election was a widening split between the salience for voters and the salience for the major parties of long-term issues such as climate change and transparency in government. “Localised” politics, community campaigning and candidate quality were more prominent than in recent elections, in combination with the changing nature of campaigning in an evolving digital media landscape.

Another issue that unexpectedly took off was the Coalition’s broken promise to introduce a federal integrity commission. Integrity issues were highlighted by the teal independents and the Greens and, along with gender issues, became part of the negative depiction of Morrison that dominated social media. The Coalition unsuccessfully attempted to deflect attention from integrity issues by suggesting they were of no interest to ordinary voters and that the focus should instead be on cost-of-living issues and economic management — their usual electoral strengths.

Along with climate change and integrity issues must be mentioned gender issues, which were more prominent than in any election since 1972. The Morrison government’s seeming incapacity to deal with issues of sexual misconduct in the parliamentary precinct served as a touchstone for women’s disenchantment with the government on a range of issues. Veteran political journalist Paul Kelly was taken by surprise (and won a Gold Ernie Award) for his 2021 prediction that “the women’s movement won’t decide the next election.”

With so many high-profile ministers (and purported future party leaders) falling victim to independents’ campaigns on these issues, the Liberal Party faces the daunting task of rebuilding and — along with the Nationals — re-establishing its relevance with Australian voters, particularly women, socially progressive economic liberals and younger Australians.

The 2022 federal election also marked a profound shift in how the country runs its elections. A record proportion of voters cast their ballot before election day through either early or postal voting. While this trend was no doubt accelerated in 2022 by Covid-19, it builds on an underlying preference for convenience and arguably on disengagement from politics — with voters casting an early ballot to switch off from the long campaign.

With fewer than half of all voters casting their vote on election day, it appears that we have moved from an election day to an election period. This is a trend that is highly unlikely to be reversed, with potentially significant implications for the nature of elections as democratic rituals. It also has implications for small parties and independents because non-incumbent candidates can struggle to staff polling booths for extended periods.

The traditional media were criticised during the campaign for a seeming preoccupation with the performance of leaders and the possibility of missteps, with the hashtag #ThisIsNotJournalism trending on Twitter. In the very first week, Labor leader Anthony Albanese was unable to recall either the unemployment or the cash rates during a press conference. The government and the conservative media seized on the misstep to discredit Albanese’s economic expertise and cast doubt on his leadership abilities. But it also became illustrative of a style of politics that characterised the election: a focus on “gotcha” moments and detail from which bigger policy issues and debates were notably absent.

Having learned from the mistake of campaigning in 2019 on complex reforms (such as overhauling tax policy in areas like imputation credit refunds), the Labor Party focused on a slimmed agenda of manufacturing, wage growth, gender pay parity and housing. The Coalition responded by repeatedly emphasising its record of economic management, leading to what it described as “jobs and growth.” This dynamic left major policy issues prominent in the minds of voters — such as climate change — out of the contest between the major parties and in the hands of the Greens and the teals.

Despite the major parties’ best efforts to keep the campaign focused on preset announcements and policy agendas, significant events occurred during the official campaign period that challenged both leaders to respond in ways that were not scripted. These included the announcement of Solomon Islands’ security pact with China early in the campaign, which made regional security a significant issue, though not in a way favourable to the government.

On 3 May, the Reserve Bank of Australia lifted the official cash rate by 0.25 per cent — the first of eight increases during 2022. This was the first time since the 2007 federal election (when Liberal prime minister John Howard was ousted by Labor’s Kevin Rudd) that such an increase had occurred during a campaign, and it cemented economic management, the cost of living and housing affordability as key campaign issues.

Compared with other recent federal election campaigns, the 2022 election saw a heightened focus on individual candidates and constituencies. While all elections feature scandals involving candidates, the attention given not just to individual seats but also to the competencies of individual candidates was highly unusual. In part this focus can be explained by the momentum behind the localised campaigns of the teal and “Voices for…” independents, but it could have also been a broader consequence of the renewed importance of place and community that was felt so acutely during the Covid lockdowns.

The national media were captivated by the controversial candidate Katherine Deves, who was selected by Morrison to contest the northern Sydney seat of Warringah against independent Zali Steggall. Deves’s vocal stance against the rights of trans Australians was interpreted as a dog whistle to the Liberals’ conservative voter base. In other electorates, meanwhile, the suitability of candidates was being questioned based on geographic representation and appropriate reflection of ethnic diversity.

Labor’s Andrew Charlton and Kristina Keneally — both contesting seats in western Sydney — were caught up in these debates. Charlton — despite his political credentials as a former adviser to prime minister Kevin Rudd — was criticised for not living in the electorate. Former NSW premier and senator Kristina Keneally, also attempting to win a House of Representatives seat, was criticised in a similar way — but the party also faced strong opposition to the fact that it had not fielded a candidate who reflected the diversity of the electorate’s population. Independent and Vietnam-born candidate Dai Le ultimately won the seat of Fowler from Labor.

The victorious Albanese government got to work quickly, embarking at high speed on its election commitments, including preparation for a referendum on a Voice to parliament, legislation to introduce a federal integrity commission, and a jobs and skills summit. Both Albanese and foreign minister Penny Wong embarked on international diplomatic visits to the Pacific region, to security summits in Japan and Spain, and to Paris to “reset” Australia’s relationship with France, which deteriorated after the cancellation of a multibillion-dollar defence submarine contract in 2018.

The government itself was more diverse than ever before, with a record number of women — including an Indigenous woman, Linda Burney, holding the Indigenous Australians portfolio.

Doubt continued about the legacy of the Morrison government. In August 2022, it was revealed that Morrison had been secretly sworn into multiple ministerial portfolios, including health, finance, home affairs and industry. He defended these actions as necessary in a time of unprecedented crisis and uncertainty caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, but his actions were widely criticised as contrary to fundamental principles of collective ministerial responsibility and open and transparent government.

While the implementation of Albanese’s policy agenda began with considerable speed, the economic context created — and will continue to create — significant challenges for the new government. Saddled with its election commitment to proceed with the Stage 3 tax cuts for the wealthy, the government faces an incredibly difficult mix of rising inflation, rising interest rates and falling wages. This will significantly constrain its fiscal policy options and presents a scenario for industrial unrest that could become difficult for Labor to resolve given its voter base and election commitments. •

This is an edited extract from Watershed: The 2022 Australian Federal Election, edited by Anika Gauja, Marian Sawer and Jill Sheppard and published by ANU Press, the latest in a series of detailed post-election analyses dating back to 1975. Contributors to the book — which can be downloaded free of charge — include Carol Johnson, Murray Goot, Marija Taflaga, Glenn Kefford and Stephen Mills, and Anthony Green.

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As I never tire of pointing out, by-election results tell us nothing about the next election. Because the stakes for electors are so small — nothing as important as who will govern for three years — they can vote on other things. Such as “sending a message.” Candidates can make much more difference at by-elections than at general elections.

So they are not dry runs for the main event, and any “momentum” generated by a result is illusory and short-lived, strictly limited to the reporting bubble.

But by-elections are invested with all sorts of magical properties by the political class, and so they can often matter, a lot, particularly when it comes to the fortunes of political leaders.

The Longman (Queensland, margin 0.8) by-election in July 2018 played a very large role in ending Malcolm Turnbull’s prime ministership. The result, a 3.7 per cent swing to the opposition, was routine and unexciting; not so Aston, Victoria (margin 2.8) in April this year, which delivered a 6.4 point swing to the government that opposition leader Peter Dutton is still feeling today.

Three years ago this month, at the Eden-Monaro (NSW, margin 0.9 per cent) by-election, Anthony Albanese faced his own first “electoral test” as Labor opposition leader, and it came very close to being a similar disaster.

Triggered by the resignation of the popular member Mike Kelly, it was held in the early months of the Covid pandemic when prime minister Scott Morrison, his summer troubles behind him, was recording the highest approval ratings of his career (in the high 60s). Those voters ended up giving only a small swing to the government, and Labor candidate Kristy McBain won with a 0.4 per cent margin.

Labor was very lucky to hold Eden-Monaro. The electoral commission’s ballot draw alone, with McBain above the Liberals’ Fiona Kotvojs, was probably worth more than 0.4 per cent. So was the decision of the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party to advocate (on how-to-vote cards) preferences for McBain before Kotvojs.

McBain’s candidacy itself was a very fine pick; before nominating she was mayor of Bega Valley Shire, which comprises a large chunk of the electorate. Like many political identities, her profile had risen during those disastrous 2019–2020 fires. The booths in that part of Eden-Monaro swung to her, the rest swung against. And Kotvojs, who had run in 2019, was hardly an inspired choice. A much stronger candidate, NSW Liberal MP Andrew Constance — still a rock star because of his criticism of Morrison during the fires — was in the mix for a while but didn’t make the final cut.

Back to this Saturday, though, with the hullabaloo following Dutton’s presiding over the first opposition by-election loss to a government since 1920 still ringing in the ears. The defeat damaged his leadership, and it is a brave person who would predict Dutton will still be leading his party in 2025.

It’s the exact bullet Albanese dodged in Eden-Monaro July 2020.

But all is not lost for the opposition leader, for the Labor Party is offering him a chance at redemption.

Fadden’s margin is 10.6 per cent. No government has contested an opposition-held seat with a margin of that size since Bob Hawke’s Labor ran in Groom (Queensland) in 1988. Its candidate didn’t even make it to the two-candidate-preferred count.

That’s not saying much, because in recent decades governments have been reluctant to run in opposition seats. The Howard government sat on its hands for all six (where margins ranged from 6.4 to 15.1 points). The new Rudd government fielded a candidate in Gippsland (Victoria, margin 5.9) in 2008, copped a nasty 6.1 per cent swing, and ignored the next four (margins ranging from 7.1 to 13.5).

Tony Abbott’s Coalition government ran in Griffith, Queensland, in 2014 (margin 3.0), and got a pretty good 1.3 point swing, but not enough to win it. Under Turnbull the government ran in Braddon, Tasmania (2.2) and the aforementioned Longman.

And Labor thinks it has a chance of a 10.6 point swing this Saturday? Obviously not. Even if it did snatch the seat, it would be lost again at the next general election. (Aston is different: with the benefit of incumbency Labor stands a better-than-even chance in 2025.) Is Albanese high on his own supply, assuming there’ll at least be a decent swing to Labor and the media will coo and fawn again, make life even easier for him and destabilise his opponent?

Or is a longer game afoot? The chances of a second by-election win in a row are astronomically small. A Liberal National victory would revitalise the opposition leader somewhat, and there’s actually a decent chance Fadden will swing substantially his way. And that would stiffen Dutton’s faltering standing. Is that what the prime minister wants? Does he just like having Dutton around?

Albanese seems to take “narrative” nonsense less seriously than most political leaders. The least inspiring opposition leader in memory, he stuck to his guns and refused to placate the commentariat’s demands for shock and awe. Small and steady won the race.

He probably would prefer to face Dutton than any of the likely alternatives (deputy Sussan Ley is the most likely) at the next election. Still, politicians don’t usually take steps like this, no matter how much sense they make in theory. They prefer an easy life in the short term.

Labor is running heavily on robodebt, the Liberal Nats on the cost of living. How will the competing “send a message” messages pan out?

Fadden will be in the headlines on Sunday, though we don’t know the font size yet. Any repercussions for federal leaders will take longer to play out.•

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All the better when the incoming government employs its new-found authority to trash the former outfit’s legacy, a task the current administration has been discharging with some vigour.

Pollsters, meanwhile, have the government way ahead in two-party-preferred terms and the prime minister trouncing the opposition leader on personal ratings. This too is par for the course.

Tony Abbott, the most recent of this government-from-opposition species, was an outlier. Like Albanese, he had never enjoyed high personal ratings, but unlike this incumbent his post-election boost was modest. Within months of the September 2013 election the Labor opposition was ahead, and it largely remained there until Abbott was replaced by Malcolm Turnbull in 2015.

But the three incoming PMs before Abbott, Kevin Rudd (elected in November 2007), John Howard (March 1996) and Bob Hawke (March 1983), all generated voting-intention numbers and personal ratings during their first twelve months that peaked above anything seen under Albanese.

At this point in Rudd’s tenure, the GFC stimulus payments were starting to arrive in voters’ bank accounts. That financial calamity gave much-needed purpose to his leadership, which had seemed trapped in a news spin-cycle, addicted to quickly devised policy announcements.

Howard in April 1997 was a long way from his Port Arthur–elevated honeymoon, had three embarrassing ministerial resignations under his belt — and four more to come, mostly victims of his strict code of ministerial conduct — but his first budget had been very well received (much more, from surveys, than this year’s) and had worked brilliantly as a political exercise in delivering bitter medicine and blaming it on thirteen years of Labor. Still, by the one-year mark his personal ratings and the government’s polled two-party-preferred leads had slid to slightly below Albanese’s and Labor’s today.

By the end of 1997 the opposition was ahead, assisted by the government’s embrace of a GST and Democrats leader Cheryl Kernot’s defection to Labor.

Further back, Hawke was still riding high in early 1984, even if he was disappointing the true believers who had expected more Whitlamesque cage-rattling. His personal and party ratings remained stratospheric — until he called an election for December and the gap gradually narrowed to a modest victory. Howard, of course, after a shaky first re-election in which he lost the national two-party vote, went on to have the last and longest laugh.

Ultimately the GFC-induced fiscal problems proved diabolical for the Rudd government, providing a jarring contrast to the boom and the surpluses under Howard. On top of that, treasurer Wayne Swan was about as woeful a chief economic communicator as could be imagined.

What about the current government? According to the polls — and unlike Rudd’s and Julia Gillard’s, but like Hawke’s a lot of the time — it is generally seen as a better economic manager than the opposition. All else being equal, two strands often make it hard for Labor to do well on this rather important measure: the Liberals are generally seen as more economically responsible; and a party in office will score better than it does in opposition. I can’t think of a time when a Coalition government was not viewed as superior on economics, but there have been plenty of times when Labor governments weren’t.

The before-and-after economic situation around the 2022 election has been very different. By pure luck, this government can boast the first surplus in fifteen years. Treasurer Jim Chalmers learned his politics at the feet of Swan, but from such dire beginnings has developed into an effective public politician. His “trillion dollars of debt” mantra — as unfair as the “debt and deficits” narrative Abbott used against Rudd and Gillard — undoubtedly has at least some persuasive power.

And the prime minister? What are we to make of him?

Albanese’s rise to the top of his party was driven not by popular demand — he was little-known outside the political bubble — but by wheeling and dealing. It was his turn. As a factional boss, and someone immersed in politics his whole working life, his timing was brilliant: he reached the peak when a highly winnable election was in the offing. Remaining opposition leader for three years was arguably the bigger challenge.

America’s longest-serving president, Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933–1945), was once characterised as possessing “a second-class intellect but a first-class temperament” (a description that might apply even more aptly to Joe Biden). Albanese’s intellect is better than that, but unlike most predecessors he doesn’t seem to be a policy wonk or a details man.

From closer to home comes a 1996 quip from political commentator Cate McGregor (sometimes wrongly attributed to the late Labor speechwriter Graham Freudenberg): that new Labor leader Kim Beazley was the first since Ben Chifley “who doesn’t have a major personality disorder.”

It’s a good line when you think of the parade of grandiosity, narcissism and exploding egos we’ve witnessed, especially if we extend McGregor’s words through to Rudd. Albanese would sit in the Beazley category. But does it make for a good national leader?

We saw from 2019 to 2022 that Albanese has a realistic if unexciting view of what drives changes of government. Not for him the wild tales of opposition leaders dazzling the electorate with feats of derring-do, engaging the enemy in hand-to-hand combat on values, winning the hearts of the middle Australians who hold up the scorecards on election day. (The most obvious of this variety was Mark Latham, 2003–04.)

In reality, federal changes of government tend to occur when voters wish to dispose of incumbents and don’t find the alternative too threatening. In both 1983 and 2007 that fact was camouflaged by the extraordinary personal popularity of Labor’s leader — Hawke and Rudd respectively — though it ultimately had a questionable impact on actual votes. (In both cases the massive polled leads narrowed dramatically by election day.)

Albanese in opposition set no one’s pulse racing and never enjoyed high personal ratings or huge voting-intentions leads. Which means, one imagines, that he commenced his prime ministership without Rudd-like delusions of electoral grandeur.

He had plenty to be modest about. The election of 21 May 2022 was the first in which a party took office from opposition despite suffering a primary vote swing against it. Both sides recorded lows not seen since the second world war, and the winner lost the primary vote by 3 per cent. Preferences from a record-high Greens vote flowed 86 per cent to Labor, and it took office with a two-party-preferred vote of 52.1 per cent, the smallest for a federal change-of-government election since 1949.

A vague, bland quantity, Albanese got out of the way of electors’ anger and allowed the votes, either directly or through preferences, to flow through to him and his party. The electorate’s “pox on both their houses” attitude was also reflected in the record-sized crossbench.

But now Albanese is prime minister — and a rather well-regarded one at that, at least for the time being.

“Small target,” coined in 1996, is not the only Howard comparison Albanese invites. Both are decidedly charisma-free and not particularly eloquent, and so our storytellers have settled on their very ordinariness as explainers of their success. But Howard had shown more policy ambition by this stage. His government broke promises and blamed it on the Keating government and its finance minister, who was now opposition leader.

Howard also enjoyed a much friendlier Senate. While the current one’s “progressive majority” excites some Labor true believers, it is highly problematic for the government. Legislation can only be passed with the cooperation of either the Coalition or the Greens plus someone else (most likely ACT independent David Pocock). That’s not as difficult as Rudd experienced during most of his first term, when (if the Coalition opposed) the government needed the Greens plus Nick Xenophon plus Family First’s Steve Fielding, but it’s still very restrictive.

Further back, Hawke had a one-stop option in the “centrist” Democrats. Howard (before his 2005–07 Senate majority) had it even easier, able to choose either the Democrats or someone else.

Unlike under Julia Gillard, the Greens currently have no incentive to make life easy for the government. In fact, product differentiation — being seen to drag Labor to its positions — is the chief string in the minor party’s electoral bow. We are currently seeing this play out with housing policy, but it will afflict other issues in the years to come.

Given the reality of the upper house, perhaps there’s little point in trying to do too much. The Abbott government’s first budget showed the disaster that can come from broken election promises jammed in the Senate: the odium of unpopular policies without the payoff of having those policies settled into law.

So maybe the Senate partly explains the government’s policy timidity.

There is one area in which Albanese does appear to differentiate himself from recent predecessors: his refusal to get trapped in the twenty-four-hour news cycle. This afflicted Rudd most obviously, but also most prime ministers since. The idea that the media beast can’t be ignored, that it must be fed or it will devour you, enjoyed much currency only a few years ago but is little-heard now.

Is this the product of a level-headed PM and his office, or has the nature of the beast changed? Is Albanese just getting an easy media run (outside News Corp) — and if so, will it turn eventually?

In the past, prime ministers’ longevity (and treasurers’) has been underpinned by economic booms, which are mostly dependent on the international climate. That precondition doesn’t seem likely in 2023 or the foreseeable future. The inflation, the declining real wages, the high interest rates and the housing shortage aren’t going away. The possible international recession will continue to hover threateningly.

Can we detect in this prime minister a Kevin-like aversion to jeopardising the strong polls? Rudd also began his term determined not to break campaign promises, but he eventually ended up doing so closer to the next election, when it was harder to sheet it home to the defeated government. Rudd, instead of developing the authority that comes from making voters eat their greens, ended up being seen as a prime minister afraid of making difficult decisions.

We are only one year in, which as past governments have shown tells us nothing about how things will pan out. And we’ve not seen how Albanese copes under pressure, in difficult times. They will come, sooner or later. •

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At state level, however, boxes aren’t so often needed. Labor premiers Bob Carr (New South Wales), Steve Bracks (Victoria) and Peter Beattie (Queensland), for example, all retired on their own terms in the mid 2000s after securing three election victories.

WA premier Mark McGowan seemed likely to follow suit. After winning office easily in 2017 and then spectacularly in 2021, a comfortable election win in 2025 was assured. It was widely assumed he would then hand over the leadership to someone else. But on Monday this dominant figure in WA politics shocked almost everyone by announcing his resignation as premier and from parliament.

With the benefit of a few days’ hindsight, perhaps we should not have been quite so surprised. Remaining in office until the next election, due in March 2025, and for a respectable period after that would have meant three more years in the job — three more years of “normal” politics in which the only direction was down, given the heights McGowan had reached.

And what heights! Politically, McGowan achieved the greatest electoral victory in Australian history in 2021, securing almost 60 per cent of the primary vote for Labor — which translated into fifty-three out of fifty-nine seats in the state’s Legislative Assembly — and reducing the Liberal Party to a derisory two seats.

On top of that, Labor took outright control of the upper house for the first time in its history, and promptly reformed the electoral system to remove Australia’s last case of egregious rural vote weighting. McGowan then played a pivotal role in Anthony Albanese’s bid for the prime ministership, helping Labor win four WA seats from the Liberals at last year’s federal election.

Added to that, McGowan’s period as leader has been accompanied by record budget surpluses, driven by booming iron ore and gas prices and a deal brokered with Scott Morrison that ensures at least 70 per cent of GST raised in Western Australia is returned to the state. The economy is strong, and McGowan has a respectable record of reform on issues such as voluntary assisted dying, environmental protection and public transport investment through Labor’s signature Metronet suburban rail project.

All of this, of course, was underpinned by McGowan’s deft handling of the Covid crisis, in which his hard border closures fed into Western Australia’s inherent independent streak. By becoming “an island within an island,” the state largely kept Covid out, allowing daily life to continue almost as normal while the mining industry powered on. Toss in disputes with Clive Palmer, the Morrison government and the NSW Liberal government, and the rest is history.

Of course, there were failures — most noticeably in the youth detention system, the destruction of Juukan Gorge, and lax regulation of Perth’s only casino (which led to a royal commission) — as well as problems in health and housing. But overall, McGowan’s legacy is assured politically, economically and financially.

What happens now?

After a day of factional drama on Tuesday within the Labor caucus, deputy premier Roger Cook has emerged as the premier-elect. Cook has been Labor’s deputy leader since he entered the parliament in 2008. Like McGowan, he had a good pandemic: as health minister he was often by the premier’s side, and the state’s low incidence of Covid gave him a prominent and largely positive public profile in a portfolio that is often a poisoned chalice for an ambitious minister.

As Covid’s prominence fell during 2021, though, problems in the health system mounted and Cook was shifted into the economic portfolios of state development, tourism and science. He later added hydrogen industry to his responsibilities, and he has been active in promoting the state’s critical minerals industry. In retrospect, the shift was shrewd, allowing him to demonstrate a breadth of interests.

Cook has promoted himself as the continuity leadership candidate, but he does represent a departure from McGowan in some important respects. He has described himself as “born and bred” in Western Australia — subtly differentiating himself from McGowan and his main challenger for the leadership, health minister Amber-Jade Sanderson, both of whom were born in New South Wales.

He is also the first strongly factional Labor leader for many years, having been senior in the party’s Left faction. By contrast, McGowan — like former premiers Geoff Gallop and Alan Carpenter — was factionally unaligned.

Cook has always had a strong interest in Aboriginal issues, having worked for several Aboriginal advocacy organisations before entering parliament. Whether this leads to a change in the government’s hard-nosed approach to juvenile detention — for which McGowan was increasingly facing criticism — will be closely watched.

The main issues facing the new premier and his government will be those facing most state governments around the nation — health and housing systems under stress, cost-of-living pressures, and labour and skill shortages. Unlike in other states, however, Cook has a large budget surplus, a strong economy, a weak opposition and a massive electoral buffer. He now has twenty-one months to prove himself.

For Anthony Albanese, McGowan’s resignation is undoubtedly a blow. Before 2022, Western Australia had been a Liberal stronghold federally. But McGowan’s popularity saw massive swings to Labor, with four seats switching to Labor, which also gained a senator. With McGowan gone, those seats are potentially back in play.

Western Australia’s support for the Voice referendum may also come into question. Albanese has been diligently paying attention to the state, visiting twelve times in his first year, including holding a cabinet meeting in Port Hedland in the state’s Pilbara iron ore region. While some state and territory leaders have raised the possibility of rewriting the state’s GST deal now its architect is leaving the scene, there is little prospect of that happening. It would spell certain electoral disaster in Western Australia for any federal political party. •

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Howard’s promise was a dog whistle to Australians that he would end the continual economic change of the Hawke–Keating years and the turmoil caused by the 1990–91 recession and other policy errors. Under pressure from big business, he broke his promise and introduced the GST, but in the generation since then, the only substantial reform we’ve seen has been the short-lived carbon tax.

Almost a year into its term, the Albanese government has fine-tuned many small things but embarked on no really big changes, and none are foreshadowed. It’s unleashed no surprises other than committing future governments to spend up to $14,000 for every Australian on nuclear-powered submarines. Nothing the PM and his team have learned in office seems to have changed their priorities or their sense of what Australia needs.

At each policy announcement, Albanese reminds us that Labor put this policy to voters at the election. Fulfilling campaign promises has become his mantra, his commitment: it proves that his word can be trusted. He is governing as he campaigned: as a small target, promising changes only if they are popular. And politically, as the opinion polls show, it’s working.

After almost a year of Labor in power, perhaps the main surprise is that so little has changed. It feels a bit like Orwell’s Animal Farm. Refugees remain locked up in Nauru, but now it’s a Labor government that is paying a US security firm hundreds of millions of dollars to provide “garrison and welfare” services. Whistleblowers David McBride (Afghanistan) and Richard Boyle (tax office intimidation) are still being prosecuted for exposing unwelcome truths, but now by a Labor attorney-general, Mark Dreyfus.

The real wages of Australian workers are falling even faster than before, yet the Labor government plans to deliver tax cuts to the rich. Australians on lower incomes remain priced out of home ownership, endless economic debates bring no action, and sky-high energy prices haven’t lifted the budget out of a structural deficit the International Monetary Fund now estimates at 3.25 per cent of our GDP — more than $80 billion a year.

This is one of the few Western countries with no economy-wide carbon price and no vehicle-emission standards, and no plans for the former and endless reviews for the latter. Sure, the Voice to Parliament could prove an important step forward, maybe, if it works well and governments listen to it. But the pace of reform generally under Albo’s rule has been a gentle trot.

Welcome to Australia 2023, where life is relaxed and comfortable.

Have Anthony Albanese and his ministers found no urgent issues in their first year that can’t be solved by Labor’s 2022 campaign promises? Given the problems we face, is it enough for them to stick to their pre-election script and aim to keep out of trouble?

Or is the reality, rather, that Labor’s campaign policies, designed to be popular, do too little to fix some of the biggest problems confronting us? It will be challenging for just 215 selected companies to deliver Labor’s target of reducing emissions to 43 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030 — assuming integrity reforms ensure those reductions are genuine. Australia’s per capita emissions will probably remain the highest in the Western world.

Labor’s policies are clearly inadequate to fix the problems of the economy, or of the budget: more on that in a moment. Across the board, its problem is that as the traditional party of social justice it has raised expectations it has no plans to meet. By camping in the middle ground, it leaves its traditional radical base looking for an alternative. Increasingly, they are finding one.

As psephologist Ben Raue of The Tally Room has pointed out, Labor won the election with 52.1 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote — but only 32.6 per cent of voters gave the party their first preference. Three in every eight voters in the broader Labor camp preferred Labor to the Liberals but chose to vote first for other parties (mostly, the Greens) or independents.

It’s been a long-term trend, and it’s getting stronger here and around the world. Ten years ago, the Socialists ruled France: today they are a minor party. Germany’s Social Democrats are gradually being overtaken by the Greens.

When Labor came to power in 2007, the House of Reps had just two crossbenchers, Bob Katter and Tony Windsor. Today it has sixteen, with another eighteen in the Senate. Overwhelmingly, they are to the left of Labor. Sure, they won’t support the Coalition. But if Labor keeps losing voters and seats to the left, will this be its last majority government?

Contrast the responses treasurer Jim Chalmers gave to two key reports he released last week. The first, by the government’s expert Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee, reported that Jobseeker and related benefits for people of working age are “seriously inadequate,” leaving many recipients in such financial stress that some “[have] to choose between paying for their medicine or electricity bills.”

Chalmers released the report at 5.10pm on Tuesday evening, too late for it to get appropriate media coverage, and issued a statement making it clear that Labor would not implement its proposals. “We can’t fund every good idea,” he said, emphasising that support for those most in need had to be “responsible and affordable… and weighed up against other priorities and fiscal challenges.”

Two days later, Chalmers released another report, this time on the Reserve Bank, by three monetary policy experts, essentially into how interest rates should be set. He announced that all fifty-one recommendations would be accepted, including its core proposal that interest rates be set by a committee of experts, as in the United States, to embrace a wider spread of informed opinion.

The contrast was striking. Labor today feels at home with highbrow issues of economic policy, and is willing to act swiftly and decisively on them. But it doesn’t want to know about the problems of those most in need, and does not intend to do anything about them.

Yes, the budget is in a desperate situation, and this is no time for unfunded new spending (such as $380 billion to buy a dozen or so submarines). That’s why many of us have been arguing that Australia needs to get the budget back in the black by closing the tax loopholes that mean we raise far less revenue than most other Western countries.

A recent report by Grattan Institute economists Danielle Wood, Kate Griffiths and Iris Chan conceded that there are no easy options but proposed getting there mostly by closing loopholes — and making normal budget rules apply to politically driven spending on infrastructure and defence. We don’t need to raise taxes: we can get there by scrapping tax concessions.

For example:

• Reduce tax breaks for superannuation, especially for retirees and high-income earners.

• Redesign the stage 3 tax cuts to eliminate the overcompensation of high-income earners.

• Scrap the Coalition’s decision to tax small business profits at a lower rate than those of bigger firms.

True, Grattan also recommends some tax rises on mainstream Australia, notably lifting the GST to 15 per cent, widening its base, and compensating only the bottom 40 per cent of income earners for their losses. But closing loopholes is easier politically than raising the GST or tightening the assets test for pensions.

A Resolve Strategic poll last weekend in Nine’s Sunday papers found that only 17 per cent of Australians say they want to close the deficit by raising taxes, whereas 40 per cent say they want to close it by cutting spending (and another 26 per cent want to just keep running up debt). But the poll failed to ask what spending the cutters wanted to cut, whereas it asked everyone what they thought of specific tax increases. And, hey, most of them attracted more support than opposition.

For example:

• Increase taxes on the profits of resources companies: 58 per cent support, 12 per cent oppose, 30 per cent undecided.

• Reduce tax concessions for negative gearing: 44 per cent support, 21 per cent oppose, 35 per cent undecided.

• Cancel or reduce stage 3 income tax cuts: 34 per cent support, 23 per cent oppose, 43 per cent undecided.

• Reduce tax concessions for superannuation: 37 per cent support, 28 per cent oppose, 35 per cent undecided.

• And, on raising the $50 a day rate paid to unemployed people reliant on Jobseeker benefits: 43 per cent support, 31 per cent oppose, 26 per cent undecided.

That contrasts sharply with voters’ usual knee-jerk opposition to any tax rises. The more Australians have been talking about it, the more people have come to see them as necessary. On negative gearing, for example, the number opposed to reform is now about the same as the number of people who own rental properties. Unfortunately, one of those is Anthony Albanese.

Chalmers has been given a looser rein to let us know that the budget is in bad shape, and has led the way in encouraging debate on tax increases. But Albo himself has seemed to stand above all that. He is not warning Australians of hard times ahead. He is not asking us to make any sacrifices. And above all, he is not drumming home a message that things must change. His message is: business as usual.

But times are tough. The IMF recently downgraded its forecasts of Australia’s economic growth to 1.6 per cent this year and 1.7 per cent in 2024. With our population swelling at a record 400,000 a year, that implies two years of zero or negative growth in per capita GDP. It hasn’t led to rising unemployment yet, but if the IMF forecast is correct, it will.

What wasn’t reported here was that the IMF’s medium-term projections see Australia’s growth per capita sliding towards the bottom of the pack: over the next five years, only Canada will rank lower among the dozen largest advanced economies. On the IMF’s projections, Australia would also lose its proud position as one of the world’s twenty largest economies. (That’s on the IMF’s preferred measure, which adjusts for differing cost levels to measure the real volume of production.)

With real wages set to fall by 8 to 10 per cent over this period, it seems a very strange time to be delivering tax cuts costing more than $25 billion a year and directed overwhelmingly to high-income earners — those who by definition are doing well and least need help.

We can all understand Labor’s desire to be seen as keeping its word. But this was a bad reform that ordinary households’ loss of buying power has made worse. I suggest a compromise that keeps some key elements of the package but redistributes the gains more fairly. Rather than abolishing the 37 per cent marginal tax rate, reduce it to 35 per cent with the same thresholds as now — but add a new 40 per cent rate for income from $180,000 to $200,000, and a timetable to raise that threshold to $250,000. Over time, that would save the budget a lot of money, without taking everything from those who would gain from the plan Labor promised them.

As the Grattan Institute report points out, the budget is in even more trouble than it seems to be, because it assumes continued underspending in areas where that is clearly unsustainable. In areas like aged care and regional hospitals, jobs can’t be filled because governments have failed to ensure enough funding to pay the going rates. Country and even suburban GPs are closing down because the long Medicare freeze on rebates has made general practice unviable as a career.

These are just some of the many areas where Labor has raised expectations of change that it can’t deliver with existing revenues. Australia already has full employment; mineral prices are already close to record highs. This budget can’t be fixed, and the underspending lifted to adequate levels, without revenue increases on a wide range of fronts. Labor is flagging a few nibbles at tax reform in the 9 May budget. That won’t do it.

In the end, these are moral issues: we should raise the rate of Jobseeker because it is wrong to make people relying on it (40 per cent of whom have mental health issues) live in such abject poverty. One told last week of taking the lightbulb with her from room to room because she couldn’t afford a second one. But the moral issues don’t seem to resonate with the cynical hardheads running Labor.

They ignore them on political grounds. The Coalition won’t do anything about them, so there’s no need for Labor to do anything either. Most voters, they say, don’t care how low the dole goes — at $50 a day, it’s now about a third of the median wage — and those who do are soft-hearted lefties who end up having to vote Labor anyway.

But wait. Yes, back in 2007, when Rudd was elected, voters on the left had no other choice. Labor had 43.8 per cent of the votes, while the combined vote of the Greens and independents of all shades was 10 per cent. The Greens won 20 per cent of the three-party vote in just one seat, when a young lawyer named Adam Bandt pipped the Liberals for second place in Melbourne. They couldn’t win seats: their role was to help Labor win seats.

Fifteen years later, that reality has gone. At the 2022 election Labor won just 32.6 per cent of votes for the House of Reps, while the Greens and independents won 17.5 per cent. Their vote has been swollen by former Labor supporters who have moved left because of issues like these. They don’t want unemployed people to be condemned to live in dire poverty. They don’t want refugees to be locked up on Pacific islands. They don’t want whistleblowers to be prosecuted, or Australia to keep dragging its feet on action to slow global warming. Labor is no longer their party.

Peter Dutton is risking giving Liberal voters more reason to abandon his party and vote independent. Albanese risks giving Labor voters more reason to abandon his party to vote for the Greens. Last year they took Griffith from Labor, overtook it to claim the marginal Liberal seats of Brisbane and Ryan, and came just 300 votes short of taking Macnamara (formerly Melbourne Ports), a seat Labor has held since 1906.

Honeymoons rarely last until the next election. If Labor alienates more of its base by inaction or half-hearted measures on issues that matter to them, it risks losing more seats. Macnamara would fall to the Greens in a swing of 0.3 per cent, while its neighbour Higgins (2.4) and Richmond (1.3) in laid-back northern New South Wales are very marginal. Another seven Labor seats had a margin of less than 10 per cent over the Greens — and while that’s big, the Greens won most of their seats with higher swings than that.

Remember 2010. The media focus was on Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard, but the vast bulk of the voters who deserted Labor went to the Greens. Their vote jumped from 7.8 to 11.8 per cent, and they picked up Melbourne — and four extra seats, and the balance of power, in the Senate. Labor has never regained the seats it lost.

Another swing like that would take a lot more seats with it. It could mean this is Labor’s last majority government. •

The post Albo’s choice appeared first on Inside Story.

Margaret Simons acknowledges the crude misogyny implicit in such a remark, but also that it was “in line with the views of most political hardheads.” The hardheads are not all misogynists: Julia Gillard and Penny Wong lean in that direction, though they would reject Latham’s terminology. Others, Plibersek a leading voice among them, would argue that bringing issues like childcare, domestic violence, human services and social inclusion to the centre of the policy arena is some of the toughest work around.

Taking this difference in perspective as a central theme, Simons begins her new biography, Tanya Plibersek: On Her Own Terms, by paying her respects to Jane Austen, for whose work she and Plibersek share an enduring love. Given that Austen is not a political novelist, it’s an unlikely starting point. If you read all her works twice over you’d be forgiven for missing any reference to major national crises of the time: the madness of the King, the Highland clearances, the Luddite riots and (aside from the appearance of handsomely dressed soldiers) the Napoleonic wars.

And yet. She is the first English-language novelist to portray social and family relations as a form of politics. Social hierarchies display the dynamics of control and subjugation. Personalities are formed and deformed through ambition. Economic factors determine the composition and management of households, and underlie the all-important negotiations over marriage partners. At the heart of each story is the question of how personal integrity may play out in the midst of all this.

What piques Simons’s interest from the outset is that Plibersek has a special admiration for Elinor Dashwood in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, a character remarkable for “strength of understanding and coolness of judgement.” Dashwood’s good sense enables her to steer through thickets of vested interest and covert motivation towards a secure future. “It is rare, in fiction as in politics, for sensibleness to be cast as heroic virtue,” Simons observes, as she embarks on a political narrative that will have little in the way of major intrigues, crises and dramas, because these are not Plibersek’s milieu.

What she presents is an interesting case study in female ambition. Simons cites some stern remarks from Anne Summers on a 2001 interview in which Plibersek responded to a question about her ambitions by saying she was “not desperate to be a minister.” She’s known as a good communicator, never a fiery orator. Colleagues say she lacks “the vision thing.” Her career has been one of steady ascent, slow at times and rather predictable.

The daughter of Slovenian migrants whose skills and hard work brought the family to middle-class prosperity in a single generation, Plibersek grew up in Oyster Bay in Sutherland Shire and graduated as dux of Jannali Girls High School in 1987. Her association with the Labor Party began earlier, at the age of fifteen, and it was then that she first encountered Anthony Albanese as a fellow member of Young Labor.

After completing a degree in communications at the University of Technology Sydney, where she served as women’s officer in her honours year, she became involved in feminist networks that helped frame her enduring priorities. Meredith Burgmann, Wendy Bacon and Ann Symonds were important influences.

Her first big break came early, when it was suggested she run for preselection for the seat of Sydney after sitting member Peter Baldwin’s resignation. In her own words, it was “an audacious move,” and one that introduced her to the nasty business of factional politics. Simons emphasises this aspect of Plibersek’s story as background to the damaging Labor leadership battles that began when Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard replaced Kim Beazley in 2006, and continued through the chaotic alternations of the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd governments.

How do you maintain an ethic of loyalty in an environment riddled with treachery? On a personal level, Plibersek steered a discreet course, never wavering from her loyalty to Beazley but serving the regimes that followed him with consistency and good grace.

Sometimes, though, loyalty to principles conflicts with personal loyalties, and the Tampa crisis of August 2001 was a crucial test in this regard. Beazley’s capitulation to the Howard government’s decision to refuse landing to the Norwegian freighter after it rescued 433 shipwrecked asylum seekers went against everything Plibersek believed in, yet after speaking out in fraught party meetings she, too, capitulated.

“I don’t think I’ve ever found it so hard to walk into the chamber and vote for something in my life,” she told Simons. She was only a backbencher, but perhaps this was, to use one of the metaphors employed in the book, a “sliding doors” moment in her career, as it was in Australian politics.

She had been speaking out on asylum seekers in alliance with Western Australian MP Carmen Lawrence. Suppose she had held the line, displayed some of the oratorical fire Simons finds lacking in her rhetoric, and taken a lead on “the vision thing”? It might have marked her out as a future prime minister. Surely that is what Jacinda Ardern would have done.

Opting instead for good parliamentary behaviour, she identified herself in the party room as someone to be thoroughly trusted with whatever brief she was given. Her ministerial portfolios in the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd governments were in line with her established priorities: housing and the status of women, human services, social inclusion and health.

It was not until 2013, when she became shadow foreign affairs and international development minister, that she stepped outside what some might have termed her comfort zone, though “comfort” would be an ironic word to describe areas of responsibility in which so much human suffering is at issue, and where she has so often taken courageous personal action.

Simons astutely does the work of a Jane Austen, insisting on the centrality of what others might consider incidental matters. There is the account of how she noticed a man in a boarding house whose fingers were gangrenous, and drove him to hospital in time to get life-saving surgery. It’s one of countless incidents in which she intervened immediately to assist someone in a critical situation.

Preparation for a white paper on homelessness involved meetings around the nation in remote communities, homelessness centres and refuges. Plibersek was present whenever she could be. She would read correspondence from constituents, checking official replies to ensure that someone in urgent need was not left without a line of help.

According to staffers, she is not just “as good” as her reputation, but exceeds it. She takes home-cooked food to elderly neighbours and serves cake in the office for those working long hours. If someone brings an infant to work (as she did herself with two of her children), she adapts the office environment to suit their needs.

“She lives with great complexity, and handles it well,” as one colleague puts it. It’s the complexity that’s easy to miss, and that Simons is determined to capture. Demarcation lines between domestic and professional life, personal commitment and political statement, urgent situations and long-term objectives, are constantly being erased. This is unusual in a senior minister, even among women at that level.

There’s much in this book about Plibersek’s family: the challenges faced by her migrant parents, the murder of her dynamic brother Philip in Papua New Guinea, the well-known troubled past of her husband Michael Coutts-Trotter, now a distinguished senior public servant. And towards the end of the book, an exclusive interview reveals how her daughter Anna’s personal crisis led to Plibersek’s decision not to oppose Albanese for the leadership.

The question of whether she will at some stage become prime minister, and if so whether she would be a good one, hovers over the book, and draws with it another, larger question: what do we most need in a national leader?

As geopolitical tensions intensify, economic challenges deepen and ecological catastrophe looms, the main concern is how a prime minister can perform on the world stage, something Plibersek has never had a chance to demonstrate. But revelations from the robodebt inquiry draw the attention back to home ground, and the rot beneath our feet when human principles are discarded. Is Jane Austen’s prime minister the answer? •

Tanya Plibersek: On Her Own Terms
By Margaret Simons | Black Inc. | $34.99 | 320 pages

The post Jane Austen’s prime minister? appeared first on Inside Story.

That would be a stunning swing of 8 per cent against Dominic Perrottet’s government — a government one could argue is the most progressive and competent the Coalition has produced in the past decade, certainly relative to its counterparts federally, or in Victoria or Queensland.

Four days later, a Resolve poll for the Sydney Morning Herald came up with roughly similar findings, though on those figures the swing seems to be more like 6.5 per cent. It would still be curtains. The bookies give the Coalition’s last government on the mainland just a 20 per cent chance of holding onto office when the voters deliver judgement on 25 March.

If that proves right, it would be a dramatic illustration of how far the Liberal Party has fallen. At its peak in 2014, the Coalition ran every government in Australia except for South Australia (where it won the election on votes but lost it on the seats) and the ACT (where it hasn’t won an election since 1998).

The Abbott government’s 2014 budget of broken promises marked the turning point. Since then the Coalition has lost one government after another.

Three of those governments fell after a single term. Six months after Abbott’s budget, Victoria led the way, following four years dominated by the Coalition infighting that brought down premier Ted Baillieu. Queensland followed two months later, with premier Campbell Newman, the hero of its 2012 election win, losing his own seat in a 14 per cent statewide swing.

The polls suggested Abbott’s own government would also be booted out after a single term, but Liberal MPs forestalled that by dumping him and installing Malcolm Turnbull to win them the 2016 election.

Coalition governments continued to fall: Northern Territory voters dumped the Country Liberal Party government in 2016, leaving it with just two seats; the following year Mark McGowan began his remarkable reign by ousting the Coalition government in Western Australia.

In South Australia, by contrast, the Liberals finally broke through after sixteen years in opposition to win power in 2018. But that government too lasted just one term, and Labor emphatically returned to power last March — two months before voters finally sent the federal Coalition on its way.

But the NSW Coalition government should surely be less vulnerable. While the Morrison government showed no appetite for tackling climate change, NSW treasurer and energy minister Matt Kean has been a national leader in pushing the pace of decarbonisation. No government in Australia is more subject to integrity watchdogs than the NSW government is to its own ICAC. And, with some exceptions (water, for instance), it has been more a reformist government than a reactionary one. On gambling reform, it is far more progressive than Labor.

But this election cycle has become merciless for the Coalition parties. They began it with seven of Australia’s nine federal, state and territory governments. They now have just two, and if the NSW government falls on 25 March, they will be left with just one.

It’s worth recalling that latest cycle, and what it means for the Coalition parties. South Australia’s Liberal government fell in March last year, the federal Coalition government was voted out in May, and the Victorian Liberals received another thrashing from voters in November. In 2021, the Western Australian Liberals were left with just two seats in the Legislative Assembly and the Nationals replaced them as the official opposition.

2020 saw Queensland’s Labor government re-elected with an increased majority, leaving the Liberals with just five seats in Brisbane. The Labor–Greens government was given a sixth term in the ACT, while in the Northern Territory Labor was re-elected for a second term.

The one victory for the Coalition in that time was in Tasmania, where former premier Peter Gutwein called an early election in 2021 and narrowly retained his majority. If Dominic Perrottet loses in March, Gutwein’s successor, Jeremy Rockliff, will lead Australia’s only Liberal government. He doesn’t have to face the voters until early 2025.

Being out of government makes everything harder for political parties. They have far fewer staffers to call on, few public servants to provide policy assistance, less fundraising power and a bigger challenge finding things out. Talented people don’t waste their energies on a party destined for opposition, so the opposition parties are left with rusted-on supporters and branch stackers’ recruits.

But cycles change. In the last years of the Howard government, Labor controlled every state and territory government in Australia. Then, with the Rudd government still at the peak of its popularity, Western Australians voted out their Labor government. Two years later Victorians did the same, and by early 2014 Labor had only two governments left.

The next political cycle began with the Andrews government taking power in Victoria in November 2014. If the Perrottet government is voted out, that cycle will culminate on 25 March.

But would that also imply that Labor is now at the top of its cycle? That it will be all downhill for Labor from here, and the Coalition will soon start taking back the governments it has lost?

Not necessarily. A looming Coalition revival would be a reasonable expectation if you assumed that its losses of government reflected cyclical factors alone: bad luck, changing political fashions, one-off factors, and in the NSW case, the wear and tear of twelve years in government.

But if that were so, we should be seeing signs of it in the state that was first to switch its allegiance to Labor. And those signs should have been apparent in November’s election there. As we shall see, though, there was little if any sign of a Liberal comeback.

It’s early days yet for the Albanese government. We’ve seen many governments enjoy an extended honeymoon before crashing — the Rudd government, for example — but eight months after the election, all the polls suggest it’s the Coalition that has lost a lot of ground.

Labor won the 21 May election with a tad over 52 per cent of the two-party vote. The latest Resolve poll in Tuesday’s Age/Sydney Morning Herald implied that the figure has jumped to 60 per cent since the election. Peter Dutton’s poll ratings remain far behind Anthony Albanese’s.

In this Labor cycle, the Coalition lost its first state government just eight months after reaching its peak of running seven of the nine governments. But the Coalition’s next cycle might not begin anytime soon.

After New South Wales votes it will be almost a year and a half before the next election anywhere in Australia, and then there will be a bunch of them: the Northern Territory, the ACT and Queensland in the second half of 2024, and then Western Australia, Tasmania and federally in the first half of 2025. While you’d think the Coalition will surely win one of them, it could face a long wait before its own cycle gets going.

Why?

First, since 2000, the Coalition has mostly been in government in Canberra, but Labor has dominated government at state and territory level. So far this century, in the states and territories, Labor has been in power for roughly three-quarters of the time, and the Coalition for just one-quarter. Outside New South Wales and Tasmania, Labor has become the natural party of government, and the Liberals/Nationals/LNP/CLP the natural parties of opposition.

In Victoria, the Coalition has been in power for just four of the past twenty-three years. In Queensland, three. In South Australia, six. In the Northern Territory, five and a half, and in the ACT, the Liberals have had less than two years in office and twenty-one in opposition.

Maybe that’s logical. The federal government’s main jobs are economic management, social security and foreign relations — and on two of those, voters have a conservative bias. The states, by contrast, are mainly responsible for running the services we rely on: hospitals, schools, roads and public transport. On those issues, voters have a bias towards improving services. Keeping the budget in the black seems to have gone out of fashion.

But former NSW premier and federal Liberal president Nick Greiner put it well when he said the Liberals’ problem is that its activist base is well to the right of its voter base. (Just as the Greens’ activist base is well to the left of its voter base.) And the longer a party is out of power, the more deep-seated that becomes. Failure breeds more failure.

Take the ACT Liberals. In its first twelve years of self-government the ACT mostly had Liberal governments. Red Hill pharmacist Kate Carnell was parachuted in to become party leader. She won two elections, presenting a moderate, modern face that Canberra voters could relate to. But in 2001, the Libs lost office, went into opposition, and stayed there.

By 2023, it’s come to feel as though the Labor–Greens coalition is the permanent government of the ACT, and the Liberals are the permanent opposition.

Could the same be happening in Victoria? There, the Coalition parties have won a majority of Victoria’s seats in just one of the last sixteen elections, federal or state. For a Liberal Party that once governed the state alone for twenty-seven years straight, defeat has come to be seen as normal.

The Coalition’s one victory was at the 2010 state election under another moderate, modern Liberal, Ted Baillieu. But in truth they were not ready to govern, were profoundly disunited and had no coherent agenda. When voters turfed them out in 2014, there was little to show for their four years in power.

Love him or loathe him, Daniel Andrews has been full of ambition to do things, above all investing in transport infrastructure and tackling cutting-edge social issues. In 2018 Labor was returned with a massive majority — so large that we all assumed 2022 would see a swing back to the Coalition.

That assumption seemed certain after the government’s mishandling of Covid. It imposed harsh, unpopular lockdowns that effectively closed down Melbourne for eight months, then changed course 180 degrees and dropped all controls as the death toll from Covid soared. More than one in 1000 Victorians have now died of the disease — 76 per cent more than in the rest of Australia.

Surely the 2022 Victorian election should have been the start of a new cycle of Liberal renewal. But no. At face value, the Libs made no progress at all. Labor had fifty-five seats in the old Assembly, the Coalition twenty-seven, and the Greens and independents three each. In the new one, Labor has fifty-six, the Coalition twenty-eight (assuming it retains Narracan at Saturday’s delayed election), and the Greens four. Labor won easily — and while the Nationals gained three seats, the Liberals went backwards.

But there are nuances to that narrative — and in politics, nuances matter. One reason why the Albanese government is riding so high is that it has the freedom of having a clear majority in the House of Representatives. But that majority came so close to being a minority.

If fewer than 500 votes in the relevant booths had changed hands, the Liberals’ Andrew Constance would have won the federal seat of Gilmore from Labor, the Greens’ Steph Hodgins-May would now be the member for Macnamara — and Labor would be a minority government, negotiating every bill with the crossbenches or the Coalition. Small changes, big difference.

For Victoria, nuance one: The pre-election redistribution of boundaries, on the Victorian Electoral Commission’s estimates, gave Labor a net gain of three seats (because Melbourne had grown rapidly, and Labor held most of the seats with swollen enrolments). That was the real starting point: so Labor lost two seats, and the Coalition gained two. Not much difference, sure, but there was some movement the Coalition’s way, however inadequate.

Nuance two: As in the federal election, Labor was lucky. A shift of just 350 votes in the relevant booths would have seen the Greens take Northcote and the Liberals win Pakenham and Bass. Instead of the seats going from 58–26–4 to 56–28–4, they would have ended up as 53–30–5. Not much difference there either, but it would have shown clear movement from Labor to the Coalition.

Nuance three: On the votes, there certainly was movement. For the eighty-six seats contested by both sides at the last two elections, Labor’s share of the two-party-preferred vote fell from 57.5 per cent in 2018 to 54.8 per cent this time. That’s a swing of 2.7 per cent to the Coalition.

But in the twenty-five marginal seats — those where the election is decided — it was a very different story. The average swing from Labor to the Coalition there was just 0.3 per cent. The Coalition won four seats that were notionally Labor’s on the new boundaries (Caulfield, Hawthorn, Nepean and Morwell), while Labor won three seats that were notionally the Coalition’s (Bayswater, Bass and Glen Waverley).

(Labor also lost Richmond to the Greens and the Coalition won Shepparton from independent Suzanna Sheed. That’s why, in net terms, Labor lost two seats, and the Coalition gained two).

Mostly, the big swings to the Coalition were in safe Labor seats in Melbourne’s western and northern suburbs, where it had no chance of winning: seats like Greenvale (15.1 per cent swing to the Liberals), Mill Park (13.5), St Albans (12.4), Thomastown (11.4) and Kororoit (11.1).

Across the nineteen middle and outer suburbs northwest of the Yarra, the average swing to the Coalition was 7.1 per cent. But it won none of them, and even after those swings, only two of them were even mildly marginal.

To win a majority in the Assembly, the Coalition needed to make a net gain of nineteen seats. On the traditional pendulum, admittedly a rough measure, that required a swing of 10.4 per cent.

At the 2026 election, to win a majority, it will need to make a net gain of seventeen seats. On the pendulum, that would require a swing of 8.1 per cent. No opposition has gained a swing of that size since 1955, when Labor split in two.

The start of a cycle that will see Australia swing back to Coalition governments? I think not.

At this election, twelve Labor seats were marginal against the Coalition. At the 2026 election, only eight will be. Most of the seats it needs to gain to win office will need to be won by swings of 6 to 10 per cent.

These are normally classified as “fairly safe” seats. If Labor is still riding high with voters in 2026, they won’t be threatened. But if it loses support in the next four years, as governments often do in their third terms, some could come under threat. Labor would have far more territory to defend.

Nuance four: A significant development was lost in the focus on Labor’s triumph and the Liberals’ woes. This election saw the Greens almost double their territory. Richmond was the only seat they picked up, but they came close to winning five other seats: Northcote (lost by 0.2 per cent), Pascoe Vale (2.0), Preston (2.1), Footscray (4.2) and Albert Park (4.5).

One in ten seats in the Assembly, all in the inner suburbs, are now either held by the Greens or within their reach. That’s a position they’ve never been in before, anywhere in Australia.

In the Legislative Council, they now hold the balance of power, winning four seats, up from one in 2018. Labor will have to negotiate with them on any legislation the Coalition opposes.

Their first-preference vote rose just slightly, from 10.7 per cent to 11.5. But there’s a simple reason for that which media commentators ignored: at this election there were three times as many minor-party candidates as last time. Animal Justice and Family First ran in every seat, and the Freedom Party in most of them. Those candidates took votes from all other parties. As the table shows, the minor parties’ vote more than doubled, from 5.2 per cent last time to 11.7 per cent.

Note: while the independents’ vote fell by 0.6 per cent, the Liberals by 0.8 per cent and Labor’s by 5.8 per cent, the Greens’ vote rose by 0.8 per cent. They clearly did the best of the major players.

We can compare apples with apples by looking at the vote for the three main parties after minor-party preferences. The comparison is limited by the fact that only in twenty-seven seats were Labor, Liberals and Greens in the final three in both 2018 and 2022 and the commission distributed everyone else’s preferences between them. (The VEC has promised that this time it will eventually distribute all preferences in all seats. Thank you, at last.)

When just Labor, Liberals and Greens were left in those twenty-seven seats, the Liberal vote was unchanged from 2018. But Labor’s vote was down 3.2 per cent, while the Greens’ vote rose by 3.2 per cent. In the new marginal seats of Footscray, Pascoe Vale and Preston, the swing from Labor to Greens was three times that size.

But isn’t that just because the Liberals changed their preferences from Labor to Greens? No. These are three-party figures: the Liberal preferences hadn’t been distributed at this stage. And note: when they were, they didn’t change the outcome in a single seat, not even Richmond. As the VEC has repeatedly shown, most inner-suburban Liberals don’t follow their party’s how-to-vote card.

Where Liberal preferences were distributed, they lifted the Greens’ two-party vote by an average of 4.5 per cent. The Greens were slowly expanding their territory even when the Liberals preferenced Labor, but in 2026 that 4.5 per cent would make it far easier for them to keep doing so. And conversely, Labor would breathe a huge sigh of relief if the Liberals preferenced them instead.

In war and politics, they say, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Helping the Greens win Labor seats brings the Coalition no closer to government, as the Greens would always support Labor. But making Labor fight on two fronts dilutes its campaign resources: and of Labor’s thirteen most marginal seats after this election, in five its opponent is the Greens. If the Liberals redirect preferences to Labor in 2026, the only one Labor need worry about would be Northcote.

The Greens often declare war on themselves, and do or say silly things that discourage you from taking them seriously. But they have stood up for principles that matter to many Australians — tackling climate change seriously, treating refugees humanely, ending persecution of whistleblowers — which is why they have become the first party since Federation to establish itself as a lasting independent alternative to the two major parties.

The Country Party, now the Nationals, began as an independent group but abandoned that to form what has been a permanent coalition with the Liberals. In the last term of the NSW Coalition government, their one public stand on principle seemed to be to defend the interests of land developers against koalas.

The DLP and the Australian Democrats each lasted a generation and won significant support as independent alternatives to the two majors. But neither established a territorial base that could win them lower house seats, and eventually they withered away.

The Greens have carved out their own territory by making themselves the party of young voters in the inner suburbs. In those nine seats in inner Melbourne, they won 38.7 per cent of the three-party vote this time, ahead of Labor with 38.4 per cent and the Liberals with 22.9 per cent. At the federal election, they also won all three seats in inner Brisbane.

And the young, and the inner suburbs, just keep growing. It’s a good constituency to have.

New South Wales has become the Greens’ weakest state. At the federal election they polled just 10 per cent there, compared with 13.3 per cent in the rest of Australia. While they are now competitive in nine state seats in Melbourne, in 2019 they were competitive in just two seats in Sydney (Balmain and Newtown, both safe Green seats) and two in the hippie north of the state (winning Ballina, just losing Lismore). This state election will test them too.

For Victoria, the bottom line is that the Liberals have lost not only the 2022 election but probably the 2026 one as well. What happens then will be determined by the events of the next four years, and how voters respond to them. But things would have to go very badly for Labor for the Coalition to emerge with a majority.

For Australia, the bottom line is that if the Coalition loses what many see as its best government of recent years then it could be a long road back to power. And if the Greens’ MPs, senators and activists manage to avoid alienating their potential voters, it’s possible that the ACT will not be the only parliament in which the successor to a Labor government is a Labor–Greens one. •

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Often this technique leads to brilliant summary descriptions that seem to capture a person perfectly in a specific moment. Her essay on Malcolm Turnbull at the moment of his defeat is especially memorable, but remember, too, her farewell to Peta Credlin in 2015: “Even after the terrible rout of [Abbott’s downfall]… she’s refusing to shrink, rolling on, stoking her own mythology like a little sustaining campfire, owning a persona she invented for a purpose, refusing to defer.” Identifying a persona invented for a purpose seems to be Murphy’s forte.

The Scott Morrison persona, and prime ministership that resulted proved more difficult for her to pin down. I’ve noted before that she once considered Morrison to possess unusual “shapeshifting” proclivities. In 2020, she described his prime ministership as a work in progress, fascinating to watch. A year later, though, she was incensed by a government that claimed to be “trying to do its best” without the “barest hint of remorse, or any sustained interest in learning from past mistakes.” Only then did she conclude, “we endure these cycles of self-exoneration and thin-lipped irritation [from Morrison]. Why are people so mean to us?… It is a disgrace.”

She realised then, as did others, that nothing had changed: there was no “work in progress,” no growth. Morrison, as Sean Kelly recently remarked, recalling his earlier analysis of the man behind the ScoMo myth, “was allowed to shrug off much of what he’d done before [he became leader]. It wasn’t, it seemed, really who he was. In the end, it turned out to be exactly who he was.”

Murphy is on surer ground with her new Quarterly Essay, Lone Wolf: Albanese and the New Politics. Anthony Albanese has been around a long time: so, now, has Murphy. She is dealing with a practitioner she has watched for years — experienced, fully formed and exercising capacities congruent with the collaborative leadership he promises. Her title is teasing because of the contrast between what we expect of a “lone wolf” and the persona of the team leader Albanese now presents — inclusive, committed to working with others and recognising the importance of collective enterprise, all of which is demanded by “new politics” in an era of declining big-tent parties.

Murphy’s purpose is to explore how Albanese’s contradictory traits work in creative tension to produce his leadership style, and why that style might succeed in this era of new politics and declining big-tent parties. It is a story of growth, from the young firebrand “lone wolf” party activist who took no prisoners to the seasoned parliamentarian who knows how systems work, recognises the need for flexibility and negotiation.

But the dynamic she outlines isn’t linear. The dogmatic, aggressive demeanour may have been ameliorated but a root disposition remains: the need for privacy and personal space, the habitual self-reliance, the tenacity with which views are held once decided, the fact that “people can move in and out of favour for unfathomable reasons.”

Hence the balance of opposing characteristics on which he can strategically draw: the ruthlessness that politics requires, but the loyalty needed in transactional business; a willingness to negotiate, but only within the bounds of his electoral mandate; the investment in personal relationships, but the loner’s need for personal space from which he can connect with his networks on his terms; a capacity for tough, wily calculation leavened by well-timed empathy and kindness.

Even in his firebrand days, long-time associates recall, Albanese had the capacity to bring people with him. “He could get people to do stuff because they wanted to be doing stuff with him,” recalls Meredith Burgmann. Former Labor minister Tom Uren is said to have taught him about “forgiveness and long-term thinking,” but he always had to look ahead. With a single mum, and living in council housing, he had to plan from an early age. “If I didn’t plan, my mum wouldn’t have food, we wouldn’t pay rent.” Bringing people with him, having a plan and orchestrating others to work with him is now his leadership mode.

Yet his background as an insurgent — as someone who had to blast his way into contention and always think two steps ahead — is significant. It was overlaid by parliamentary experience, ministerial responsibilities and, especially, the challenge of managing government business in the House under Kevin Rudd and then serving as key parliamentary tactician for Julia Gillard’s legislative program. But those residual methods of professional survival remain: always being battle ready; always thinking ahead. So, while others obsess over numbers, flow charts and strategy documents, “Albanese is often cartwheeling several steps in front, light as a tumbleweed.” At the same time, Murphy reminds us of his emotional intelligence: he feels things, and the public knows it.

It might be these abilities — to “cartwheel ahead” of those yet to acclimatise to the new politics, and to empathise with public anxieties — that prove to be Albanese’s strengths. For, as Murphy demonstrates, the challenge of new politics is to recognise that dramatic global uncertainty and specific crises (climate change, a European war, energy shortages, the pandemic, a potential recession) have provoked greater expectations of government just as the days of the big-tent parties are crumbling. Dwindling membership; a small and unrepresentative base of “true believers” clinging to precepts not shared by broader publics or even by habitual party voters; a precipitate drop in the primary vote forcing reliance on strategic preference flows — these are the lot of both major parties.

In this environment, the leader’s especially tough job involves building broader coalitions of support for measures that tackle public concerns — and that means appealing to a wide constituency and drawing, as needed, on minor parties and the crossbenches, all without sacrificing core values. At the same time, the leader must curb potential insurgency by old guard true believers and parliamentary colleagues.

Murphy draws adroitly on polling, demographic data and election studies to explain the decline of big-tent parties. She appears to have adopted this term, instead of the more conventional “mass parties,” because she is exploring whether the new politics, given the right leadership, offers a different form of big-tent politics.

The trends that have culminated in the current malaise of the major parties have been gathering momentum for at least twenty years. No prime minister between 2007 and 2019 successfully managed to sustain public approval while retaining core party support. Kevin Rudd captivated the public but lost his caucus; Julia Gillard managed a successful legislative program and retained caucus support until near the end, but couldn’t convince a disbelieving public that negotiation and compromise were essential; Tony Abbott thought the slavish support of his unrepresentative base was sufficient while his popularity, never high, was plummeting disastrously; the promises that initially boosted Malcolm Turnbull’s public popularity were always hedged by his right flank, which eventually turned on him.

Each of these prime ministers was torn down by internal insurgency. And then there was Scott Morrison — a leader with no apparent purpose other than to retain and secretively widen his own power.

But is the threat any the less for Labor, notwithstanding the realignment of tectonic plates at the 2022 election? The Liberals may well be facing an existential crisis, but Labor’s victory was built on its lowest primary vote since the 1930s, 32.58 per cent. And its win was delivered by preference flows indicative of an unusual degree of strategic voting by electors.

Is it realistic to expect that trend to continue? Partisan support for the major parties has reached record lows, but the election results revealed that voters are open to reforms that would change the trajectory of democratic politics. The proposition that Murphy invites us to consider is that Albanese might just be able to manage this challenge and offer the template for leadership in the era of new politics. Rather than folding the big tent, he will make it more accommodating.

Murphy argues that the buffer of protection around Albanese’s slim majority provided by non-Labor progressives in the House and the Senate was partly a consequence of Labor’s campaign strategy. The party encouraged Labor voters in teal-targeted seats to vote tactically — implicitly welcoming people who could help get rid of Morrison by voting for someone other than Labor — but also fought to retain (and in some cases, regain) support in its traditional territories. Despite big swings against it in some of those outer-suburban seats, Labor remained just enough ahead to maintain its hold.

With climate policy as her lead example, Murphy shows how Labor managed to “swim between the flags” — identifying the bedrock of majority support for action, but within certain parameters, and carefully calculating the political and practical max-out point. This is not just old-school pragmatism. It gave space to the bottom-up, community-engaged independents on whose support it would ultimately have to rely, while recognising the need to be seen to respond to majority opinion on key concerns and to re-engage with those whose support it might once have taken for granted.

These strategies worked. The 2022 Australian Election Study shows that voters identified the most important issues as the cost of living, the environment, economic management and health, and that voters preferred Labor’s policies on three of these, including the one rated most important — cost of living. Only on economic management (where the Coalition’s 2019 advantage was significantly reduced), taxation and national security (which were not high on the list of voter concerns) were Coalition policies preferred. Albanese was evaluated more favourably than any party leader since Kevin Rudd; Morrison emerged from the study as the least popular party leader in its history.

In the six months since then, Labor has done what it promised, purposefully but not precipitately. It brought together employers, unions and community representatives at a Jobs and Skills Summit, the recommendations of which will feed into policy. It has steered sixty-one bills through parliament, including the National Anti-Corruption Bill and the controversial Secure Jobs, Better Pay Bill, the latter involving delicate and ultimately fruitful dialogue with independent senator David Pocock.

While new governments often experience a honeymoon, the polls for Labor and for Albanese have continually improved. In late November the Guardian Essential poll had Labor comfortably ahead of the Coalition on its “two-party-preferred+” measure, with more voters believing the country to be on “the right track” than the wrong, despite surging concern about inflation. A week later, the Age/Sydney Morning Herald Resolve poll reported a rise in Labor’s primary support to 42 per cent, with the Coalition dropping further to 30 per cent and Albanese leading Dutton as preferred prime minister by 54 to 19 per cent. These findings indicated that voters “weren’t quite sure about Albanese as the agent of change” before the election but since then he “seems to have blossomed in their eyes.”

Much of this reinforces Murphy’s argument. To form majority government, the big-tent parties have always needed to court and hold diverse electoral coalitions and appeal to millions of voters whose values may not align with one another.

In the past they did this by assuming they had the support of their core base and their habitual voters, and then targeting those “swinging voters” they felt were persuadable and ignoring the rest. Now they have to cope with the disjunction between their base and their habitual voters while rallying minority parties for their preferences and as potential collaborators across the aisle. But conventional mass parties have gradually lost the institutional and ideological flexibility needed to pursue the compromises necessary in the “impatient and uncompromising age” of new politics.

Murphy’s compelling essay draws attention to four qualities Albanese brings to this process of making the old politics new. First, he believes that Labor is the party of change — the party that enacts reforms responding to community needs — and that change requires time and patience. Second, there’s the calculated strategy of “swimming between the flags,” staying within the parameters of what the public will accept.

Yet third, according to Murphy, is Albanese’s need to keep moving. As he once told Meredith Burgmann, “You’ve got to keep them dancing.” What he meant, according to Murphy, was “they can’t see you as having no further moves,” which is a spur to continually innovate to keep ahead of coming disruption. Murphy encapsulates this as a talent for dexterity, fluidity and strategic ambiguity that in the last period of Labor government served everybody’s interests, including Albanese’s own. It has become a necessary talent and markedly at odds with the polarising rigidities that plague the Coalition.

Fourth, as evidenced in the campaign’s gamble on progressive independents, Albanese is confident of his ability to negotiate with MPs outside the major parties.

These four elements might be the means for developing the diverse constituencies of support and collaboration needed to maintain government in the era of new politics. At the least, as Murphy persuasively demonstrates, they indicate that Labor won’t surrender to bleak mega-trends — zero-sum identity politics, adverse demographic change, a distrust of conventional parties — but will remain relentless in chasing the means of staying alive. •

Lone Wolf: Albanese and the New Politics
By Katharine Murphy | Quarterly Essay | $24.99 | 128 pages

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The by-election had been brought on by the resignation of the sitting Liberal member, external affairs minister Paul Hasluck, to become governor-general. At any other time, Labor would probably not have bothered to run in this very safe Liberal seat. Indeed, Labor had not run a candidate for Curtin even in the 1963 general election.

Such a cop-out would have been anathema to Whitlam. He had campaigned impressively in two by-elections in 1967, his first year of leadership, and regarded such events as opportunities to spread the party message to a citizenry that had not elected a federal Labor government since 1946.

Nineteen sixty-nine was also a federal election year. Having narrowly won a self-inflicted caucus ballot to reassert his leadership the previous year, Whitlam needed to perform strongly and pull off a decent swing at the election. While a Labor victory was almost in the realm of fantasy, winning just a few seats here and there was unlikely to cut it: too many enemies in his own party were ready to use a weak result as a good reason to turn up the heat on Whitlam.

Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam war, and the use of conscripts to fight there, remained major issues, and while it is almost certain that Whitlam referred to them that night in 1969, my only abiding memory of his address was his criticism of the inequities and inefficiencies of Australia’s federal system. What especially stuck in my mind was his scathing description of how different state governments ordered different railway rolling stock from different countries when some coordination and cooperation would make more economic and practical sense. It didn’t exactly bring the (sparsely populated) house down, but it wasn’t without impact either.

Whitlam is associated so greatly with emotion and passion (especially after 1975) it is easy to forget that in opposition he spent much more time criticising the government for its inefficiency and ineptitude than decrying its moral failings (although sometimes it was both) — or that his enduring critique of Australian federalism’s shortcomings was something of a magnificent obsession. Even on conscription, his criticism was often as much about its inherent inefficiency (a view traditionally shared by many in the military) as about its violation of liberty and its cruel impact on those whose lives it took or damaged beyond repair.

What of the Curtin by-election? The seat was retained by the Liberals’ Vic Garland, who would go on to achieve ministerial office in the governments of William McMahon and Malcolm Fraser. But Labor achieved an estimated two-party-preferred swing of 7.9 per cent, closely matching the national swing of 7.1 per cent that Whitlam secured later that year in the general election.

That result set the stage for victory in 1972, although to regard it as inevitable is to ignore the risks Whitlam had to take, the best examples being the decision to launch a federal intervention into Labor’s left-controlled Victorian branch in 1970 and his visit to the People’s Republic of China in 1971, when Australia still recognised Taiwan as the real China.

The “inevitable” tag also ignores the modest nine-seat majority Labor achieved in 1972: the win was no landslide, and it is near certain that only Whitlam within federal Labor’s parliamentary ranks could have brought the conservative domination to an end.

That night in April 1969, I walked home reasonably impressed. But my impression would have been of little use to Whitlam: the voting age was twenty-one and I was too young to vote in 1969 — and indeed, even in 1972. •

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“Get your hands off me,” an angry photographer in a pink shirt snarls at a television reporter. Punches are thrown. Blood spurts from the nose of a radio journalist. “Come on, simmer down,” people shout. Someone warns the pink-shirted troublemaker: “This is going all over the country, you know.” More punches are thrown. “Go to buggery, punk,” the photographer screams at a member of the ABC crew. “This is not the ABC studio.”

One of the Labor Party’s public relations team, David White, is pleading with the mob to “ease back, make room for the camera.” Tony Whitlam, the six foot five inch son of the Labor leader, moves in to try to break up the scuffles. He is patient at first, then he flushes angrily and clenches a fist. A Whitlam aide, Richard Hall, places a hand on his shoulder and says, “Easy, Tony.” David White motions to a rather large member of the Canberra press corps and whispers, “Stand in the doorway and look imposing while I get some policemen.”

Inside the house, oblivious to the violence on the patio, Gough Whitlam and his wife, Margaret, are cutting a victory cake. In the icing are the words “Congratulations Gough Whitlam, Prime Minister, 1972.” The party workers sing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” but the noise from the garden drowns them out.

“We should have thought of barricades,” mutters Richard Hall, as he and other members of the Whitlam staff hurriedly make new arrangements for the prime minister–elect to face the television cameras inside, away from the mob. Party guests are cleared from the sunroom. The big ABC camera is lifted through the door. Lights are set up. Mrs Whitlam appears and is questioned by radio and TV men, but her answers are inaudible more than a few feet away. Whitlam’s driver, Bob Miller, fights his way through the crush with a white piano stool for his boss to sit on.

About forty media people are packed into a room that measures no more than twenty feet by fifteen feet — together with the TV camera, the lights, the microphones. The heat is overwhelming. Television reporters sweat under their make-up. Then, at 11.27pm, Gough Whitlam squeezes along the passage and takes his place on the stool.

Radio reporters lunge at him with microphones as he begins to speak. “All I want to say at this stage is that it is clear that the majority given by New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania is so substantial that the government will have a very good mandate to carry out all its policies. These are the policies which we have put in the last parliament, and throughout the campaign we did not divert from them, we were not distracted from them, and we are very much reassured by the response the public gave to our program… We are, of course, very much aware of the responsibility with which the people have now entrusted us.”

The TV and radio men begin to fire questions about the actions he plans as prime minister, but he stops them. “I can’t go on answering questions like this… I have to wait for a call from the governor-general.” But it is enough. He has claimed victory, and now he moves out into the garden to mingle with Labor supporters, friends and neighbours who have attended similar parties at the unimposing Whitlam house in Albert Street, Cabramatta, every election night since he moved there in 1957.

Twenty-five miles away, at Drumalbyn Road, Bellevue Hill, a far grander residence in a far grander suburb, William McMahon has watched the Whitlam performance on television. He had been about to go outside to face the cameras himself, but now he must wait another ten minutes or so. Early that afternoon one of his press officers, Phillip Davis, anticipating a Labor win, had drafted a statement conceding defeat. At 10pm he and speechwriter Jonathon Gaul had retired to the family room in the McMahon home to dictate a final version to a stenographer.

Now McMahon reads it over, scribbling in a note at one point to “thank government supporters.” Then he says, “All right, let’s get it over with.” A staff member asks if he is sure he knows what he is going to say, and he nods. Davis asks Mrs Sonia McMahon if she minds accompanying her husband. “Nothing would stop me going out with him,” she says.

Outside the door are the cameras and a tunnel of pressmen. To the right nearly 200 well-wishers — neighbours, party supporters, curious sightseers — are gathered. McMahon walks out. His wife, looking strained but dry-eyed, follows. “Mr Whitlam has obviously won and won handsomely,” says the politician who has led the Liberal–Country Party Coalition to its first defeat for twenty-three years.

“There can be no doubt about the trend in New South Wales and Victoria, and they show a decisive majority for him. I congratulate him, and I congratulate his party, too. For my own part, I accept the verdict of the people as I always would do… Mr Whitlam must also accept the fact that we are an opposition that will stick to our Liberal principles and will give him vigorous opposition whenever we feel that he is taking action which is contrary to the interests of the Australian people.”

He thanks those who voted for the Coalition, and then adds, “Above all, I want to thank my own staff who have been driven relentlessly over the last few months and have stuck with me, they’ve helped me, and they’ve never wilted under the most heavy and severe oppression.” Finally: “The election is gone, it is over, and Mr Whitlam is entitled to be called upon by the governor-general to form a government.”

It has been a dignified statement, delivered with scarcely a tremor in his voice. The man who has gone through an election campaign reading speeches from an autocue has departed from his prepared text, and improved on it. He has been more generous in his references to his opponents than Davis and Gaul had been. The appreciative remarks about his staff are totally unscripted, coming as a shock to people who in the past have felt themselves to be little more than numbers to their employer.

McMahon refuses to answer questions on the reasons for the Coalition’s defeat. “That’s something for deep consideration,” he tells the reporters. Then he turns away and, with Mrs McMahon, plunges into the crowd clustering around the wrought-iron double gates and across the gravel driveway. For several minutes his diminutive figure is lost from sight as he moves among the well-wishers, shaking hands and accepting condolences.

Gough Whitlam and William McMahon spent polling day, Saturday 2 December 1972, touring booths in their electorates. There are forty-one booths in the sprawling electorate of Werriwa in Sydney’s outer-western suburbs, and Whitlam, accompanied by his wife and the Labor Party’s radio and television expert, Peter Martin, visited all of them.

Mr McMahon, too, visited all thirty-three booths in his seat of Lowe, not far away but closer to the city. On his way home he dropped in on several booths in Evans, one of the marginal seats the Liberals feared they would lose. The sitting Liberal member, the navy minister Dr Malcolm Mackay, was one of his closest supporters, and McMahon wanted to help him if he could, even at that late stage. Then McMahon returned to Bellevue Hill, had a swim in his pool and settled down to wait with his staff and a few friends. Whitlam went back to Cabramatta to prepare for the party.

The Whitlam election night party is by now a tradition in Werriwa. For several months before the 1972 election, members of Whitlam’s staff — particularly his press secretary and speechwriter Graham Freudenberg — had been trying to persuade him to change the venue, to hold it at a club or a hotel. With a Labor victory likely, they foresaw security problems.

The crowd, they warned, would be too big for the small cottage and its pocket-handkerchief garden. But Whitlam insisted the function would be held at the house as usual. The party workers in the electorate expected it, he said, and that was that. But he made one concession. He agreed that, while the figures were coming in and he was studying the count, he would retire to the Sunnybrook Motel two blocks away.

Mrs Whitlam supervised the arrangements for the party. A bar was set up in a corner of the back garden. In another corner was a makeshift toilet labelled “gents.” She explained proudly to early arrivals, “It’s a two-holer. Have a look at it.” At various places in the back garden were five television sets, their cords snaking among the shrubs to power points inside the house. On the roof, television technicians set up a microwave link disc, giving the house a science fiction appearance. There were three television outside broadcast vans in the street near the front gate.

On the patio, the television men had placed a ten foot high microphone to pick up the sounds of the party. It produced considerable amusement. “Have you seen it?” Peter Martin kept asking people. “It’s the Gough Whitlam microphone stand, the first one we’ve found that’s tall enough for him.” There was one television camera set up high, near the bar, which could sweep the whole garden. The other, on the patio, was to record whatever Whitlam might say in either victory or defeat. One of the bedrooms had been taken over as a press room, with half a dozen telephones on a long table.

Preparations in Bellevue Hill were more modest. At the insistence of Phil Davis the Liberal Party provided a tent for the press beside the swimming pool, with a few tables and chairs. Davis had stocked it with a car fridge and $30 worth of beer. There were no television sets until the TV men themselves set up monitors, but Davis left his transistor radio with the journalists mounting the vigil which, as the night wore on, they dubbed the “death watch.”

In the lounge room were two telephones and two portable television sets for McMahon and his close advisers. In the family room another set had been provided for the stenographers and Commonwealth car drivers on his staff.

McMahon appeared briefly to talk to the press and the cameras before the figures began coming in. He was confident of victory for the Coalition, he told them, and had no worries about his own position in Lowe. No one could be sure whether he believed it, but he appeared jaunty enough, immaculate in his freshly pressed blue suit, white shirt, crimson tie and carefully polished shoes. With a wave he disappeared into the house, not to be seen again for more than three hours except in silhouette through the lounge room windows.

It was a strange atmosphere inside the house, tense but not emotional. McMahon settled down at one telephone. John Howard, a vice-president of the NSW Liberal Party, remained glued to the other. Davis, Gaul, McMahon’s private secretary Ian Grigg, Mrs McMahon, and several friends of the family watched the results on the television sets. Little was said.

McMahon received frequent reports on his own seat from scrutineers, and remained outwardly calm even when it looked as though he might lose it. Only once did he snap at a party worker when conflicting figures were phoned in from Lowe. He was in constant contact with electoral officials in Canberra, and with the federal director of the Liberal Party, Bede Hartcher, who was in the national tally room. From time to time Howard handed him figures. Davis and Gaul kept him up to date with the figures coming up on television. He scribbled on a notepad, calculating the government’s position and appreciating it far better than anyone else in the room.

McMahon has the ability to “feel” a political situation before most other people. It is one of the reasons he was able to survive so many crises in his turbulent career, the talent that earned him a reputation as a political Houdini. He got the “gut” feeling that told him the government was heading for defeat almost as soon as the early figures began to come in. He was ready to concede by 10pm, but wanted to make sure Lowe was safe before he faced the questions of the press.

Hartcher and other Liberal officials urged him to wait, telling him there was still a chance the government could scrape back, but he knew better. Then [Liberal frontbencher] John Gorton appeared on television, admitting that Labor had won. The customs minister, Don Chipp, also conceded. And the treasurer, Billy Snedden. McMahon knew he had to go out on the lawn, where the cameras and the journalists were waiting like vultures. But first he had a cup of tea. Mrs McMahon handed it to him, and those in the room watched as he spooned in the sugar. His hand was steady.

The ordeal of the statement over, McMahon returned to the small group in the lounge room and sat quietly for a time. Then he perked up. “Oh well, that’s it,” he said. “We’ve got some champagne. Let’s open it.” From then on the mood was almost one of relief that it was all over. Party workers from Lowe dropped in, and some NSW Liberal Party officials. Outside, their work over for the night, journalists and TV men were drinking in the tent. Davis and Gaul joined them.

At about 1am a young woman broke through the security screen around the McMahon house by clambering over a fence from next door. She joined the press group, and gushed over McMahon and his wife when they emerged soon after for a final, off-the-record chat. Only once during the night did McMahon lapse into introspection and ask rhetorically, “Where did we go wrong?” He did not offer an answer to the question. Later he said, “At least we didn’t lose as many seats as in 1969.”

Whitlam’s staff spirited him away from his home to the motel soon after 8pm. Very few people knew where he had gone. It was well over an hour before a group of journalists and photographers tracked him down, and they were kept locked out of the room where he was studying the results.

Around the room were four television sets tuned to different channels. At one end was a table with a bank of seven phones. Richard Hall was constantly on the phone talking with scrutineers and candidates round the country, getting figures before they were posted in the tally room. Clem Lloyd, Lance Barnard’s press secretary, phoned through figures from the national tally room at regular intervals. David White was also manning phones.

Mungo MacCallum, the Nation Review journalist, had been co­opted to work a calculating machine. Whitlam sat in an armchair facing the television set tuned in to the ABC, but frequently he screwed himself around to watch the other sets as they showed new figures. Peter Martin was there. Graham Freudenberg sat on the bed listening intently to the analysis of British psephologist David Butler on Channel 7. Another of Whitlam’s press aides, Warwick Cooper, hovered in the background. His private secretary, Jim Spigelman, was making calculations on a notepad.

Bob Miller poured glasses of beer and orange juice for the workers. Also present was Ian Baker, press secretary of the Victorian opposition leader, Clyde Holding. There was whispered conversation. “It’s starting to look as though the DLP vote is down in Victoria,” said Martin at 8.45. “A trend is developing to us in the outer suburbs,” Hall told Whitlam a few minutes later. “We’ve got Phillip,” Freudenberg announced at 8.50. Placing his hand over the mouthpiece of his phone, Hall read out the first figures for MacArthur and told Whitlam, “It looks like Bate is going to poll well.” Less than a minute later he interrupted another phone conversation to tell Whitlam, “There’s no doubt about it, the DLP is ratshit in Victoria. They’re going down.”

But Whitlam remained cautious. When the ABC showed figures for Mitchell and compere Robert Moore told viewers that Liberal member Les Irwin was trailing his Labor opponent, Whitlam commented, “It’s still not marvellous.” Hall announced. “There’s a clear absolute majority to us in Hume,” but Whitlam replied, “Later figures always go against us. We’d have to have a very good lead.” One of the TV screens showed Liberal Alan Jarman trailing in Deakin, but Whitlam said, “He’ll still get in, though.”

Whitlam showed little emotion as he stared intently at the television screen, until a little after 9pm when Hall told him, “I reckon we’ve won Casey, Holt, Latrobe, Diamond Valley and Denison.” On the TV set tuned to Channel 9, [journalist] Alan Reid was saying, “If this trend continues I’d say Labor is home and hosed.” Then Whitlam allowed himself a smile, and sprawled back in his chair clearly more relaxed.

At that point he knew he had almost certainly won. There was irony when one of the channels rescreened McMahon’s earlier interview, showing him saying, “I feel more confident than I did this morning.” But there was bad news, too. At 9.05 MacCallum looked up from his calculator and remarked, “In Bendigo David Kennedy is only on 48 per cent. He’ll go to preferences.” Whitlam became sombre again as he said, “But will he get them?” At 9.15 Whitlam gave Hall permission to phone the Labor candidate in Denison, John Coates, to congratulate him on a certain win.

Then Hall reported that Labor scrutineers had no doubt the party would win Evans. At 9.18 one of the staff let out a cry of “Jesus!” as figures for Flinders on one of the TV sets showed the labour and national service minister, Phillip Lynch, fighting to hold the seat. Then at 9.20 MacCallum performed some more calculations and announced to the assembled company, “I think we can send the white smoke up the chimney now.”

From then on, the mood in the room was one of elation. “Welcome home Victoria!” said Spigelman as one of the television computers came up with a printout showing a swing of 6 per cent to Labor there. NSW party officials had told Whitlam there was a good chance of a Labor win in the Country Party–held seat of Paterson, but he had not believed them. At 9.26, when Freudenberg said, “They were right about Paterson,” he sprang out of his chair with an astounded cry of “What?”

He rubbed his hands together gleefully when Freudenberg hold him a few minutes later, “Look. Race is in.” Race Mathews, his former private secretary, had a clear lead over the minister for the environment, Aborigines and the arts, Peter Howson, in the Victorian seat of Casey. At that point, Bob Miller was sent to fetch Mrs Whitlam, and as soon as she arrived Hall popped the cork from the first champagne bottle. Glasses were clinked all round. “Many happy returns,” said Mrs Whitlam.

Only the news from the South Australian seat of Sturt, where Labor’s Norm Foster had been defeated, interrupted the celebratory atmosphere. “We can’t really do without Norm,” said Mrs Whitlam. “We need someone with that sort of tenacity and ferocity.” Her husband was quickly on the phone to Foster, offering commiserations and promising to find a job for him.

But Whitlam was possibly more upset by the bad result for Labor in Bendigo, and he phoned David Kennedy too. The Labor leader has what his staff describe as “a thing” about by-elections. They have played an important part in his political career. It was his role in the Dawson by-election in Queensland which saved him from expulsion over his fight with the ALP machine on State Aid in 1966. In 1967 the by-election victory in Corio in Victoria was his first triumph as party leader, and gave him the leverage to secure reforms to the structure of the federal ALP conference and executive. In the same year the Capricornia by-election success helped him to “break” Harold Holt. In 1969 a by-election in Bendigo had shown his mastery over the then prime minister, Gorton. The possibility of losing one of the seats to which he had devoted such time and effort in a by-election campaign appeared to affect him deeply.

Whitlam had been hoping McMahon would go on television first to concede. But soon after 10.30 he decided further delay would be fruitless, and prepared to return to the house and the waiting cameras and pressmen. But first he and Mrs Whitlam posed for the photographers who were gathered outside the motel room. In typical fashion, they hammed it up. “This is my best side,” said Whitlam. “Well, my nose is too big on this side,” replied his wife, “but I’ll do it for you, dear.” Their eighteen-year-old daughter turned up and gave her father a hug. “Are you happy now, Dad?” she asked. “Yes, Cathy,” he said. “I hope you are.”

Back at the house a British journalist was phoning a story to his paper in London. “Australia has a new prime minister,” he dictated. “Yes, I’m quite serious.” In the back garden the party guests were milling around the television sets, sending up loud cheers as each new set of figures confirmed the Labor victory.

The NSW ALP president, John Ducker, wandering through the crowd beer in hand, did not seem to quite believe it. “There’s no doubt, is there?” he kept asking people. “Billy McMahon’s going to lose his seat,” a gloriously drunk party worker shouted at the top of his voice. Laughter rippled from one end of the garden to the other.

Then the word was passed excitedly through the crowd: “Gough’s coming. He’s here.” Whitlam’s tall figure could be seen slowly forcing its way through the crush as people tried to shake his hand or simply touch him.

Photographers held their cameras above their heads, trying to get shots. “Good on yer, Gough,” people shouted. And then the chanting started. “We want Gough! We want Gough!” Slowly he made his way to the sunroom door, stood there a moment smiling, and then disappeared inside.

Sometime later, when he had made his television appearance and done the right thing by his party guests, Whitlam returned to the motel and the stock of champagne for a quieter celebration. And there, away from the cameras and the crush, he was more expansive in his comments to journalists. The Liberals would have lost under any leader, he said, adding, “It’s just too silly for them to blame or for us to thank Bill McMahon. The whole show was running out of steam.” Then, a little wearily, “It’s been a long, hard road.” •

This is an extract from The Making of an Australian Prime Minister, published by Cheshire in 1973.

The post A party for the people appeared first on Inside Story.

The Liberal Party took another trouncing, losing most of the seat-by-seat contests for the fifteenth time in Victoria’s last sixteen federal and state elections. Despite leader Matthew Guy’s optimistic claims in his concession speech last night, it is very unlikely to end up with more seats; at best it could hold on to the same small number it started with. It seems even further from winning back power.

The Nationals had a night to relish, taking back all three seats they had lost to regional independents over the previous eight years and holding their own with the greatest of ease. But the Liberals’ malaise condemns them, too, to remain on the opposition benches seemingly forever, until a new crowd can win control of the Liberals, recruit members from mainstream Australia and take the party back to the middle ground.

Early last night the Greens’ tide came in. Their vote was surging and it seemed they might sweep through inner Melbourne to win as many as nine of the Assembly’s eighty-eight seats. But as the night wore on, the tide went out again, their vote slumped back to its 2018 level, and it looks like they won just one more seat, Richmond.

And the independents had a terrible night. The two remaining regional independents, seen as tied to Labor, paid the price for the government’s lack of interest in country Victoria. Of the four teal indies backed by Climate 200, two will be elected at best, but more likely none. In other seats, the average independent won only a few per cent of the vote; in the end, they were poorly funded amateurs up against well-funded professionals.

There might be one exception: Gaetano Greco, an independent from Preston in the northern suburbs, who seems to have slipped through unnoticed while Labor was focused on the Greens. More on him later.

The one blow for Daniel Andrews was in the Legislative Council: on current counting, Labor would lose three seats, forcing it to rely on support from the Greens or the fringe parties of the right — One Nation, the Shooters and the DLP — to pass any legislation the Liberals and Nationals oppose. That was predictable, and predicted, but it could require a more inclusive style of governing.

As I half-forecast, this election looks like introducing a significant newcomer to Victorian politics: Legalise Cannabis Victoria. It’s the party formerly known as HEMP, but its rebranding and its decision to be part of a preference swap among left-wing parties could win it two seats in the Council, maybe more. It’s very significant that it’s got there with Labor preferences. Soon the joint could be jumping.

The Council aside, this election confirmed more than it changed. Andrews’s one-man rule and uncompromising way of handling the pandemic have been endorsed by the majority of Victorians, at the cost of alienating both those seriously inconvenienced or maddened by the repeated lockdowns, and increasingly, the minority of Victorians who dislike his government’s lack of transparency, lack of openness, centralisation of power and slide into heavy debt.

The transparency warriors were never going to win yesterday: they had no horse in the race. Their best hope now is that the smaller parties of the left — the Greens, but also Fiona Patten (if she gets back), the dope smokers and Animal Justice — might use their numbers in the Council to pressure Labor to raise the quality of Victorian democracy, as the governments of John Cain, Steve Bracks and John Brumby did.

This election was a triumph for the defenders. Labor has lost only four or five seats from the fifty-six that were nominally its seats after the redistribution. The Liberals were defending virtually nothing but marginal seats; yet they’ve lost only two for sure, and possibly two more. The Greens and Nationals had bumper swings in all their seats. Only the independents lost out.

The Liberals and Nationals never had a hope of winning the extra eighteen seats they needed to form government. Whatever their leaders said publicly, the best they could hope for was to win enough votes and seats to be in a position to make a realistic bid for power in 2026. And they failed.

Guy put the best spin on it he could last night, claiming his team had won a 4 per cent swing and got “more than halfway” to closing the gap. Not so. As Ben Raue of the Tally Room points out, the average swing was more like 2.5 per cent. The Coalition will have only half as many seats as Labor in the new Assembly, much the same as in Labor’s last term. The party’s new leader will start from no better a position than four years ago.

What went wrong? First, Labor had few marginal seats to defend: most of its seats had majorities of more than 10 per cent. Only ten Labor seats were held by margins of less than 5 per cent — and when you have a government willing to play Scott Morrison’s game of spending taxpayers’ money to win marginal seats, there is no advantage like incumbency.

On ABC TV last night, Antony Green pointed out the sharp difference between the zero swing (or at one stage, a swing to Labor) in seats southeast of the Yarra, where most of the marginal seats are, and the big swings against Labor in some seats in the more deprived Labor heartland, north and west of the river; but the Liberals were starting from too far back to win any of them.

Late counting in some seats moderated that difference. Late at night the Liberals reclaimed Kew and Caulfield, both of which seemed lost two hours earlier, took the lead in Hawthorn and Mornington, secured Polwarth, Croydon and Rowville, and got back in the contest in Hastings. Meanwhile across the river, Labor pulled away from the Greens in Northcote, Footscray and Pascoe Vale.

Some of the swings against Labor in the outer-northern and western suburbs were extraordinary. There was a swing of 14 per cent against energy minister Lily D’Ambrosio in Mill Park, 12.5 per cent in Yan Yean, 15 per cent in Greenvale, and 8 to 10 per cent in Broadmeadows, Sunbury and Sydenham. But the Liberals’ past vote in these areas was so low that it didn’t even come within 5 per cent of winning any of these seats.

The Liberals were not a problem for Labor in its rusted-on heartland. With one exception, nor were the independents. There were dozens of them in Labor’s safe seats, many making the case that their area had been neglected because it was a safe seat. But Labor’s campaign team identified what it saw as the three real threats — Melton, Point Cook and Werribee — and ensured that they were not forgotten in the campaign promises. After their strong showing in Melton and Werribee in 2018, the independents flopped badly there in 2022.

Here’s my scoop. The exception — completely overlooked in last night’s coverage — was Preston, and Gaetano Greco. A long-time Darebin councillor and Labor activist, Greco had the advantage of running in an area where the Liberals are weak and the Greens and (increasingly) Victorian Socialists have eroded Labor’s support. A plan to demolish most of the heritage Preston Market became the centrepiece of his campaign, along with a range of local issues that the state government was not tackling because Preston posed no political problem. So Greco resolved to make it one.

Apart from Labor and Greco, seven other candidates ran in Preston — and six of them (all but the Freedom Party) directed preferences to Greco. Labor’s Nathan Lambert (denounced by Greco as a candidate “parachuted in from Geelong”) has 38.3 per cent of the vote, and the rest are evenly divided: Liberals 16.5 per cent, Greens 14.8, Greco 14.2, Victorian Socialists 6.7, others preferencing Greco 6.6 and others preferencing Labor 2.9.

While some preferences always leak, it seems certain that Greco will overtake the Greens and the Liberals to make the final two with Labor. Who wins the seat will then depend on how many preferences leak to Lambert: on these figures, he needs about 25 per cent for Labor to hold the seat, which gives Greco a 50–50 chance, though the postal votes will favour Labor. Victoria’s electoral commission will have to carry out a new two-candidate count for the two of them.

Early in the night, the Greens looked like being the big story. The commission’s two-candidate counts showed them clearly ahead in Northcote and Richmond, and neck and neck with Labor in Albert Park, Footscray, Pascoe Vale and Preston. But as the prepoll votes were counted the Liberals pushed the Greens into third place in Albert Park, and Labor regained the lead in Northcote, and pulled ahead in the rest. Richmond will be the Greens’ only gain in the Legislative Assembly.

The final Greens first-preference vote statewide will end up much the same as the 10.7 per cent they polled in 2018. But that is largely because there was far more competition, with roughly three times as many micro-party candidates as in 2018. The Greens have increasingly cast themselves as an inner-suburban party, and in Melbourne they are expanding that territory. In 2026 they will be the sitting party or serious competitors in nine seats.

Apart from Greco, three teal independents were the only indies to come close to winning a seat. At the close of counting, Kate Lardner had 49.8 per cent of the two-candidate vote in Mornington, Melissa Lowe had 49.4 per cent in Hawthorn, and Sophie Torney 47 per cent in Kew. With postal votes favouring the Liberals, all of them are likely to lose, but it will be close.

Liberals trying to find something to celebrate last night were grateful for the likely return of leading moderate John Pesutto in Hawthorn and the arrival of Jess Wilson in Kew. Pesutto could be a candidate for the party leadership if and when Guy steps down.

The Liberals didn’t have much to celebrate elsewhere. To put themselves in a position to win in 2026, they needed to win back the eastern suburbs seats they lost last time, but Labor successfully defended Ashwood (formerly Burwood), Box Hill and Ringwood, and captured Glen Waverley and Bayswater (nominally Liberal after the redistribution). The outer-suburban seats of Pakenham and Yan Yean, both seen as Liberal chances, stayed with Labor.

Labor maintained its grip on Geelong’s four seats, as well as the two seats each in Ballarat and Bendigo. The Coalition’s one success in Victoria’s bigger regional centres came when the Nationals reclaimed Morwell, the centre of Victoria’s electricity industry, which is facing a dismal decade ahead with the gradual closure of all three coal-fired power stations. Andrews’s promise to revive the former State Electricity Commission as a renewable energy provider, while popular in Melbourne, brought no comfort to the Latrobe Valley.

In the Legislative Council, however, Labor looks set to lose a lot of ground. With 20 to 30 per cent of the vote counted, Labor was on track to lose three seats. That leaves it with only fifteen of the Council’s forty seats, which would make it uncomfortably dependent on support from the Greens or a collection of right-wing parties to get contested legislation through.

The biggest swings against Labor were again in the northern and western suburbs: 10 per cent in the Northern Metropolitan seat, 11 per cent in the west. But Labor lost ground everywhere, costing it seats in South-Eastern Metro, Northern Victoria and Western Metro.

It’s important to remember that these are early figures, and Victoria’s group voting system means small changes to the figures can cause quite different outcomes. As the numbers stand, though, three of those seats would go to left-wing parties who formed an alliance with Labor and the Greens to get their preferences first.

Legalise Cannabis Victoria is on track to win seats in Melbourne’s southeastern and western suburban regions, and is close in several others. Animal Justice, thanks to a deal negotiated when it was falsely pretending to be part of preference whisperer Glenn Druery’s alliance, stands to win a seat in Northern Victoria but has lost its leader, Andy Meddick, from Western Victoria.

Reason Party leader Fiona Patten is on track to narrowly hold her seat in Melbourne’s northern suburbs in a three-way contest with the Victorian Socialists and former Labor powerbroker Adem Somyurek, now running for the DLP.

The Greens vote lifted everywhere: on these figures, enough to give them upper house seats in Western Victoria, North-Eastern (formerly Eastern) Metropolitan and Southern Metropolitan, while its leader Samantha Ratnam comfortably held her seat in the northern suburbs. If that holds, those four seats will be their most important victory at this election.

The Druery group had a bad night. In 2018, Druery’s team won nine of the forty seats. Last night, they won two (or three, if you count the seat won by Animal Justice on preferences Druery arranged before the party betrayed him). The DLP won a seat in North-Eastern Metropolitan from fellow Druery group party Transport Matters, and could still end up with seats in Northern Metro, where Somyurek is standing, and Western Metro, where their candidate is controversial former Liberal MLC Bernie Finn.

On current figures, however, the Liberals would reclaim their second seat in the western suburbs by just pipping Finn at the post, while the Coalition would also gain seats in Northern Victoria and Western Victoria. One Nation would take a seat in Northern Victoria from the Druery group, whose only other success was in Eastern Victoria, where Shooters party leader Jeff Bourman is on track to retain his seat.

I suspect these figures will change before the counting is over, but for now, the numbers in the forty-member Council would be: Labor fifteen, Liberals and Nationals fourteen, Greens four and Legalise Cannabis two, with one seat each for Reason, Animal Justice, One Nation, the DLP and the Shooters.

Whatever the final numbers, Labor will be in a minority but will have to find a way to make it work. Might we even see the two main parties of the left in Victoria lift their game to forge a constructive working relationship as their counterparts have in the ACT? Pigs might fly.

Like him or loathe him, this election result was a personal triumph for Daniel Andrews. It was in many ways about him, and his way of governing. No Victorian premier in my lifetime has acquired such an avid, uncritical fan base, or so many opponents who detest him (although Jeff Kennett came close). His photo appeared not only on Labor’s how-to-vote cards but also on those of other parties wanting to inspire Victorians to vote against him. The result, Labor’s overwhelming victory, speaks for itself.

The pandemic was rarely mentioned in the election campaign, but you suspect that, somewhere in voters’ minds, it was a defining issue. If you approved of Andrews’s handling of the pandemic, you voted for him. If you didn’t, you voted against him. There were many parties against him, but the election results showed us they’re still small parties.

The risk is that his success will further boost what Labor MPs described to his biographer Sumeyya Ilanbey as his sense that he’s always the smartest guy in the room. In his first term in office, Andrews consulted and listened more. In his second term, we’re told, he regarded listening to critics or people with different views as a waste of time. Many are urging him to adopt a more inclusive style in his third term. That could be challenging.

He starts his third term facing many problems. The Covid pandemic is as deadly as ever: last week sixty-two Victorians were reported dead from the disease, half the national death toll. The state budget is out of control, and Josh Gordon and Chip Le Grand of the Age have shown how the numbers are being fudged to make it appear that all is well.

Those are problems for tomorrow. Today, Daniel Andrews and Labor are winners with cause to celebrate. •

The post For today, a triumph for Victorian Labor appeared first on Inside Story.

That’s not enough for the Murdochs’ Herald Sun, which has been whipping up its rusted-on older conservative readership with stories quoting fearful Labor insiders’ predictions of gloom: “Toxic Dan: ALP Fears Voters Are Turning against Andrews,” “Sign Dan Could Lose Mulgrave Seat in Shock Upset” and, today, “Dan Faces Minority Govt as Voters Turn against Labor.”

But I would take that less seriously than the polls. I’ve never heard an insider in the final week say, “We’re home. We’re going to win by a mile.” They are paid to worry. They always pretend it’ll be close. They did it in 2018, when Labor won twice as many seats as the Coalition.

By contrast, the polls tell us the contest is narrowing, but Labor remains well ahead and Daniel Andrews is still far more popular than Matthew Guy; and no poll has yet shown the Coalition remotely within reach of winning. The polls can be wrong — in 2018 they all understated the scale of Labor’s landslide — but my instinct is that this time they’re probably close.

On the average of the last five polls reported in the media, Labor’s vote is down from 43 per cent in 2018 to 37 per cent, the Coalition is unchanged on 35 per cent, the Greens have edged up from 11 to 13 per cent, and “others” — independents and micro-parties — have jumped from 11 to 15 per cent. (That’s partly because there are far more of them, almost three times as many micro-party candidates as in 2018, and mostly running to the right of the Liberals.)

In two-party terms, the average implies a swing to the Coalition of three percentage points or so, taking Labor from 57.5 per cent to 54.5 per cent. That would normally be a very safe lead — but this election is not just between two parties.

In this morning’s Herald Sun, former Labor assistant state secretary Kos Samaras, now director of the pollster Redbridge, forecast that Labor would lose six seats and is in danger in a dozen others. But only half of those are battles between Labor and the Coalition. On his reading, Labor is in danger of losing up to five seats to the Greens, and up to four seats to independents.

The punters half-agree. They don’t see many seats changing hands, but of the twenty-five electorates Sportsbet rated on Wednesday as the closest contests, three are Labor v. Green, four are independents v. Labor, five are independents v. Liberal, and two are independents v. National (including one that is shaping as independent v. National v. independent). Fewer than half are classic Labor v. Coalition contests. (I covered this last week.)

If Samaras is right, then Victorian Labor might lose its majority and have to learn how to share power in some form with the Greens or independents. Labor and the Greens have been doing that in the ACT for most of the last two decades, and it’s been quite harmonious. But Victorian Labor will also face the big unknown of a new Legislative Council.

Ah, the Legislative Council. Until the 1950s, it was a conservative bastion, elected by property owners to be a brake on hasty populist reforms. (It sure was: it took almost twenty years and nineteen private members’ bills before the Council agreed that women should have the right to vote.) It was a part-time chamber where gentlemen gathered in the evenings to debate the issues of the day. Most Victorian adults were excluded from the Council’s voting roll, and most MLCs were elected unopposed.

These days it’s so different. Since 2006 the chamber has been elected by proportional representation, with preferences decided not by voters but by backroom deals via group voting tickets, like the Senate elections of old. Even a decade ago, the Council’s only crossbenchers were three Greens. But at the 2014 election, “preference whisperer” Glenn Druery orchestrated the election of five crossbenchers from small parties — and in 2018 the forty MLCs elected included nine of Druery’s team plus a rebel breakaway, Fiona Patten.

There are eight regions with five members each. The quota for election is 16.7 per cent, yet those nine Druery members on average won just 3.4 per cent. Druery’s system works by getting ideologically diverse parties to direct preferences to each other, in effect pooling their votes — and then doing trade-offs with the major parties to get them to do the same. The preferences are arranged so that every party gets a seat or more — or at least, the chance of one.

His system works because Victorians have no control over their preferences unless they vote below the line — which last time only 9 per cent did. Voters below the line only have to number five boxes or more, far easier to comply with than the rules in the Legislative Assembly, where votes in seats like Point Cook and Werribee will be declared informal unless voters have numbered all fifteen boxes in order. Our ignorance and indifference let Druery and party bosses decide our preferences for us.

In 2018 this system led to many results seen as unjust. In Eastern Metropolitan, Greens MLC Samantha Dunn won 9 per cent of votes, yet lost her seat to taxi owner Rod Barton of Transport Matters, who won 0.6 per cent. In South-Eastern Metro, Liberal MLC Inga Peulich, with 12 per cent of the votes, lost her seat to Liberal Democrat David Limbrick with 0.8 per cent. And in Southern Metropolitan, Greens MLC Sue Pennicuik, with 12 per cent, was unseated by Sustainable Australia’s Clifford Hayes with 1.2 per cent.

In Western Australia, the last state apart from Victoria to tolerate this system, the McGowan Labor government has moved to abolish group voting tickets after the last election saw Daylight Saving Party candidate Wilson Tucker, then living in the United States, win a seat in the outback region with just ninety-eight votes. But the Andrews government has shown zero interest in electoral reform.

Why not? Because it sees this system as working in its favour — and at the 2018 election, Labor was effectively an associate member of Druery’s team. Its preferences were directed to Druery parties in six of the eight regions, and in four they helped elect parties as diverse as the Liberal Democrats, Derryn Hinch’s Justice Party, Animal Justice and Transport Matters.

The losers in 2018 were the Greens, who went from five seats to one, and the Coalition, down from sixteen seats to eleven. Its election landslide gave Labor eighteen of the forty seats, close to a majority, and it could recruit enough allies issue by issue to pass its bills. The Age reported last year that its most reliable supporters were Animal Justice MLC Andy Meddick and Fiona Patten, followed by Rod Barton, and the one Greens MLC who survived Druery’s rampage, Samantha Ratnam.

The other six MLCs elected on Druery’s tickets have all voted mostly against Labor. One is from Sustainable Australia, two from the Liberal Democrats, and originally three from Hinch’s squad, one of whom, former Maribyrnong mayor and army reservist Catherine Cumming, soon quit the party and is now running for the Angry Victorians. (She was the one who told a rally last weekend she wanted to turn Daniel Andrews into “red mist” — a politicised play on the army term “pink mist” for the spray of blood on the face of the victim of a shooting.)

For this election, the Druery team consists of just eight core parties: the DLP, Derryn Hinch’s Justice Party, the Health Australia Party, the Liberal Democrats, the New Democrats (a party founded by rebel Labor MLC Kaushaliya Vaghela), the Shooters, Sustainable Australia and Transport Matters. All but Health Australia have sitting members — in the DLP’s case, sacked Liberal ultraconservative Bernie Finn in Western Metropolitan and sacked Labor powerbroker Adem Somyurek in Northern Metropolitan — and their priority is to retain those seats.

On the fringes are four other parties. Angry Victorians and the new party calling itself Sack Dan Andrews Restore Democracy in the end stayed out of the group, but their group voting tickets largely reflect its priorities. Animal Justice is now a former member. And Labor remains an unofficial associate member, but more distant than in 2018.

In 2022, Team Druery’s prospects are not looking good. It faces unprecedented opposition from the left and right alike. The Liberals, Greens, One Nation and United Australia Party all effectively refused to deal with it. Four smaller left-wing parties organised their own version of Druery’s system, and got Labor and the Greens to direct their initial preferences their way in every region. And some parties it thought were on board refused to sign up.

The worst betrayal was by Animal Justice. Elected with Druery’s help in 2018, it pretended to be part of the team again, and was awarded the group’s preferences in two regions, Northern Victoria and Western Victoria. But it hid the fact that it had joined the new left-wing alliance, and is directing its preferences there. This became known only when its real group voting tickets were released.

The second betrayal was by Angry Victorians. It is giving Druery’s parties high preferences in all regions, and has been rewarded by the group giving it high preferences in Western Victoria, where its leader Chris Burson is standing. But it gave the Herald Sun a secretly filmed video of a long chat with Druery in which he boasted of his power to select MPs and told them his aim was to create a Council that Labor could work with. (He was talking to the wrong people on that one.)

Labor is still a Druery ally, but its preferences at this election are going first to the left-wing alliance. Their combined preferences should ensure that in Northern Metropolitan, Fiona Patten will either hold her seat or lose it to the Victorian Socialists. Animal Justice’s double dealing has probably wrapped up seats for it in Northern Victoria and Western Victoria. The Greens look set to win back their lost seat in Southern Metropolitan, and possibly several others. But in some seats, the left’s alliance has fractured.

There was a plan that, to maximise the left’s haul, Labor and the Greens would also preference each other. But something got in the way of that. Instead, Labor will direct its sixth preference to the Shooters in Eastern Victoria, to Transport Matters in North-Eastern Metro, and to Derryn Hinch in South-Eastern Metro — and, of course, its second preferences are going to Animal Justice in Northern Victoria and Western Victoria (where Hinch and the Shooters will also get Labor preferences before the Greens).

All of them are (or were) the primary candidates of the Druery group in those regions. Clearly, Labor is still part of the team.

Spurned, the Greens have directed preferences to Transport Matters ahead of Labor in every region, but realistically, that has no effect:  in North-Eastern Metro the two parties will be rivals, and Transport Matters will be quickly eliminated everywhere else.

What does Labor get from Team Druery in return? Well, the Shooters have taken the unusual step of giving Labor their second preferences in the marginal seat of Morwell, as well as in Narre Warren North. Hinch nominated candidates in some of the Assembly seats Druery claimed Labor was worried about, but after the betrayals, he appears not to have registered how-to-vote cards.

Then there is a curious deal in Northern Metropolitan. Three of Druery’s parties are giving their second preferences directly to Labor’s number three candidate, Susie Byers. Why? Well, if the votes go as they did in 2018, she would be the one competing for Fiona Patten’s seat. Druery has never forgiven Patten for deserting his team and telling the world that he charges candidates a success fee of $50,000. And Labor has never forgotten that it is their old seat that Patten occupies.

You could be forgiven for thinking that Labor and Druery are combining to try to unseat Patten, even if Labor is also directing its preferences to her. But that assumes the voting at this election will be something like 2018. It won’t.

In 2018, Labor won 39 per cent of votes for the Council. In May 2022, it won just 31 per cent of Victorians’ votes for the Senate. If its vote is like that on Saturday, it could lose up to six seats in the Council, maybe even more.

By contrast, votes for the Greens and the minor parties of the left (including Legalise Cannabis, formerly HEMP) jumped from 12 per cent to 20 per cent. They stand to gain the seats Labor loses. There is no certainty that it will find all of them as easy to deal with as Animal Justice and Reason.

In 2018, Team Druery consisted of thirteen parties and won 20 per cent of votes. In May 2022, only four of its current members contested the Senate election, and they won 5.6 per cent of the vote. Of the other four, only the DLP has any proven following, and it’s pretty small these days.

Outside both groups are the other right-wing parties. One Nation and the United Australia Party are continuing their alliance, which helped the UAP win Victoria’s final Senate seat from the Liberals. But in contrast to the federal election, they have been inconspicuous in this campaign. Palmer’s party stands to get preferences from the Liberals in most regions, but with few others coming its way, it’s hard to see it being a strong contender. One Nation has a chance of winning a seat in Eastern Victoria, but generally its Victorian base is limited to the country.

The new Freedom Party has a preference deal with Family First, and a more limited one with One Nation, but by and large the minor parties of the right look uncoordinated compared with the tight preference deals of the left and the Druery group. It’s surprising that most of them appear to have no preference swaps at all with the Druery camp — whose largest members are the Shooters, the Liberal Democrats, the DLP and the Hinch party. I suspect they will win few if any seats.

But it’s really anyone’s guess who will win the final seats in each region. One dark horse: at the Senate election, the biggest small party on the left was Legalise Cannabis (formerly HEMP). It won 3 per cent of the Victorian vote, outpolling One Nation. It’s got its share of preferences coming. It’s got a pretty simple policy. A lot of people agree with it. For those who hate all politics and politicians, it could be an attractive alternative.

As you can probably tell, I have no idea who will control the new Council. We will find out very late on Saturday night. Those with a keen interest in the outcome can try out their tipping skills on Antony Green’s election calculator, but it’s more useful after the event.

There has been a buzz this week in the betting markets, picking up on the fears of Labor insiders. Even so, the Coalition’s odds of forming a government have shortened only from 10/1 to 5/1: giving it at best one chance in five of victory, and four chances in five of another term in opposition.

For what it’s worth, the punters see just five seats clearly changing hands. Labor is tipped to lose Richmond and Northcote to the Greens, Nepean to the Liberals, and Hawthorn to either the Liberals or teal independent Melissa Lowe. The Liberals in turn are tipped to lose Kew to teal independent Sophie Torney.

A lot of seats are seen as being on a knife edge: Bayswater, Glen Waverley, Morwell, Pakenham and Ripon between Labor and the Coalition, Melton between Labor and independent Dr Ian Birchall, Benambra between the Liberals and independent Jacqui Hawkins, and Caulfield between Liberal, Labor and another teal independent, Nomi Kaltmann. The Coalition would have to do a lot better than that to pose any threat.

But the punters can get things just as wrong as the pundits. In 2018, as now, they tipped just five seats to change hands. Yet only one of those five did, whereas twelve seats they hadn’t tipped to change hands did so.

To lose its majority this time, Labor would need to lose twelve of the fifty-six seats it has on Antony Green’s pendulum. To win a majority, the Liberals and Nationals would need to win eighteen seats on top of their current twenty-seven. Both sound improbable, but stranger things have happened. •

The post Will Labor need to share power in Victoria? appeared first on Inside Story.

Yet Andrews’s years in power — and especially his record-breaking pandemic lockdown — has divided the state more bitterly than those of any premier since Kennett. He’s a typical political strongman: quick to decide what he wants to do, determined to carry it out, and contemptuous of anyone who gets in his way. In the homeland of Aussie Rules, he’s the standout resourceful tough guy who bursts through the pack to deliver what his fans want from him.

In his first term, the fans liked seeing him deliver the transport infrastructure Melbourne had been deprived of for so long — particularly when he got rid of all those level crossings that stopped traffic whenever a train came through. In his second, they admired him as the strong leader whose readiness to take tough decisions kept them safe during the pandemic.

But many other Victorians hate him, with a passion not seen since Kennett ruled the roost. Daniel Andrews oozes arrogance. He can’t take criticism, and contemptuously dismisses or ignores adverse reports or anyone disagreeing with him. Many of those tough decisions he made during the pandemic were foolish, even harmful ones — such as banning children from playgrounds, closing schools, or locking up thousands of residents in public housing towers without warning.

Whatever you think of his policies, he is darn good at politics. The polls put him way ahead of Liberal leader Matthew Guy as preferred premier, and a third four-year term — which he says he intends to serve out in full — seems a formality. The most recent published polls were taken in September, but even the closest found Labor ahead by a whopping 56–44 majority in two-party terms. A month-old Morgan poll released last week put the gap at 60.5–39.5.

Yet, for a leader so dominant, he is not well understood. After eight years as premier, we at last have a biography of him: albeit one he did not cooperate with and, since he hates being criticised, by an author he definitely would not have chosen.

Sumeyya Ilanbey is a trailblazer, the first Victorian political reporter in a hijab, and one of an outstanding group of journalists now covering state politics for the Age. Her account of the premier, Daniel Andrews: The Revealing Biography of Australia’s Most Powerful Premier, doesn’t let you down: it really is an inside story. Andrews refused to be interviewed but Ilanbey talked to many of his colleagues, past and present, and collected a lot of revealing stories and perspectives, even if most of them are passed on unsourced.

She pulls no punches. Daniel Andrews emerges from the book as a highly successful, hard-working, utterly determined, socially progressive despot — with little respect for people who get in his way or for the democratic infrastructure in which he has to operate.

Andrews, we learn, is a boy from the bush who developed a relentless work ethic and a talent for political infighting, which took him from stacking Labor Party branches in his youth to becoming premier at forty-two, and dominating state politics in a ruthless autocratic style unlike any Labor predecessor.

So far it hasn’t hurt him. Yet Victoria is used to premiers being nice blokes — Dick Hamer, Lindsay Thompson, John Cain, Steve Bracks, John Brumby, Ted Baillieu, Denis Napthine — or once, a nice woman, Joan Kirner. Andrews clearly doesn’t fit in either group. From Ilanbey’s portrait, he belongs squarely in Victoria’s minority of authoritarian leaders: Henry Bolte, Kennett, and himself.

All three have been lucky to rule against weak opposition. The Bolte government ran Victoria for seventeen years, but Bolte was realistic enough to tell his last biographer, Tom Prior, “I don’t think I ever won an election. Labor lost them.” Kennett and the Murdoch media left Labor winded for years by getting Victorians to blame the 1990s recession on the Cain–Kirner government when it was clearly the result of an awful policy overkill by treasurer Paul Keating and the Reserve Bank.

Ilanbey’s focus is naturally on explaining Daniel Andrews, and she does it very well, highlighting the diverse and contrasting aspects of his personality: he presents himself as the daggy dad who likes nothing better than relaxing at home with his wife and kids, yet is nonetheless a workaholic control freak. But it’s also important to note how much the poor quality of his opposition (including Murdoch’s Herald Sun) has contributed to his success.

Since 1996, Victorians have voted in fifteen federal or state elections, and have preferred the Liberals in just one of them. Why? The party has been controlled by ultraconservatives who have used that control to narrow the broad church Menzies created to a small congregation of what seem like cranks and fogeys who react against anything more modern than the world they grew up in. Victorians have moved into the 2020s, but the Victorian Liberals stay put, digging deeper trenches and waiting for the voters to come back to them. It could be a long wait.

Their one win was at the 2010 state election, after a succession of mistakes by the Brumby government allowed the lofty small-l liberal Ted Baillieu to break through on a platform of integrity in government. But his government floundered among sabotage from within; Baillieu quit and Denis Napthine took over; and that instability helped Andrews to lead Labor back into power in 2014. Since then the Liberals have obliged him by stepping up factional warfare and, with their Murdoch partner, running crude, simplistic campaigns that appeal to their narrowing base more than the mainstream. Andrews has had a dream run.

Daniel Andrews grew up as a bright boy in a working-class family that experienced a ghastly bit of bad luck and responded by moving to the country and working long hours to get back on top. It’s fair to assume that some of his hyperdetermination and mania for control comes from that upbringing.

Like so many male politicians, Daniel was a firstborn son (that probably explains a bit too). He was born on 6 July 1972 in Melbourne, where his parents, Bob and Jan Andrews, owned and ran a milk bar on Pascoe Vale Road. One night when Daniel was ten, an arsonist blew up the supermarket next door, taking out the Andrews’s shop with it. It was underinsured, and they were suddenly left with next to nothing.

The family made a fresh start by moving to Wangaratta, where his parents bought a house on a two-hectare block on the outskirts of town. Bob began rising at 4am every day to deliver Don smallgoods throughout the region, while Jan got the kids off to school before going to work as a teller at the Commonwealth Bank. They were churchgoing Catholics, and Daniel was schooled in the faith: mass every Sunday, school under the Marist Brothers at Galen College.

His parents’ influence perhaps deserves more attention than it gets in Ilanbey’s story. Bob Andrews was clearly a man of ability and determination. As his business grew, he took on employees, became president of the footy club, and bought “Old Kentucky,” a nearby beef cattle stud around a century-old four-bedroom country home with wide verandas. One night at a meeting of the local Victorian Farmers Federation branch, the Labor leader’s dad stunned his mates by confiding, “I’ve always voted for the National Party.”

His son Daniel inherited Bob’s determination to achieve things. “Dan’s life started just out of Wangaratta on the family farm,” his website tells us. “His mum and dad — Jan and Bob — taught him life lessons that stay with him today: hard work, the importance of making a contribution, and that when you make a promise, you keep it.”

But Daniel didn’t inherit his father’s politics. School done, he headed to Monash to study arts — living at Mannix College like a good Catholic son, but joining the Labor Party, where he became deeply involved in the Young Socialist Left. His organising talents caught the attention of local left MP Alan Griffin, who took him on as a casual electorate officer.

Ilanbey tells us that Andrews developed quickly as a factional warrior: “He became known as Alan Griffin’s ‘numbers man,’ the main go-to guy for the Socialist Left’s branch-stacking operation in the south-eastern suburbs, a meticulous and detailed young operative whom Griffin trusted wholeheartedly.” Apart from student jobs selling hotdogs and driving trucks, it was his first real job.

His career since has been entirely inside Labor. At twenty-three, branch stacker in an electorate office. At twenty-six, assistant state secretary. At thirty, the new MP for Mulgrave and assistant minister for health. At thirty-four, gaming, consumer affairs and multicultural affairs minister. At thirty-five, health minister. At thirty-eight, Labor leader and opposition leader. At forty-two, premier. He is now fifty.

From a young age, he clearly stood out from the pack in the eyes of those who mattered. We can debate whether he’s a good premier, but he’s certainly a highly successful one. Other than having weak opposition, what makes him such a hit with Victorian voters?

Ilanbey keeps coming back to his punishing work ethic, his political instincts that anticipate so well how developments will play out, his readiness to back his judgement and take a risk — although he can be extraordinarily stubborn about backing down when he gets it wrong — and the systematic way he analyses the game. He is capable of being warm and supportive to colleagues in trouble, but it doesn’t happen very often. They are more likely to find themselves in trouble with him, and being cast into “the freezer” — a state of being coldly and completely ignored — from which some never escape.

Political biographies sometimes market themselves through their scoops. But Sumeyya Ilanbey’s real scoop in this biography is her compilation of a devastating dossier on how Daniel Andrews treats those who “disappoint” him — particularly, as several colleagues told her, if they are close to him. He cannot take criticism. Once he has made a decision, he cannot tolerate disagreement with it. That inability to listen probably explains why his second term has seen so many bad decisions.

One telling example. Gavin Jennings was an older leftie, and already a minister, when Andrews entered parliament. Ilanbey describes him as “Andrews’s closest confidant in government… to whom he would turn to fix his problems and sort out his political headaches”:

Labor MPs often described Jennings as Andrews’s conscience, and as one who would do the premier’s dirty political work… It was Jennings who would talk to colleagues on behalf of the premier; it was Jennings who was asked to fix any political mess the premier found himself in.

But as Andrews grew into his leadership, he began to grow tired of Jennings, who saw his role as playing devil’s advocate, questioning policies and the government’s intentions. Andrews did not like this, and came to view Jennings as an agitator and a hindrance to his agenda. Where Jennings saw his role as improving a policy by focusing on its deficiencies, Andrews saw it as a nuisance. The relationship was slowly becoming toxic.

According to multiple sources, [Jennings] started questioning Andrews on the billions being poured into the government’s mammoth transport infrastructure agenda. Andrews’s once-close relationship with his mentor had disintegrated.

Many in the Labor Party point to the deterioration of Jennings and Andrews’s friendship as evidence of the premier’s crash and burn style; and of his contempt [for] those around him. If that friendship broke down, they said, what hope is there for the rest of us?

In March 2020, as Covid-19 broke out across Melbourne, Jennings quietly quit politics. Andrews seized the opportunity to announce that to handle the crisis better, he would create a crisis council of cabinet, comprising himself and eight senior ministers, as a top-level executive body.

A few months later he sacked one of them, health minister Jenny Mikakos, making her the scapegoat for Covid getting into the community from quarantine hotels. That December the widely respected attorney-general Jill Hennessy quit cabinet to “spend more time with her family.” In June this year, deputy premier James Merlino, health minister Martin Foley, police minister Lisa Neville, industry minister Martin Pakula and planning minister Richard Wynne all announced that they too would quit politics at this election.

That’s some turnover. The only members left from the nine-member Covid crisis council are Andrews himself, his new deputy and heir apparent (but not anytime soon) Jacinta Allan, and veteran treasurer Tim Pallas.

The upheaval could be seen as recognition of the need to bring fresh blood into the senior portfolios — after all, most of those retiring had been ministers for twelve years. Or it could be seen as a sign that the Andrews cabinet is not the happiest place to work. In eight years, sixteen of the twenty-two members of his original ministry have either quit or been sacked.

Throughout the Victorian bureaucracy, it has been a similar story. Political loyalty — to Andrews — seems to be a prerequisite for running a department or agency. After the revelation that thirty-three Victorians in the last year died after their calls to triple-zero went unanswered, the Age reported that the former chairman of the service, Roger Leeming, warned ministers and officials back in 2016 that it was critically underfunded, and was rewarded by being told to quit. Two former Labor staffers were then appointed to the board.

These things have serious consequences. Before the pandemic, the government received repeated warnings from below that Victoria’s public health services were severely underresourced. The advice was unwelcome, so it was ignored — until Covid arrived, when it was too late. The ineptness of Victoria’s pandemic response reflected the reality that it didn’t have experts trained to handle it.

Andrews’s response was to double down on a futile crusade to eliminate Covid. His government imposed the most severe lockdowns in Australia, and the longest ones. Mildura and Mallacoota, more than 500 kilometres from the capital, were locked down because there were Covid cases in Melbourne. Schools were closed and the premier closed his ears to expert advice on what having no school would mean for the mental health and educational development of children.

One could go on, but Chip Le Grand’s book Lockdown and a fine report published last week by the Paul Ramsay Foundation say it better than I could. The bottom line is clear. So far, 877 of every million Victorians have died of Covid, as against a toll of 506 deaths per million in the rest of Australia. Victoria’s death rate has been 73 per cent higher than in the other states. It is ludicrous to argue that Andrews’s hard line kept Victorians safe.

The Andrews who emerges from Ilanbey’s book is a complex man, with real achievements to offset those failures. His first term was more impressive than the second. The government doubled investment in Melbourne’s transport infrastructure, wisely focusing on removing the level crossings that caused daily traffic jams in most suburbs of Melbourne, but also pushing ahead with a short but expensive underground line (Metro 1) from North Melbourne through the city to South Yarra.

Andrews stayed in the background but lent his support as Jill Hennessy and Gavin Jennings shepherded Australia’s first assisted dying legislation through parliament. A pioneering royal commission was held into domestic violence — albeit one that focused on looking after its victims rather than stopping it from happening. He and his government were rewarded with an electoral landslide in 2018, one of Labor’s three best in Victoria.

The second term has been less impressive. Covid saw two years of grossly excessive restrictions followed by a year of “let it rip”: in both stages, Victoria’s death toll was the worst in Australia. An official inquiry by former justice Jennifer Coate into how Covid escaped from quarantine hotels was derailed by dissembling — or worse — by the premier and senior officials, who all seemed unable to remember who had decided to put private security firms in charge.

Now we have the so-called Suburban Rail Loop: in reality a twenty-seven-kilometre underground line in an arc between Cheltenham in the south and Box Hill in the east. Tunnels are very expensive, and the government estimates that this one will cost more than $30 billion — an amount that, even with an ill-advised $2.2 billion donation from us taxpayers via the Albanese government, will use up funds that would otherwise have built better projects like the Metro 2 line to Fishermans Bend.

The project stinks of the worst kind of political cynicism. There is no demand for it. The idea did not come from rail experts but from Andrews’s political staff. The line would run almost entirely through marginal Labor seats. The government committed without submitting the plan to Infrastructure Victoria, supposedly its adviser on infrastructure priorities, and without waiting for a business plan. When the latter finally appeared, it claimed the project would have a positive benefit–cost ratio — but it got that figure only by breaking the Victorian Treasury’s rules for such analysis. The auditor-general has since found that applying those rules, it is likely to cost Victorians twice as much as the benefit they get from it.

With scores of examples, Ilanbey shows us a leader whose decision-making has become warped by a self-indulgent culture of cronyism, surrounding himself with yes-men and yes-women, making snap decisions and ignoring warnings about their consequences. She depicts Andrews as a narcissist who thinks he’s the smartest man in the room and ignores any questioning of his decisions. He decides issues on political grounds and treats their merits as secondary. His decision made, to question its logic is to challenge his authority. It’s then a matter of who’s running the state.

The long-term consequences for Victoria could be serious. The Labor governments of Steve Bracks and John Brumby (1999–2010) were fiscally cautious to a fault. So was Andrews at first, but he quickly warmed up. In the past five years, Victoria has gone from repaying debt to running up $29 billion a year of net new borrowing. The state has lost its AAA credit rating and the Liberals are right when they warn that within four years, on current projections, Victoria’s net debt will exceed that of New South Wales, Queensland and Tasmania combined.

Crossing the entrance hall of Victoria’s lovely old Parliament House, you pass a mosaic with a line from the Book of Proverbs: “Where no counsel is, the people fall: but in the multitude of counsellors there is safety.”

That beautiful, poetically worded Jewish folk wisdom still resonates. But that’s not how Victoria’s government now operates. Rather, its people have one counsellor with a multitude of staffers.

It can’t have been easy to write a book like this about someone so powerful and hostile to criticism. Sumeyya Ilanbey has been courageous, persistent and thorough in interviewing so many of Andrews’s colleagues, asking the tough questions and collating their answers into this coherent, convincing, fair-minded but always hard-headed account of what drives him and how he runs Victoria. This book justifies her sources’ trust in her. She deserves our thanks. •

Daniel Andrews: The Revealing Biography of Australia’s Most Powerful Premier
By Sumeyya Ilanbey | Allen & Unwin | $32.99 | 312 pages

The post What drives Daniel Andrews? appeared first on Inside Story.

In the event, the swing to Labor was less than 3 per cent. Labor had been wrong-footed by Malcolm Fraser’s announcement of a national wage freeze. Its candidate was unimpressive. But inevitably the blame fell primarily on Hayden.

It was Labor’s third successive election loss, and a new mood of pessimism descended on the party. Frantic behind-the-scenes activity culminated in senator John Button, an astute and respected Labor figure who had been a close ally of the opposition leader, writing to Hayden on 28 January 1983 after unsuccessfully trying to persuade him to make a peaceful transition to Hawke.

Button’s letter summed up the mood of senior figures in the party. “You said to me that you could not stand down for a ‘bastard’ like Bob Hawke,” he wrote. “In my experience in the Labor Party the fact that someone is a bastard (of one kind or another) has never been a disqualification for leadership of the party. It is a disability from which we all suffer in various degrees… I must say that even some of Bob’s closest supporters have doubts about his capacities to lead the party successfully, in that they do not share his own estimate of his ability. The Labor Party is, however, desperate to win the coming election.”

Six days later came one of the most extraordinary events in Australian political history. On 3 February, Fraser, hoping to maintain the momentum generated by the Flinders by-election and fearful that Labor could change leaders, asked governor-general Sir Ninian Stephen for an early election. At the very same time, but without being aware of Fraser’s decision, Hayden announced his resignation to a meeting of shadow cabinet.

Hayden had been convinced by Button’s letter, which he called “brutal but fair.” Nevertheless, it was a wrenching decision. “I am not convinced that the Labor Party would not win under my leadership,” he told the media. “I believe that a drover’s dog could lead the Labor Party to victory the way the country is and the way the opinion polls are showing up for the Labor Party.”

Fraser had been outmanoeuvred. When he went to Government House, he was expecting to fight an election against Hayden. When the governor-general granted him the election, his opponent was Bob Hawke, although still to be formally endorsed by the Labor caucus five days later.

With the economy in recession, a government in its third term and the public popularity Hawke had developed over the years, only a disciplined Labor campaign was needed to ensure victory. That was not quite the foregone conclusion it seemed in retrospect, particularly after Hawke reacted angrily to a question from the ABC’s Richard Carleton about whether he had blood on his hands over Hayden’s demise. If voters had a concern about Hawke, it related to whether he had the right temperament to be prime minister. Carleton’s question touched a raw nerve in Hawke: political assassinations are never gentle affairs, however much he might have pretended.

But he was a model of statesmanship and responsibility for the rest of the campaign. He exploited the recession and condemned what he argued was Fraser’s divisive approach to government. He adopted Hayden’s campaign themes of national recovery and reconstruction and added his own “r” — reconciliation.

As well, Labor promised a big spending program, tax cuts and petrol price reductions to tackle the recession. Fraser tried a scare campaign against Labor’s “mad and extravagant promises,” saying people’s savings would be safer under their beds than in the bank. Hawke responded with a clever quip harking back to the “reds under the beds” bogy that the Liberals had used against Labor in earlier times: “They can’t put them under the bed because that’s where the Commies are!”

On 5 March 1983, at the age of fifty-three, after decades of frustration and a period of self-doubt, Hawke became prime minister. Labor’s win was convincing: the two-party swing of 3.6 per cent came on top of the 4.2 per cent it had achieved under Hayden in 1980, resulting in a final Labor vote of 53.2 per cent — the highest support it has ever received in a federal election.

The vote gave the new government a majority of twenty-five in the 125-member House of Representatives, compared with the Whitlam government’s nine-seat majority in 1972. It was all the more impressive considering that Labor had suffered a devastating loss in 1975 and some had questioned not only its legitimacy as a governing party but its very survival.

The day after the election, Treasury secretary John Stone came to see Hawke and the new treasurer, Paul Keating, with a reality check: the projected budget deficit for 1983–84 was $9.6 billion. Adding Labor’s election promises could take the figure up to $12 billion — the highest since the second world war. Hawke had received an inkling of the deficit figure before the election, leading him to qualify his election promises. It was the signal that the economy would come ahead of election promises and that pragmatism was the priority.

In truth, the $9.6 billion figure was not a measure of anything tangible but a projection that Treasury typically calculated on pessimistic assumptions. But it was the excuse Hawke and Keating used to abandon most of their promises on spending and tax cuts. And it was the political weapon that they used relentlessly to attack the Fraser government’s economic legacy.

From the very beginning, Hawke was intent on laying the foundations for something that had eluded federal Labor for all its history — long-term government — and with it the opportunity to entrench Labor policies, and even, in his fondest hopes, to become the party of natural government.

Resentment lingered within the party over how the Coalition had never accepted Labor’s legitimacy after Gough Whitlam had returned it to power in 1972. That attitude led to breaches of convention such as the Coalition parties’ blocking of the budget and culminated in the sacking of Gough Whitlam by governor-general John Kerr. But there also was a recognition of the failings of Whitlam’s government.

This is why Hawke drew an immediate and deliberate contrast with his Labor predecessor. In his victory speech on election night he promised not excitement or a great wave of reform but “calmness and a sense of assuredness.” It did not sound like a revolution, socialist or otherwise, and that was precisely Hawke’s intention. Determined not to allow a repeat of the indiscipline of the Whitlam government, his first focus was process — the orderly management of government.

Under Whitlam, all ministers were members of cabinet, meaning decision-making was unwieldy and sometimes resulted in those who lost in cabinet appealing to caucus to reverse the decision. Instead, Hawke created a cabinet of thirteen from the ministry of twenty-seven elected by caucus. Ministers, including those from the outer ministry who participated in cabinet discussions in their area of responsibility, were required to support cabinet’s decisions in caucus. In a strictly formal sense, the supremacy of the Labor caucus in decision-making was preserved but in practice it was greatly weakened.

A second contrast was on foreign policy. Where Whitlam was intent on carving out a more independent foreign policy, sometimes at the cost of criticism from the United States, Hawke went out of his way to build good relations with president Ronald Reagan and secretary of state George Shultz, despite their conservative credentials. The Americans trusted Hawke and that was a political asset in Australia.

Third, Hawke drew a sharp distinction with the Whitlam government on economic policy. Whitlam had shown little interest in economics and it became one of his government’s biggest liabilities.

In many areas, Hawke left the running to his ministers, avoiding delving into the detail of policies unless there was a pressing political need to do so. But economic policy and foreign affairs were exceptions. He had studied economics at university, prepared national wage cases for the Australian Council of Trade Unions, served on the Reserve Bank board for seven years as ACTU president, and been a member of a committee of inquiry into the manufacturing industry, headed by Gordon Jackson, the head of CSR.

Within a month of coming to government, Hawke presided over a national economic summit that brought together leaders in federal and state governments, business, unions, and welfare and community groups. The epitome of Hawke’s consensus approach, it attracted scepticism, including by some within the new government. The opposition portrayed consensus as compromise when what was required was bold decision-making, and characterised the Hawke approach as corporatism — those in positions of power stitching up the game for themselves.

Significantly, the summit was held before the resumption of parliament and the venue was the House of Representatives chamber. The symbolism was clear: Hawke, no fan of parliament, was substituting the quest for agreement for the parliamentary clash that emphasised differences.

Hawke confronted the summit with “the gravest economic crisis in fifty years” and laid out his remedies: a budget with a deficit of $8.5 billion and the Accord between the government and the ACTU. The Accord was a distinctive feature of Labor’s economic policy, designed to subordinate wage increases to the overall demands of economic policy — in other words, to ensure that the kind of wage explosions that had occurred under both the Whitlam and Fraser governments, and for which Hawke carried some responsibility as leader of the trade union movement, would not be repeated. It traded off part of the wage increases that strong unions could achieve and that tended to flow on to the rest of the workforce under a centralised industrial system for the so-called social wage. This included universal health insurance under Medicare, more generous and targeted welfare benefits, and compulsory superannuation.

The government’s economic policy won endorsement from everyone present at the summit, with the sole exception of Queensland National Party premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen. The summit was also a success when it came to public opinion: voters liked the idea of community leaders agreeing on what was best for the country rather than playing politics. In reality, there was plenty of politics involved; it was just that it was being played more subtly than usual. Within months of coming to government, Hawke’s approval rating had shot up to 70 per cent.

The new government had luck on its side. The drought broke, bolstering the economic recovery already under way. Hawke was blessed with an exceptionally strong team of ministers, including Keating as treasurer, Gareth Evans as attorney-general, Hayden as foreign minister, Button as industry minister and Neal Blewett as health minister. Others who made their mark later were Peter Walsh in finance, Kim Beazley in defence, John Dawkins in education and Brian Howe in social security. In cabinet, Hawke was a skilled chairman, letting ministers have their say and striving for consensus. His own working style was methodical and diligent.

Three days after the election, the government had accepted Reserve Bank advice and devalued the dollar by 10 per cent, thought to be large enough to stop the damaging speculation in the currency. But almost immediately the dollar came under more pressure, as did the system under which officials set its value.

In the first week of December, the Reserve Bank spent $1.4 billion on buying foreign exchange to counter the overseas money flooding into the country. The Reserve Bank was advocating a free float of the dollar, as was Hawke’s senior economic adviser Ross Garnaut. But Stone, the formidable Treasury secretary, resisted, concerned about losing control of an instrument of economic policy and fearful that the Australian economy would be at the whim of international speculators. When Hawke concluded the lengthy internal debate by saying the dollar would be floated, Stone told him, “Prime Minister, you’ll regret this; you’ll come to see this as a terrible decision.”

The float became the Hawke government’s most significant economic decision, exposing the economy to the full force of international competition. It was a step that had ramifications for most other aspects of economic policy. No longer could the exchange rate be used to cushion against inflation that was higher than overseas or to protect inefficient industries.

Further steps towards financial deregulation removed the ceiling on interest rates and allowed foreign banks into Australia as a means of increasing competition. The latter was a controversial decision inside the Labor Party, but Keating sold it with the same zeal and political skill that he had used to oppose it when John Howard as treasurer had proposed it under the Fraser government.

The float and further financial deregulation triggered a wild ride during the 1980s, with the dollar crashing in value, a boom in credit, skyrocketing interest rates and big corporate failures culminating in a severe recession. Bob Johnston, the Reserve Bank governor at the time, subsequently told the author Paul Kelly, “It’s just as well they did not foresee all the consequences, otherwise we might not have got the change.”

For a Labor government, deregulation was a particularly bold decision, although one driven by circumstances, given the rapid growth of international currency markets trading in huge amounts of money. In opposition, Labor had opposed the Fraser government’s first moves towards financial deregulation. Effectively subjecting economic policy to the whims of the free market was the very antithesis of Labor dogma. Many on the left of the party accused the government of selling out, seeing its actions as justifying the resistance they had shown to Hawke’s becoming leader.

It is easily forgotten how vehement these complaints were. In the early years of the government, Labor’s national Left, a broader grouping than the parliamentary party but with caucus members playing a prominent part, periodically held news conferences to criticise government decisions, particularly on economic policy. Stewart West, the only left-wing member of the first Hawke cabinet, resigned after eight months because he could not support a cabinet decision on uranium mining. Brian Howe, a left-wing minister outside cabinet in the first term, accused the government on one occasion of having a “deficit fetish” and on another of policies that he compared to a mule — like the animal that cannot reproduce, they had no future.

The Left also took its grievances to Labor’s national conferences which, in theory, were the supreme decision-making bodies of the party. The debates were robust and the votes close, with the government relying on the Right and Centre-Left factions carrying the day.

But Hawke and Keating were dominant in cabinet and were strongly backed on economic decisions by employment minister Ralph Willis and by finance minister Dawkins and the fellow Western Australian who succeeded him, Peter Walsh. This meant their authority was rarely challenged successfully by the full ministry or caucus, even though caucus had the final say on decisions. On one occasion after an economic policy announcement following a meeting of the full ministry, science minister Barry Jones asked communications minister Michael Duffy, “How did that happen?” “It’s purely a matter of numbers,” Duffy replied. “There’s four of them and only twenty-three of us.”

The government had another advantage: on the hardest economic decisions, such as the float, financial deregulation more broadly and, in subsequent years, tariff cuts, privatisation and labour market deregulation, it had the support of the opposition, and particularly John Howard, first as shadow treasurer and from 1985 as leader. All these Labor decisions were in line with the philosophy of the Liberal Party, or at least that of its conservative wing led by Howard, who had tried unsuccessfully to persuade the Fraser government to adopt some of the same measures.

The way for these decisions was smoothed by one of Hawke’s underrated achievements: the skill he brought to decision-making, particularly on contentious issues. He would come to cabinet meetings well briefed but would first listen patiently to his ministers, making them feel their contributions were valued. Then he would sum up the debate and conjure up a solution to what sometimes seemed intractable issues — one that satisfied most of the concerns or, if not, that his colleagues felt they could live with.

Enjoying an extended honeymoon in the opinion polls and wanting to avoid separate elections for the House and Senate, Hawke decided to go to the people in December 1984, only twenty-one months after the 1983 victory. Labor strategists were counting on a repeat of Neville Wran’s success for Labor as NSW premier, when he followed up his narrow victory in 1976 with “Wranslides” in 1978 and 1981, setting the party up for long-term government.

But Hawke was overconfident. He opted for an unusually long campaign of seven-and-a-half weeks in the expectation that he could destroy his opponent, Andrew Peacock. Instead, he gave the Liberal leader a platform as alternative prime minister. As well, Hawke campaigned poorly. He broke down in tears at a news conference over the heroin addiction of his daughter. Wracked with guilt over the neglect of his parental duties, “I was within minutes of resigning from office at that time,” he said later.

Peacock proved to be an effective campaigner, hammering away day after day to get a plain message across to voters: that, “as certain as night follows day,” a re-elected government would bring in new taxes. Peacock based his claim on reforms introduced in Labor’s first term — an assets test on the age pension and a 30 per cent tax on lump sum superannuation, both of which he promised a Liberal government would repeal.

Labor’s defence was muddied by Hawke’s off-the-cuff commitment during a radio interview to hold a tax summit after the election. It meant Labor could deflect questions about the specifics of tax changes until after the election, but at the same time it added ammunition to the Liberals’ scare campaign. But Hawke emphasised another commitment: that under a second-term Labor government there would be no overall increase in taxation as a proportion of national income, and the same would apply to government expenditure and the budget deficit.

This “trilogy” became a means of enforcing harsh discipline in future budgets. But in the election campaign voters were more inclined to believe their taxes would be going up than that Labor would keep its promise.

Not for the first time, the result of the 1984 election defied predictions of a thumping victory for Labor. Instead of a swing to Labor, the opposition gained 1.46 percentage points after preferences, cutting Labor’s majority from twenty-five seats to sixteen. With 51.8 per cent of the vote after preferences, it was a solid win for Labor but, given expectations of a landslide, it was the Liberals who were celebrating — except for Howard, who had expected to become opposition leader after the election loss. As for Hawke, the political messiah had been reduced to a mere mortal. •

This is an edited extract from Bob Hawke by Mike Steketee, part of the Australian Biographical Monographs series published by Connor Court.

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It was a success according to its intentions. But that won’t take us very far. Its directors managed to evade almost completely an issue that is crucial to how Australia is to tackle the many, deep social problems spelt out by speakers on the floor of the Great Hall of Parliament House. I’ll come to that shortly.

The summit was intended to show Australians that our political climate has changed with the new government — and it did. The participants, speakers and moderators were mostly female. There was an abundant sprinkling of young faces, of non-white faces, of foreign accents. It looked and sounded like Australia.

The vibe was overwhelmingly positive. Political differences were set aside (except by the absent Peter Dutton). Everyone was given a chance to speak at some point, and most were worth listening to. Their contributions were mainly constructive.

The PM was his avuncular self, the friendly, trustworthy Uncle Albo, heir to the good Labor leaders of long ago. He urged the summit: “We have not gathered here to dig deeper trenches on the same old battlefield… Australians have conflict fatigue. They want politics to operate differently.” The contrast between his positivity and Dutton’s sniping showed why Australians, according to Newspoll, prefer him by a 61–22 margin.

This summit was a stage production. The cast spoke when they were meant to, and not otherwise. I didn’t see any debate on day one, though ANU vice-chancellor Brian Schmidt started some when he took the chair on day two. Mostly, if anyone wanted to disagree with what was being said, tough luck: they had no opportunity to do so. The “consensus” Anthony Albanese praised was more staged than real.

The summit was intended to produce a set of policy outcomes — and in a sense, it did. Soon after it ended, the government published a fourteen-page document listing what Treasurer Jim Chalmers described as thirty-six “concrete steps [it] intends to take… as an outcome of this… summit” plus a similar number of priorities for future discussion. Everyone got something to take back to their constituencies.

Seeing the speed with which the document appeared at the end of the summit, a cynic might wonder if, rather than responding to what it heard on the floor, the government took these decisions well before the summit, but held back the announcements to make it look like they came from the floor.

The summit was intended to highlight the importance — economic, social and political — of getting more women into work, into decision-making and into higher-level roles in the economy. And it did. Its three main policy themes were: how to fix the skills shortages in Australia’s workforce; how to change wage-fixing rules so that workers get a bigger share of the cake; and how to lift participation in the workforce. In the presentations, women’s work was central to all three.

Grattan Institute chief executive Danielle Wood sounded the bell in her opening keynote speech. Australia has one of the most gender-segregated workforces in the OECD, she noted, and market realities are now in sync with fairness in dictating that we tackle the underpayment of female-dominated caring occupations.

She cited an example: childcare workers are paid as little as $22 an hour, less than they could earn washing dishes at McDonald’s. No wonder we are perpetually short of them. Every year, Australia needs more than 33,000 more aged care workers, but they are grossly underpaid and overworked, so a huge turnover means a constant search for workers.

We can’t put off this issue anymore, and Labor’s leaders clearly recognise that. Treasury’s paper for the summit estimated that a quarter of Australia’s gender pay gap comes from low pay in the female-dominated caring and education professions. The Fair Work Commission is now hearing a case in which unions are seeking a 25 per cent pay rise for aged care workers. The government has promised to pick up the tab. That is where the action is.

But the obvious stage management of the summit should not obscure its genuine achievement. For two days, leaders of business, unions, community groups and federal, state and territory governments focused on contributing their knowledge, identifying the problems, finding common ground and scoping out solutions. They didn’t solve Australia’s problems, but they made progress on some fronts, and established good working relationships for future dialogue.

Yet the progress they made was marginal to the key issues facing Australia. Getting consensus meant the organisers could not allow the conference to tackle issues where consensus was impossible. Danielle Wood and fellow economist Ross Garnaut, the dinner speaker, certainly touched on some of them, but they were not targeted in any session.

One of them is crucial to almost every issue the summit addressed. It is tax.

The federal government is running deficits of $75 billion or more a year. While claimants were putting urgent cases to the summit for more spending in this area and that, Labor still insists on delivering an already-legislated tax cut, mainly for the rich, that will reduce tax revenues by 3 to 4 per cent. Where is it going to find the money to solve the problems the summit presented to it?

Garnaut pointed to the elephant in the room. “We have to stop kidding ourselves about the budget,” he said. “We have large deficits when our high terms of trade should be driving surpluses. Interest rates are rising on the eye-watering Commonwealth debt.

“We talk about the most difficult geo-strategic environment since the 1940s requiring much higher defence expenditure, but not about higher taxes to pay for it. We say we are underproviding for care and underpaying nurses, and underproviding for education and failing to adequately reward our teachers…

“[Yet] in the face of these immense budget challenges, total federal and state taxation revenue as a share of GDP is 5.7 percentage points lower than the developed country average.”

To put it another way, our governments every year raise roughly $120 billion less than they would if our tax rates were at the Western average. With that money, we could tackle every issue raised at the summit. The government, if it chose, could finance 25 per cent pay rises for aged care and childcare workers, raise the dole to $70 a day, restore the funding the Liberals took from universities, invest in research and new technology, pay the states 50 per cent of hospital costs, give state schools their fair share of funding, etc., etc. — and close the deficit.

There are many good ways to raise revenue. Australia has an abundance of tax loopholes allowing companies and individuals to avoid tax: negative gearing is a classic example, but as the International Monetary Fund once suggested, Australia could apply the same principle to business, and stop firms deducting interest bills from their tax.

In the June quarter, the Australian Bureau of Statistics tells us, the total wage bill for Australia’s millions of corporate employees was $164 billion, while its mining companies made a gross operating profit of $81 billion. In just three months! If any country ever had cause to levy a tax on super profits it is Australia, now. Jim Chalmers needs to make this a centrepiece of his October budget.

But no one in the sessions I heard mentioned tax in their speeches. Like all those who argue for more spending on worthy causes, they urged more spending without a word on how the government should find the money to pay for it. Tax is the issue we don’t talk about. The summit would have had more cutting edge if some delegates had dared do so.

There’s been little argument over the summit “outcomes” because they are mostly agreements on principles, aspirations, processes or short-term supports to be applied while longer-term outcomes are negotiated.

They are modest: first steps, not solutions. Maybe they needed to be to get tripartite agreement between government, business and unions. And having tripartite agreement on sensible first steps in the right direction gives the government more freedom to plan bolder steps to solve the problems.

One of the summit’s big moves to tackle the skills shortage, for example, was to increase the permanent migration target for 2022–23 from 160,000 a year to 195,000. Almost all that increase will comprise skilled workers and their families, mostly sponsored by state governments (who are primarily chasing health workers) and employers in the regions.

No one objected to that. Nor should they, because if the target follows current patterns, it will make little difference. In recent years, two-thirds of permanent residence places were awarded to migrants already in Australia, working or studying on temporary visas.

And while the government would like to bring in new migrants to help reduce our skills shortage, particularly in hospitals and aged care, it has an even more urgent priority: tackling the scandalous backlog of unprocessed visa applications piled up by the Department of Home Affairs under the Morrison government.

Immigration minister Andrew Giles told the summit Labor inherited a backlog from the Coalition of almost a million unprocessed visa applications. It was an unbelievable number, including applications from all types of people: separated partners, skilled workers, overseas students, business. Brian Schmidt recalled the department taking twenty-one months to process the ANU’s applications to bring in some Indian academics — for three-year appointments.

Giles said the government has now swung an extra 180 staff onto clearing the visa backlog, and has so far reduced it by 100,000. One of the thirty-six “outcomes” was that it will now spend an extra $36 million to lift visa staff by 500 people for the rest of this financial year.

But the waiting list includes a staggering 330,000 people who are already in Australia on bridging visas until their applications are processed. It’s fair to assume that many, maybe most, of them are applying for permanent visas. Given the scale of this backlog, an increase of only 35,000 in the migration target seems extraordinarily timid. Labor will have to revisit that, and soon.

The big “outcome” for the young unemployed and school leavers was the agreement by the prime minister and premiers to pump $1 billion into TAFE in 2023 to provide 180,000 extra fee-free places while they negotiate a longer-term agreement to reform the sector. Again, you applaud the direction — and in this case, the boldness and the federal–state cooperation — but it’s only a short-term solution.

Another “outcome” was Albanese’s announcement that, as an inducement for older workers to keep working, or retirees to return to work, pensioners will be allowed to earn an extra $4000 — just for this financial year — without losing any of their pension.

Good, but I think the PM is safe from being knocked down by a stampede. For a few months, it might induce some pensioners to put in a few hours a week at some nearby workplace. But why make it so small? Why end it on 30 June? It’s almost as if it was designed to avoid having any substantial impact. It’s tokenism, when big gains are possible from a comprehensive policy to extend working lives for those who want to keep going.

Chalmers and finance minister Katy Gallagher routinely fob off questions about spending proposals such as raising the Jobseeker allowance by declaring sympathetically, “There are lots of good ideas out there, and I wish we could fund them all. But we have inherited a trillion dollars of Liberal debt…”

Someone must call that out. First, Table 9.2 of the 2022–23 budget papers implies that Labor inherited $979 billion of gross debt from the Liberals — but $303 billion of that was inherited in 2013 by the Liberals from Labor (who in turn inherited $64 billion in 2007 from the Liberals, and so on). It’s Liberal and Labor debt. It’s Australia’s debt.

Second, gross debt looks at just one side of the balance sheet — which is why we focus on net debt. Table 9.2 estimates Labor inherited $631.5 billion of net debt from the Liberals, who in turn inherited $161.6 billion of net debt from Labor back in 2013. It’s a cheap, false political point.

But on the first part of its routine line, Labor is right: there are a lot of good ideas out there, and the government can’t fund them all. Its job is to sift through them and set the priorities. And if it picks a bad priority, such as backing the Liberals’ stage three tax cuts, it sticks out like a sore thumb.

These cuts were Morrison at his worst. They do not take effect until mid 2024, yet became law in 2019 — with Labor’s support, because it was frightened of being depicted as a high-tax party. This is the legislation that will give tax cuts of almost $175 a week to someone earning $200,000 a year, and $2 a week to someone earning $50,000.

The Parliamentary Budget Office estimates the cuts will deprive the government of $243.5 billion of revenue — 3 to 4 per cent of budget revenue — over their first nine years alone. The PBO says 78 per cent of that will go to the richest 20 per cent of households: by definition, those who need it least. And that, at a time when the budget is perpetually in deficit, and the government assailed on all fronts for spending too little.

The summit’s speeches ranged far and wide. Many speakers gave interesting accounts of what they were doing, or their experiences dealing with the systems now in place. Highlights are on YouTube, and the entire summit can be seen on Parliament’s video stream.

Transcripts regrettably are not available, except on ministerial websites and those of some speakers. I recommend Danielle Wood’s challenging and probing overview of Australia’s economic potential, which castigated business leaders for their risk-averse “economic funk,” and called for Australia to adopt “full employment as our lodestar” and remember that, if we want to raise living standards, in the long run, “productivity is almost everything.”

Peter Davidson, principal advisor to the Australian Council of Social Service, also made a lot of challenging points in urging Labor to reform the employment services system. “The system [has] not been working for a long time,” he said. “Jobactive was more of an unemployment payment compliance system than an employment service. It sent people out into the labour market and when they didn’t find jobs, told them to search harder. People were literally told: ‘It’s not our role to find you a job.’”

Ross Garnaut’s dinner speech recounted the reasons for Australia’s success in the postwar era, and the challenges reformers faced then — and in the Hawke-Keating era — and now. “I grew up in a Menzies world of full employment,” he recalled. “Workers could leave jobs that didn’t suit them and quickly find others. Employers put large amounts of effort into training and retaining workers. Labour income was secure and could support a loan to buy a house. Steadily rising real wages encouraged economisation on labour, which lifted productivity.”

In the postwar era, and in the 1980s, Garnaut said, “success was based on using economic analysis and information to develop policies in the public interest; on seeing equitable distribution of the benefits of growth as a central objective; and on sharing knowledge through the community about economic policy choices. This built support for policies that challenged old prejudices and vested interests.

“Personal and corporate taxation rates were much higher than before the war. Full employment and a wider social safety net supported structural change and much larger and more diverse immigration… Menzies’s political success was built on full employment — helped by Menzies insulating policy from the influence of political donations to an extent that is shocking today.”

Garnaut ended by exhorting Albanese and Chalmers to follow the path of Hawke and Keating, strong politicians who took big risks to bring in reforms when they were clearly needed. “We have to raise much more revenue while increasing labour force participation and investment,” he said, urging two radical reforms he advocated last year in his book Reset: a guaranteed income scheme, and a shift to cash flow taxation of business.

But Albo is not Hawke and Chalmers is not Keating. Like the business leaders who have dragged down Australia’s business investment to the lowest share of GDP ever recorded, they are risk-averse. Their priority is to retain power, and they see the way to do that is by giving people what they want, not trying to persuade them that tackling tough reforms is in the national interest.

It is possible, though, even likely, that they will end up having no choice. The crisis in aged care, in hospitals, in GP practices, in childcare and in teaching will force an end to governments’ model of saving money by underpaying those who work for you (or whose wages you pay indirectly). Australia’s system of doing government on the cheap has been tried, and failed. We are going to have to learn from how the rest of the West does it, and that means raising taxes.

Many have noted that the Hawke government, like this one, began its term by staging an economic summit, which brought business and union leaders to Old Parliament House with the similar aim of “bringing Australia together” to tackle its economic problems. But we should also recall that its follow-up two years later was to invite a similar cast for a tax summit.

That is what Albanese and his team should start planning for. We cannot solve our problems without an honest national dialogue on the need for higher taxes, and where we should be looking for increased revenue. It could be combined with the announcement of a super profits tax on mining companies and the big banks. Reform needs to start now. •

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This is on song — in two-party-preferred terms at least — with all the other public pollsters except for the Nine papers’ Resolve, whose most recent outing gave the Coalition a whopping seven-point lead in first preferences, 39 to 32 per cent, which would translate to a small Coalition lead of about 51 to 49 in two-party-preferred terms. If Resolve keeps this up, the possibility of wall-to-wall pollster “herding” will not be a problem during this election campaign.

The Australian is headlining another finding: that a plurality of voters, 47 per cent, believe Labor will form government after the next election, 37 per cent think the Coalition and the rest aren’t sure.

Now, some political observers believe the expectation of a win is a good thing because it generates momentum and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Your correspondent is definitely not in this camp.

Yes, expectations and outcome have correlated across electoral history. As they say in the classics, though, correlation doesn’t equal causation. Sure, the polls point to a likely victor, which largely generates expectations, directly and indirectly. But rather than millions marching dreamlike to vote for X because everyone else is — because the media says it’s so — the opposite is the case: it’s usually better to be the underdog because some voters are tempted to mitigate an expected big win.

During the 2019 campaign the Coalition seemed to grasp this, while Labor, by all appearances, believed playing up the likelihood of victory was just the ticket. We saw how that turned out.

The good news for Labor is that this time the expectations are not so one-sided. Once bitten by the opinion polls, voters are twice shy. And a prime minister who pulls off an unexpected victory will always be given some benefit of the doubt. In early December 2018, before all that happened, Labor was favoured by much more, 55 to 24 per cent, than it is now.

Back then, most of the commentariat were convinced a change of government was on its way. They could just feel it; they could smell the government’s decay. They had internalised the polls, and found further reassurance in the chaotic August change of Liberal leadership and in the November Victorian Labor landslide.

This week’s 47–37 lead on expectations — 56–44 if you exclude undecideds — actually seems surprisingly optimistic for Labor, given what happened last time.

Over in the United States the polls got it wrong in 2016 and got it wrong again in 2020, by about the same amount. The difference the second time was that Joe Biden’s surveyed lead over Donald Trump was about twice what Hillary Clinton’s had been four years before.

On that basis, Labor would want an election-eve lead next year significantly better than 2019’s average 51.5 to 48.5 per cent to feel confident of victory. (The result three years ago was 51.5–48.5 the other way.)

Right now Labor leads by roughly 6 to 8 per cent in all the polls except Resolve. A 2019-style 6 per cent error would put Labor on 51 or 50, which would be a probable (though messy, and perhaps in minority) government win. But we shouldn’t really compare today’s polls with those in the dying days of last election’s campaign. In December 2018, Labor was ahead by about what it is now, or a bit less.

As a rule, it’s best to be the underdog, but this can be complicated by another factor: the prospect of a minority Labor government reliant on Greens and independents. The Coalition has long believed it is in its interests to play up this scenario, and while it hasn’t really got much traction in past contests, this time the Greens are also pushing it energetically.

As most voters prefer majority governments, and some can even change their vote between the major parties to ensure this, that factor adds another dimension to the expectations game. It possibly played a part in that unexpectedly big Victorian result three years ago — Labor’s going to win, let’s make sure Dan Andews has a majority — but it can also work the way the Coalition wants it to. •

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Nonetheless, Morrison is hoping the setback will only be temporary and he can soon return to his promise to protect Australians from big government while letting rip “can-do capitalism.” He is courting voters who opposed major public health restrictions during the pandemic by arguing that it is time for government to step out of the way.

Despite a post-Covid spin, that rhetoric isn’t really new. Morrison went to the last election making a populist promise to protect ordinary Australians from a big, intrusive, high-taxing Labor government. His current arguments are largely a post-Covid variation on that old neoliberal, pro-market theme — though, given his criticism of official intrusion, it is ironic that his government has long exhibited an authoritarian tinge, especially when it comes to groups and perspectives it disagrees with.

Those Australians who hoped the Coalition might have learned from the economic stimulus measures it introduced during the pandemic will be sadly disappointed, particularly when it comes to the economic and social benefits that flowed from increasing unemployment benefits. The government even briefly offered free childcare. It was all a long way from the severely restricted role the prime minister sees government playing in helping rebuild the Australian economy after the pandemic, never mind tackling major issues such as climate change.

But the Coalition isn’t alone in turning to the past. Labor has been casting around for previous economic models too. Early in the pandemic Labor shadow treasurer Jim Chalmers evoked the Curtin and Chifley government’s Keynesian postwar reconstruction plans of the early 1940s: a model that sees a greater role for the state in a mixed economy than does Morrison’s can-do capitalism.

More recently, Chalmers has also been evoking British Labour’s Tony Blair by seeking to brand Labor as the “party of aspiration.” Such a flirtation isn’t new, as Labor leaders Simon Crean and Mark Latham demonstrated twenty years ago. But Chalmers should be cautious, given that those previous evocations of Blair didn’t end well for the Australian party.

Nonetheless, following an inspiring video call with Blair, and building on his own arguments, Chalmers has highlighted the role that technology can play in improving the economic wellbeing of citizens. Two decades ago, the Blair government optimistically promised that Britain would once again be a world-leading economy via its technological prowess in the information revolution. Paul Keating had embraced the opportunities of the new information economy years before Blair. New technologies can indeed bring great benefits, but they also risk deepening inequality — a risk that Chalmers, like earlier Labor figures including Keating, may well have underestimated.

It’s back to the future in other ways, too. Chalmers’s electoral focus on the suburbs has echoes of Mark Latham’s period as a Labor politician, when he published a book called From the Suburbs. Like Chalmers, former Labor leader Kim Beazley also pledged to respond to the issues that middle Australians are discussing around their kitchen tables.

With its cautious, small-target strategy, Labor appears to have backed away from Shorten-era hints that it might address some of the industrial relations policy failures of previous Labor governments, including Keating-era enterprise bargaining policies and the Rudd–Gillard government’s outlawing of pattern bargaining on an industry-wide basis. While Labor has been loath to acknowledge the problem explicitly, its own policies actually contributed to the wage stagnation that Labor now pledges to tackle.

So the industrial relations challenge for Labor is not just to deal with Coalition policies but also to tackle its own past. While it has kept the Shorten-era promise to tackle precarious work — an issue that the pandemic has brought into even greater prominence — in other respects it often seems to be returning to an earlier model. In its attempts to repair the damage that Shorten’s attacks on the big end of town inflicted on the party’s relations with business, it has ended up placing less emphasis on issues of economic equality.

For his part, Morrison is threatening to make waterfront industrial relations a major issue, echoing the Howard government’s targeting of the Maritime Union of Australia more than twenty years ago. The government has also been returning to past Coalition election strategies in its suggestions that Labor is soft on China.

Culture-war issues are also being raised, most recently with the introduction of the government’s religious freedom bill. While this legislation is close to Morrison’s heart, he also sees it as an opportunity to wedge Labor. He has incorrectly implied that the lack of protection against religious discrimination — alongside laws against sexual or racial discrimination — represents a failure of the left. But it was conservative Christians who campaigned for years against laws to protect religious freedom, including when the previous Labor government considered introducing such protections. Those Christians were concerned about these protections extending to non-Christian religions and the possible implications for Christian religious instruction and state aid to church schools. The problem for the left lies not in protecting people of faith against religious discrimination but in dealing with arguments that “religious freedom” should enable believers to discriminate against others.

True, predicting the political future is even harder than usual. Time and time again the virus has refused to cooperate with politicians’ best-laid plans. But those who hoped that the post-Covid world would see a radically “better normal” seem destined to be disappointed. In the lead-up to the next election, both Labor and Liberal have so far reverted unimaginatively to previous policy perspectives. Despite the pandemic, much of the next election seems likely to be fought on familiar ideological ground. •

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During the first half of the year, it had the Coalition and Labor running neck-and-neck on the two-party-preferred vote. Over the same period, the Coalition’s primary vote averaged a healthy 40 per cent.

From the middle of the year, though, the Coalition’s primary vote started to fall. In the latest Newspoll — released on 24 October — the government’s primary vote had fallen to 35 per cent.

More significantly, the two-party-preferred vote has been 53 or 54 per cent for Labor since July, and 46 or 47 per cent for the Coalition. That’s six Newspolls in a row, and a possible electoral wipe-out for the Morrison government.

But strangely — because journalists ordinarily love polls — this hasn’t turned into much of a media story. It hasn’t been “factored into the narrative,” as the cliché goes. So why haven’t we been reading headlines like “Poll Pressure Has Morrison in Policy Panic”?

First up, Newspoll is published in Rupert Murdoch’s anti-Labor flagship the Australian. If Newspoll had found that Anthony Albanese’s Labor Party was generating opinion poll numbers like Scott Morrison’s government, I think we might have heard more about it.

Picture the front page of the Daily Telegraph: “Albo’s Poll Agony Continues.”

And second, the polls, including Newspoll, got the 2019 election wrong. Journalists have been a bit gun-shy about highlighting good figures for Labor since Morrison’s “miracle” election victory that year.

Opinion polls ain’t elections, of course. They are fallible snapshots of voting intentions taken at a particular time in the electoral cycle. But as long as you don’t imbue them with mystical powers they’re useful tools to make guesstimates about what’s going on in Voterland. My guesstimate is that Anthony Albanese is doing something right and, more importantly, Scott Morrison is doing an awful lot wrong.

In just four months’ time we’re likely to be in the middle of an election campaign. In the meantime, Anthony Albanese is receiving plenty of gratuitous strategic advice from media commentators. And some of them are very unhappy about his small-target strategy.

Conventional wisdom asserts that Labor only wins government with a hefty program of reforming policies. But what does history say?

In the postwar period Labor has won government from opposition just three times: in 1972 under Whitlam, in 1983 under Hawke, and in 2007 with Kevin Rudd as leader.

Whitlam had the famous program, but he also faced the egregious Billy McMahon, whose government had already taken a battering in 1969. Whenever Australian prime ministers are ranked in order of greatness McMahon always comes stone motherless last.

When Hawke won office in 1983, he brought with him the Accord agreement with the unions. But he also had an opponent in Malcolm Fraser who was struggling with a recession, growing unemployment and record interest rates.

When Rudd prevailed in 2007, he won against a prime minister who had been in office for eleven years, had provoked all-out warfare with the union movement and had run out of tricks. John Howard, locked in interminable battle with his treasurer Peter Costello, even lost his own seat.

It’s true that Whitlam and Hawke were charismatic, reforming leaders who ran on ambitious policies voters recognised were necessary. But Rudd’s big carrot for the voters was a promise to spend less than John Howard.

So what do our three Labor heroes have in common? They faced tired, dysfunctional Coalition governments. Are the Newspolls telling us that Morrison has hit the wall? When Australians voted for him in 2019, they didn’t really know him. Now they do.

Albanese would probably agree he’s no Whitlam or Hawke, but he’s as experienced as Kevin Rudd, and without the obvious flaws. He was one of the few senior Labor figures, for example, to come out of the destructive Gillard–Rudd years with his standing enhanced. Though he opposed the coup against Rudd, he then dedicated himself to making the whole sorry mess work.

It looks like we’re in for an election substantially about climate change. Morrison has placed his cards on the table: he says he’ll get to net zero by 2050 basically by crossing our fingers.

Albanese has yet to declare his hand. And why should he? The Murdoch press will go berserk no matter what he comes up with.

But we already know the key question facing voters at the coming election: who are you going to trust to bring Australia through the tricky transition to a decarbonised economy?

If Albanese can paint Morrison as a fabulist on climate change policy and make a credible case that Labor will help those affected by these essential changes to our economy, he’s in with a very strong chance. And if there is a hung parliament, he’s better placed than Morrison to make it work.

Scott Morrison has just arrived home after the most disastrous prime ministerial trip since Robert Menzies went to Egypt in 1956 and failed to solve the Suez Crisis. Meanwhile, the next Newspoll looms large. •

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I opened the piece with Lewis Carroll’s Alice being chased by the jealous Queen of Hearts — “Off with her head,” the queen cried — and observed that Alice was spared “only through the king’s kindness.” But that was Wonderland, and there’s never been much kindness in NSW party politics. Long before Keneally became premier, Labor’s stocks had fallen so low that her predecessors had decamped or been decapitated.

Bob Carr, premier from 1995 to 2005, resigned just as the electorate’s patience was wearing thin. Morris Iemma, his successor, won the 2007 election by promising a halt to the privatisation of the electricity grid, but resigned the following year after losing the support of his colleagues. Then came Nathan Rees, who lasted just fifteen months. Not only had he come from the party’s left faction, but he’d also wasted no time in sacking some of the most unpopular ministers, all of whom hailed from the right.

Then came Keneally, for whom the right’s support had been crucial. She had entered parliament in 2003, taking the seat of Heffron after defeating the incumbent Deirdre Grusovin for preselection. Ministerial portfolios followed: ageing, disability services and then, with the resignation of Frank Sartor, planning. She had been a year in that portfolio when the powerbrokers backed her for the premiership.

Here it is salutary to remember that there are two different ways of looking at what happened. I’ve outlined the first above — the infamous revolving-door leadership, soon to contaminate the federal party. Then there was the poisoned chalice view, whereby a woman was handed the ship of state just as it was sinking fast. As I wrote in 2010, “When the party chose Keneally for premier no one believed that it was anything but a desperate bid to shore up the government’s sinking fortunes. After all, it wasn’t the first time a woman had been given the leadership of a seemingly doomed government.”

The pattern had been set in 1990, when Carmen Lawrence was handed the Western Australian premiership in the wake of the “WA Inc” scandals. Next came Joan Kirner in Victoria, where manufacturing was shrinking, unemployment was high, and the state’s deficit had ballooned. “After a year of Kirner’s leadership,” I wrote, “during which she was subjected to some of the most vitriolic abuse ever dished out to a female politician, voters elected Jeff Kennett.” Yet this would prove nothing next to the hatred churned up for Julia Gillard.

Fast-forward to 10 September 2021. With Covid cases rising despite a seemingly unending series of lockdowns, and with voters increasingly exasperated by the Morrison government’s failures in quarantining, vaccinating the vulnerable and overall vaccine supply, Labor announced that Keneally, deputy opposition leader in the Senate, would be its candidate in the federal seat of Fowler. The decision, though in line with Keneally’s own ambitions, was a neat solution brokered by Labor factions in readiness for the coming federal election, whenever Scott Morrison finds it in his interest to call one.

Coincidentally, that very night I logged onto SBS on Demand to watch Strong Female Lead, a documentary about Julia Gillard’s treatment as prime minister. It’s hard to imagine anyone not being shocked in retrospect at what Gillard endured. The incidents accumulated, one gross misogynistic slur after another. I had written about Julia Gillard too, and as I sat watching I felt more than a twinge of sorrow that, my feminism notwithstanding, I hadn’t been entirely sympathetic with our first and, to date, only female prime minister. Only since she left politics have I come to appreciate just how good a leader she was.

The concentrated display of what Gillard was up against, from the Ditch the Witch/Bitch banners, Larry Pickering’s pornographic cartooning, Alan Jones’s slanderous vituperations to her passionate misogyny speech and more, left me, like many others, reeling. Even at the time, the ABC’s juvenile At Home with Julia left an awful taste in my mouth, and it was far from pleasant to be reminded of it. Nor did any of her attackers, least of all the opposition leader, stop to consider what they were doing to the office of prime minister itself, let alone to the Australian body politic.

Most tellingly, of all those interviewed, it was Cheryl Kernot who got to what I believe was the crux of the matter. For what did Gillard’s choice in taking the leadership from Rudd actually entail? Kernot posed the fundamental question: is it politic, when the moment arrives, for a woman to be “willing to take the risk and step up to the challenge,” as men in politics repeatedly do.

So, to Keneally. My interest in writing about her back in 2010 sprang from the fact that, like me, she was born an American, and yet this didn’t seem to pose a problem as it might have once. That said, my experience was substantially different, as was the Australia of 1958, the year of my migration. By the time Keneally was naturalised in 2000, Australia’s population had nearly doubled and its ethnic composition had changed enormously, with a quarter of Australians having at least one parent born overseas. Australians had also seemed to become — to this Yankee expatriate anyway — more comfortable with ever-increasing American inroads into what was once a largely British-oriented culture.

Moreover, in the forty-two years between my arrival and Keneally’s, the status of women in this country had improved considerably, in no small measure due to two Labor governments. Not without a struggle, the women in the party had succeeded in carving out a significant space for women. Outside the party, though, the gains of previous years had stalled with the Howard government — services were cut back, and the effective marginal tax rate on married women in employment went as high as 90 per cent as the cost of childcare rose. This, combined with the attractive family tax benefit B, acted as a significant disincentive for women’s participation in the workforce.

At the same time, though, increasing numbers of women were tertiary-educated, and expected to have careers. If it still had its difficulties, a woman entering politics when Keneally did in 2003 wasn’t considered extraordinary.

Eighteen years later, times have changed again. The announcement that Keneally has been shoe-horned into Fowler has triggered an avalanche of responses. Those objecting point to the seat’s predominantly multicultural composition and the rejection of talented Vietnamese-Australian candidate Tu Le, who has longstanding links to the community. For many, Keneally’s move into the seat is both a cynical attempt on her part to further her ambition and yet another instance of party officialdom’s high-handed treatment of local branches. At bottom lies the belief that not only should a parliamentarian fight for issues important to her electorate, but that a member who represents an electorate’s particular demography is ipso facto best qualified to do so.

The decision’s defenders argue that a high-flyer like Keneally offers the seat its best chance for due consideration where it counts — in cabinet. Keneally’s supporters include figures like Paul Keating and, unsurprisingly, Anthony Albanese, who are thinking of the unwelcome prospect of losing her talents had she been forced to take the party’s risky third Senate ballot position. They’re looking to the party’s chances of victory, not to mention their government’s pool of talent should they happen to win.

Whatever else you can say about it, another controversy over Labor’s inner workings is a retrograde step for the party, feeding into misgivings about the factional machinations and backroom deals of quasi-mythical “faceless men.” None of which is at all peculiar to one side of politics, though with Labor it somehow sticks, taking oxygen away from the endlessly egregious performances of the Coalition government. It’s certainly put Labor on the defensive; hence Albanese’s laughable contention that white, English-speaking American-born Keneally is just another successful migrant.

As for me, after reading all the commentary, I’ve come to conclude that something important has gone missing from the debate. It has to do with those revolving doors and poisoned chalices mentioned earlier. Both are part of the same package; both bedevilled the reigns of successive female leaders, most spectacularly Keneally’s and Gillard’s. Female premiers are no longer the oddities they once were, nor is the prospect of a female prime minister anywhere near as challenging. What matters most, it seems, is the manner of their ascendancy. To paraphrase Cheryl Kernot’s remark, does one seize the opportunity as it presents itself, or bide one’s time until circumstances are more favourable?

It’s true that men in the past have got away with circumventing the rules in ways that women seem not to be permitted, perhaps because it was men who invented them in the first place. But it’s looking like the practice has gone on too long, like the end result of years of “whatever it takes” is a deep deficit of distrust within the electorate. At the federal level at least, not many have heard the alarm bells. Yet, apart from and above specific considerations of gender or diversity, this diminishing trust poses a genuine threat to democracy, and the more people are alienated from the political process, the greater that threat becomes. We see it happening in the United States, and signs of it here.

If I were Tu Le, I might heed Albanese’s assurance that her time will come, and that one way or another the party will repay her for waiting. It’s the normal progression of a rising star’s political career. But that approach overlooks the profound disillusionment among voters, and the cynicism that has come to shape the electorate’s view of politics and the character of its active participants. It’s not Tu Le’s career I’m worried about, though I’m pretty sure she would make an excellent candidate and contribute to the ethnic diversity sorely needed in our parliament.

What I have been worrying about is what’s been happening in my adopted country, and I’ve been wondering if Keneally could have done something about it, something that would have taken courage, something that might have made a difference. Supposing that, instead of following the script and slotting herself into Fowler, she’d decided to run in a riskier seat. Given her talent and political skills, she would have had a chance of taking an extra seat for the party, and more importantly, made a statement about how democracy should proceed.

It’s true it might have been a risk. She lost when she ran in Bennelong, and she might have lost again. She’d be unlikely, though, to stay in the wilderness forever. Because principles matter, courage matters, and we have to believe that people do respond to them — if they’re given the chance. •

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Does it behove Labor in particular to have a more ethnically diverse group of MPs in federal, state and territory parliaments? As the major centre-left party, it receives outsized support from Indigenous people and people from non-English-speaking backgrounds. It’s the major party one would expect to look “multicultural” and, of course, “looking” like that should translate into policies.

No one would nag One Nation or the United Australia Party or even the Nationals about a lack of diversity.

And yet, like most Australian institutions, Labor looks whiter than the country. An unwillingness to preselect people of colour seems to be part of its general timidity, its continuing capitulation to John Howard’s idea of the nation, its terror of falling out of favour with “middle Australia” (characterised as white). The same caricaturing of voters saw Labor lag behind other centre-left parties in Western democracies, and ultimately the electorate itself, in getting behind marriage equality.

Behind the scenes, by contrast, and particularly in New South Wales, diversity seems to rule, but those individuals themselves seem at least, if not more, enthralled by clunky ideas about what the electorate will tolerate. Remember national secretary Karl Bitar’s 2010 “Lindsay test”? (According to the census, Lindsay has Sydney’s second-lowest percentage of residents who speak a language other than English in the home, after Scott Morrison’s seat of Cook.)

This week’s political fuss is about the decision to parachute the high-profile former NSW premier, senator Kristina Keneally, into one of the country’s most multicultural electorates, the very safe (for Labor) Fowler. The immediate impetus came from her relegation to the third (unwinnable) Senate spot on the party’s ticket, but as someone with big ambitions she would probably have been eyeing the lower house at some point anyway.

Retiring MP Chris Hayes, who even when he first entered parliament in Werriwa in 2005 seemed like a throwback to a Calwellian golden age, and who himself was handed Fowler after the 2009 reshuffle-induced musical chairs of sitting Labor MPs, handpicked a local to take his place. That young lawyer, Tu Le, whose parents were Vietnamese refugees, has become “the” local candidate for the media in what’s presented as a binary choice, although it’s possible others in the local branch see things differently.

People of a certain age will remember Midnight Oil frontman Peter Garrett’s installation in Kingsford Smith in 2004. He’d only just joined the party, and his candidature generated a lot of complaining from people we hadn’t heard of. You’re waiting for years for the MP to retire, and when he or she finally does, some rock star is shoehorned in. Theo Theophanous’s 1995 televised tears after being pushed aside in Batman by ACTU head Martin Ferguson also come to mind.

But parties do this. It’s how they bring new talent into parliament. Very often the state office plays a role: no less than the current prime minister was installed in his electorate over the objections of local branches. And of course the preselection in Wills was just one stage of Bob Hawke’s unstoppable journey to the Lodge. He was hardly Wills born and bred.

The problem is that the reliably safe Labor seats are mostly high in people from non-English-speaking backgrounds.

At first glance, Liberal candidates in western Sydney seem more ethnically diverse, more representative of minority communities. But the catch is that those seats are safe Labor. In fact, the current list of major-party candidates contains plenty of “minority”-looking names, on both sides, but they’re overwhelmingly in unwinnable seats. There’s not much demand for those spots.

Keneally was premier for the biggest election loss in NSW history. But that would’ve happened whoever was in charge. She remained pretty popular to the end, and voters were lukewarm about opposition leader Barry O’Farrell, and yet it was the most one-sided result in the state’s history. It throws up the question of how much leaders’ popularity really matters at general elections.

Keneally did well at the 2017 Bennelong by-election (insofar as by-elections can be judged), with the biggest favourable swing for Labor, 4.8 percentage points, of all the by-elections prompted by the discovery of section 44 in the Constitution. (The most ballyhooed, Longman, was just 3.7 points.) Canning in 2015 (6.6) was bigger, but that came after the death of a very popular Liberal MP, Don Randall. (Section 44 by-elections were unusual, of course, because most of them had sitting MPs.)

Despite her obvious qualities, there’s a troubling — how should I put this? — Lathamesque side to Keneally, a similar mix of energy, headline grabbing and poor political judgement. A decade ago she was reported as suggesting the Gillard government dump its newly announced “carbon tax,” which was very Sussex Street advice, all polling and clipboards and no understanding of electoral dynamics, of how voters behave. The Rudd government had cut loose its own scheme a year before, and it cost the prime minister his job and (in my opinion) Labor its majority at the election.

And Keneally’s swashbuckling in the home affairs portfolio over the last two years, attacking the government from the right, left and centre on immigration, is just playing with fire. Two years ago I called her appointment to that portfolio Anthony Albanese’s “first big blunder.” Immigration is the area Labor needs to steer clear of.

Keneally’s ready-made personal vote would make her an excellent candidate for a Liberal-held marginal seat, such as Reid, but of course talent with a big T doesn’t want marginal seats, because they tend to go out with the tide.

Although much of the current discussion conflates the overriding of locals with the overly white face of Labor, they are really two different things. The high-flyers, those considered great enough to impose on grumpy locals, are still virtually all white. That’s a function of our society itself, but also of the institutionalised prejudices of the party and its somewhat outdated perceptions of the electorate. •

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Wran towered over his contemporaries in intelligence and acumen, but his policy achievements, while not negligible, failed to match his electoral triumphs. “I didn’t set out to achieve much, actually,” he said when asked to nominate his main achievements. “My principal objective was to keep beating the Liberals, and I’ve had amazing success at doing that. That’s been my main triumph.”

The biggest cloud hanging over Wran’s legacy was his handling of a series of corruption allegations. As biographers Mike Steketee and Milton Cockburn conclude, “while Wran’s cynicism did him no harm in the early years of his premiership, it almost brought him undone over the corruption issue. Here the cynicism was deep-rooted and absolute: corruption was not an issue because it did not affect people’s lives, as did bread and butter issues.”

The leading historian of NSW politics, David Clune, agrees. “When confronted with evidence of widespread corruption, Wran made the serious error of trying to obfuscate and cover up,” he writes. “Rather than admitting that there was a real problem that needed to be urgently addressed, he over-confidently assumed his political and parliamentary skills would enable him to defuse the issue.”

Even future Labor premier Bob Carr took Wran’s handling of corruption as a negative exemplar: “I had seen Neville Wran’s premiership tainted and compromised on probity by three distinct errors. One, the elevation of a corrupt cop as assistant commissioner. Two, the extension of the term of a corrupt chief stipendiary magistrate, Murray Farquhar. Three, being too slow to shake out police corruption… Almost every week I was to watch him struggle to ward off allegations that his administration was tainted by a laxness towards corruption.”

Allegations of corruption in the Wran era have flared up intermittently in the decades since his retirement. Most recently, early this year, the ABC series Exposed: The Ghost Train Fire aired claims about Wran’s role in organised crime figure Abe Saffron’s successful bid to lease Luna Park after the 1979 fire that killed seven people. At around the same time, former chief magistrate Clarrie Briese published Corruption in High Places, a memoir drawing on his long and distinguished career in the NSW judiciary, and Wran is one of his main targets.

“Laxness towards corruption” is one thing, but the sheer number of controversies and allegations involving Wran has persuaded some people that he was corrupt. What does the evidence say?

The brand of corruption most commonly associated with politicians is the kickback — the bribe given in return for a favourable decision. Huge stakes often hang on how governments respond to development proposals or land rezoning applications, for instance, and a sympathetic politician on the inside can make a huge material difference.

Despite some gossip, neither during nor since Wran’s years as premier has any evidence emerged that he received bribes or sought other forms of personal enrichment. That’s not to say he was unaware of the patronage potential of government decisions — for political advantage, though, rather than personal gain. In particular, Wran treated media proprietors the way the Morrison government treats swinging electorates: as targets of inducements intended to attract support in return.

The most important example is his decision to grant the Lotto franchise to a consortium whose members included companies run by Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Packer. It was a highly controversial choice, and defied NSW Labor Party policy. Defenders of Wran have argued that the marketing skills of the Packer and Murdoch companies, by guaranteeing that Lotto was highly successful, ensured that more revenue flowed to the state than would otherwise have been the case. But it’s also true that the franchise gave those companies a reliable, government-guaranteed source of income.

Wran’s wish to maintain good relations with the major media companies led him to offer Fairfax the chance to participate in Lotto as well, but its board felt that entering into an enterprise with the government it professed to hold to account would not be proper. Packer and Murdoch didn’t feel so encumbered.

Wran also helped Packer in other ways. When the mogul was trying to establish World Series Cricket, Wran’s government overruled the Sydney Cricket Ground Trust to give him access to the ground, and helped finance the construction of the light towers that enabled play to take place in front of prime-time TV audiences. Without calling for competitive tenders, the government also extended his leases at the Smiggin Holes and Perisher Valley ski resorts until 2025.

These decisions have no hint of personal financial gain, but they do suggest that Wran was happy to use the government’s prerogatives to advance Labor’s interests, and that he wouldn’t be inhibited by procedural niceties.

Wran inherited a corrupt police force. During the eleven-year premiership of his predecessor, Robert Askin, writes organised crime expert Alfred McCoy, New South Wales “endured a period of political and police corruption unparalleled in its modern history.” Although figures on illicit activity can never be authoritative, McCoy estimated that the annual turnover from organised crime in Sydney totalled $2.2 billion in 1975, with income from various sources of gambling comprising the major share, and narcotics $59 million.

When Wran was elected in May 1976, the corrupt Fred Hanson was police commissioner and a member of the panel that would nominate Merv Wood as his successor. A majority of ministers preferred Brian Doyle, who had a reputation of fighting corruption, but Wran wanted Wood, and in the end his ministers complied.

Over the following few years, Wood proved himself less than enthusiastic in pursuing organised crime. In November 1977, when Wran responded to public clamour by ordering the shutting down of Sydney’s long-tolerated illegal casinos, Wood’s public response was that such an action would be “inhumane” because 300 employees would lose their jobs just before Christmas.

In parliament in April 1979, Liberal John Dowd asked Wran why a 1977 report on the organised crime figure George Freeman had not been acted on. Wran claimed he hadn’t seen any such report, and promised that if it existed, which he doubted, he would release it to the news media. To Wran’s intense embarrassment, Dowd then produced a copy of the report. Wood was not only failing to fight police corruption, but he had deeply embarrassed the government by not alerting Wran to its existence. Wran subsequently released part but not all of the report.

Soon after, Wran announced that an anonymous informant had compiled a dossier seeking to prove that an association existed between Wood and a major illegal casino operator. Wood resigned a week later, ostensibly on the grounds of avoiding embarrassment to the police service. Months later Wran announced that the investigation had found the allegations of corruption to be politically motivated, although he never released the report.

Wran’s support for Wood’s appointment as commissioner could simply be bad luck — a case of taking the easier course of following the committee’s recommendation — and didn’t necessarily indicate he was indifferent to police corruption. The government was riding high electorally at the time, and although Wood’s misdeeds intensified attention on corruption, they did little or no damage electorally.

What did eventually transform the politics of organised crime in New South Wales was the murder of Donald Mackay on 15 July 1977. Mackay, a pillar of the Griffith community, had been nominated as the Liberal candidate in the next state election. Griffith was at the centre of a large marijuana-growing industry directed by organised crime figure Robert Trimbole, and Mackay’s anti-drugs campaigning was seen as an increasing nuisance.

Three weeks after what was officially labelled Mackay’s “disappearance,” a royal commission into drug trafficking was set up under Justice Philip Woodward. A year later, Woodward revealed how farcically incompetent the police investigation had been. Abundant material evidence made clear that Mackay had not disappeared but had been the victim of a violent attack.

In his final report, Woodward concluded that Mackay had been killed by a mafia-style organisation that was growing marijuana in Griffith. Several of its key figures had mixed socially with local police; indeed, former police chief Hanson used to go duck shooting with Trimbole. On the night the report was released Trimbole threw a large party at his home and boasted that “the commission can’t touch me or charge me in any way.” The NSW police investigation into Mackay’s murder made no progress.

Some years later, though, a Victorian police investigation into other crimes revealed that Mackay had been killed by a hitman, hired on instructions from Trimbole, because of the problems he had been causing the criminals.

Mackay’s murder had occurred just over a year into the Wran government but re-emerged in its last year, 1986, after the hitman’s conviction in Victoria. After a group of Griffith citizens critical of the NSW police’s inept investigation pressed for an inquiry, a delegation from the town, including three of Mackay’s children, had a three-hour meeting with Wran. Afterwards, the leader of the group described the encounter as a calculated process of intimidation, including personal abuse by the premier.

Wran did announce a new inquiry. But he also said, “It’s about time people in this country stopped yap, yap, yap and went along and put up, and that applies to the people of Griffith.”

The inquiry, headed by Justice John Nagle, reported in December 1986. As well as directing scathing remarks at the police, Nagle also brought into clear public focus a letter written by a former minister in the Whitlam government, Riverina resident Al Grassby. In 1980, Grassby had tried to persuade some Labor MPs to read into Hansard a document he had written alleging that Mackay’s widow and son and their solicitor had conspired to murder Mackay. The letter was the basis of a front-page article in the Sydney Sun-Herald in August 1980.

Political insiders had long known of Grassby’s links to Griffith criminals. Astonishingly, Wran appointed him to a community relations position in February 1986. Gary Sturgess, an anti-corruption campaigner and chief of staff to opposition leader Nick Greiner, told the Sun-Herald he was “sickened” that “Wran would take on a man with such obvious links to the mafia.” During a strong attack in parliament Greiner argued for Grassby’s activities to be included within the scope of the Nagle inquiry, but the government made no response.

If Wran could plead bad luck in appointing the corrupt Merv Wood, his problems with another police officer, Bill Allen, were all of his own making. Apparently impressed by the way Allen cleaned up a tow-truck scandal, he twice promoted Allen over more senior officers and against opposition within the force. Thanks to this patronage, Allen became deputy commissioner in August 1981.

Allen’s brazen behaviour in the job suggested he felt untouchable. On numerous occasions he met with Abe Saffron at police headquarters. He and his family accepted free trips and hospitality in Macau and Las Vegas from illegal gambling interests. He tried to bribe a junior police officer with five payments amounting to $2500 in cash.

Allen’s career came to an abrupt end in 1982 after the release of a damning Police Tribunal report. Then, according to Steketee and Cockburn, the government made “what amounted to a deal with Allen.” In return for not contesting the charges, he was demoted to sergeant first class but allowed to retire and retain his pension. This, of course, meant that his conduct was never publicly explored.

The government had just secured a huge victory in the 1981 election, and was in a position of political strength. But the scandal produced the first instance of the extravagant, partisan invective that became more common in later years. When National Party Leader Leon Punch said that Allen was Wran’s bagman, Wran replied in spades: “Last week I called you a piece of slime. Now I call you a cur, a coward.” This unedifying spectacle covered the fact that no effort was being made to probe Allen’s actions and relationships.

Wran later complained that the Allen affair “was built up into a big issue,” and that Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser “went on a destruct and destroy course” against him, thus thwarting his hopes of moving into federal politics. This is baseless special pleading: a blatantly corrupt deputy commissioner would always have been a big issue, and it was commonplace for federal ministers to brief journalists about state developments.

When Clarrie Briese was appointed chief stipendiary magistrate in March 1979, his predecessor invited him to dinner. Briese later concluded that all four of his fellow diners — retiring chief magistrate Murray Farquhar, police commissioner Merv Wood, lawyer to organised crime Morgan Ryan, and High Court judge and former federal attorney-general Lionel Murphy — were corrupt.

Evidence of the corruption of Wood, Ryan and Farquhar manifested itself immediately. Farquhar’s last case involved drug charges against two men, Roy Cessna and Timothy Milner, represented by Ryan. Wood intervened by radically reducing the estimated value of the drugs seized by police, which allowed Farquhar to deal with the matter summarily — and more lightly — rather than referring it to a criminal trial. Before hearing the case Farquhar thoughtfully shifted to a courtroom with no sound-recording equipment — a move, writes Briese, that left the police prosecutor indignant and helpless.

Of all Farquhar’s suspect cases, this is the only one in which the corrupt motive seems to have been purely financial. Otherwise, his motive seems to have been primarily political or personal.

Farquhar’s judicial dexterity would first have impressed Wran while Labor was still in opposition. News Limited wanted to build a printery on land it owned in Botany, but the local council was planning to convert the area to residential use. Labor offered to intercede on behalf of News — rather zealously, it seems, for in 1975 charges were laid against the local state MP, Laurie Brereton, and Labor official Geoff Cahill for attempting to influence four Labor councillors. Brereton allegedly offered them money if they voted the right way and disendorsement if they didn’t.

Farquhar found the evidence against Cahill too weak and dismissed his charge. But while he found a prima facie case of bribery against Brereton, he deftly decided that the Local Government Act took precedence over the common law crime of bribery, and that under that act a charge had to be laid within six months, meaning it was now too late to proceed. Moves were made to revive the prosecution, but after Labor won the 1976 election the new attorney-general, Frank Walker, ruled on a technicality that the case could not proceed.

Brereton escaped a trial. It is a leap to then declare, as Wran’s former press secretary Brian Dale did, that the allegations were “tested and rejected in court.”

The magistrate’s next unorthodox intervention came after Wran had become premier. In a unique and vexatious private prosecution, Sydney solicitor Danny Sankey issued a summons against Gough Whitlam and his ministers Jim Cairns, Rex Connor and Lionel Murphy for conspiring to deceive the governor-general over the loans affair, which had created enormous controversy in the lead-up to Sir John Kerr’s dismissal of Whitlam. The case opened in the Queanbeyan Court on the Monday before the 1975 federal election and continued — despite having little or no legal merit — until early 1979.

In 1977 the case was being heard by magistrate Darcy Leo. A Labor MP had attacked Sankey and Leo in parliament, and Leo had sued the Sydney Morning Herald for defamation for its report. Farquhar visited him in Queanbeyan and convinced him to withdraw from the case. Farquhar took over, but Sankey appealed against the change and Leo was reinstated. So Farquhar’s intervention didn’t materially change things, though there was speculation that his aim was to help the Labor defendants.

Wran’s devotion to Farquhar was tested in March 1978, when the National Times reported that George Freeman had been ordered out of Randwick racecourse as a disreputable character, having entered as a guest of Farquhar. Farquhar argued that he had bought the ticket at the request of a doctor, Nick Paltos, and didn’t know it was for Freeman. (Paltos was later convicted and imprisoned for drug offences.)

Justice minister Ron Mulock didn’t want Farquhar to return to the bench until he had given a satisfactory account of his relationship with Freeman. Farquhar initially declined on the grounds that he was suing the newspaper for defamation. Wran thought this was a valid reason; Mulock did not. Wran called Mulock to his office, where he was confronted by half a dozen senior ministers. Mulock stood his ground. As he left, Wran said, “Well, you’re on your own now and it won’t be forgotten.” Eventually Farquhar resumed his duties.

A year earlier Farquhar had made another decision that was to become a much bigger media focus than any other corruption issue during Wran’s premiership.

On 30 April 1983, the ABC’s Four Corners reported that a charge of embezzlement against rugby league chief executive Kevin Humphreys had been dismissed because Farquhar, professing to be acting on Wran’s instructions, had pressured a magistrate to drop the case.

Wran immediately sued the ABC for defamation and used the prospective court case as a reason for not answering any questions. A week later the magistrate who dismissed Humphreys’s case, Kevin Jones, made a statement that Farquhar had told him that “the premier has contacted me. He wants Kevin Humphreys discharged.”

This confirmed the central premise of the program: that Farquhar had told other magistrates that the premier was on the phone and he wanted Humphreys discharged. Clearly the most important sources for the program were the magistrates who heard Farquhar say this. Attorney-general Paul Landa demanded Wran step down and call a royal commission, which Wran did. Landa, and perhaps some other ministers, appear to have thought that Wran was probably guilty.

After two months of public hearings attracting saturation media coverage, chief justice Sir Laurence Street concluded that Wran was not involved, and he resumed the office of premier. One telling piece of evidence in Wran’s favour was that his diary showed that at the time Farquhar said he was on the phone the premier was in a meeting with Treasury officials and his economic advisers.

Street also ruled that Farquhar had tried to pervert the course of justice and should stand trial. Farquhar was subsequently convicted and served time in prison. Humphreys had to stand trial again, was convicted, and had to pay a fine.

The exoneration of Wran has often led his supporters to be dismissive of the whole Four Corners report. Former Wran staffer Graham Freudenberg, for instance, asserted in his memoirs that “the Four Corners ‘re-enactment’ was based on a fabrication… The ABC swallowed it hook, line and sinker.” The reporter, Chris Masters, maintains that “in all important respects the program was correct.” It accurately reported that there had been a perversion of justice, and that Farquhar had invoked Wran’s name.

On the day of his acquittal Wran held a media conference targeting the ABC and its “blot on the history of so-called investigative reporting.” On four or five occasions journalists asked Wran questions relating to Farquhar and the fact that the chief magistrate had invoked the premier’s name. Each time Wran redirected the question to the sins of the ABC.

Wran had sat through testimony by several magistrates that Farquhar had used his name. He also heard testimony about the close relationship between George Freeman and Farquhar, which showed the magistrate had a very profitable betting relationship with the crime figure. (This also showed that Farquhar had lied to Wran and Mulock about his relationship with Freeman a few years earlier.)

Yet Wran refused to utter a word of criticism of Farquhar, and neither he nor Street showed any curiosity about Farquhar’s motives for his corrupt behaviour. Nor did Wran show any interest in what Farquhar’s behaviour revealed about the administration of justice in New South Wales. As Masters commented, all who knew the case — including much of the NSW magistracy — believed the premier was involved. That belief “was a cancer that had been eating away at the NSW judiciary for six years.”

Many observers have said that the royal commission brought an enduring change in Wran’s attitudes, permanently reducing his enthusiasm for the role of premier. It also signalled an enduring rise in the prominence of corruption issues in NSW politics.

While Wran was still standing down, federal sources informed his deputy, Jack Ferguson, and police chief, Cec Abbott, of evidence that the state’s prisons minister, Rex Jackson, was accepting bribes connected with an early-release scheme he had introduced. Half-hearted internal investigations followed.

After Nick Greiner aired the allegations of bribery, Ferguson announced an inquiry. Then, in October 1983, federal opposition leader Andrew Peacock made much more specific allegations. Finally, the Fairfax weekly, the National Times, obtained incriminating information from Federal Police phone taps and on the morning of 26 October put detailed questions to the premier’s and the prison minister’s offices. That afternoon Wran, back as premier, demanded Jackson’s resignation.

The government’s stonewalling had certainly not disposed of the Jackson issue, and the fact that it was constantly on the back foot possibly increased the damage. Jackson eventually became the first prisons minister in Australian history to go to prison. Wran knew nothing about his minister’s corruption, but the resulting scandal further heightened the tension around corruption issues.

Allegations of corruption were becoming more frequent. When the National Times reported that secret police tapes revealed the identity of a Mr Fix-it for organised criminals, the Wran government’s initial reaction was to “feign disinterest,” which — according to Steketee and Cockburn — had become its favourite strategy.

At the same time, two other new allegations of corruption were made: investigative journalist Bob Bottom said that a NSW magistrate had conspired with a criminal figure to have a charge dismissed; and deputy federal National Party leader Ian Sinclair said that figures connected with the NSW government had said charges against him could be dropped if he paid $50,000.

Sensing that both claims were false, Wran moved immediately. He set up a commission of inquiry under Justice Ronald Cross to examine these two charges as well as the Jackson bribes. Cross disposed of Bottom and Sinclair quickly and absolutely. “The Spanish Inquisition would not have convicted the devil himself” on the kind of evidence Sinclair had given, he declared.

During the Cross commission, Bottom handed over a thick file on NSW police phone taps. The reaction was swift, Steketee and Cockburn write: “Three days later, the government announced through the Sunday newspapers new laws making it an offence to knowingly be in possession of a transcript or other records… of a private conversation illegally heard or recorded by a listening device.” Facing a penalty of up to five years’ jail, Bottom took the tapes to Melbourne, which is why this essentially New South Wales story was first published in the Age.

The last big corruption scandal of the Wran era came to be known as the Age tapes. It began dramatically on 2 February 1984 with a front-page story titled “Network of Influence,” based on tapes and transcripts gathered illegally by NSW police officers. No doubt sensitive to the possibilities of a defamation suit, the Age didn’t mention any names, focusing on audio recordings of Mr Fix-it and his dealings with a judge. Later, under parliamentary privilege, the crime figure was revealed to be Morgan Ryan and the judge Lionel Murphy.

Even before the names emerged, Wran was condemning the publication using two main lines of attack. The first was to say the tapes were phoney. The second — not necessarily consistent with the first — was to declare that those responsible for the taping should be jailed given that it was “the most illicit, illegal and despicable affair in Australian history.” Wran focused entirely on the illegality of the taping and, beyond calling them fakes, showed no interest in the tapes’ contents.

On the basis of Wran’s statements, the officers in the Crime Intelligence Unit who had made the recordings decided to deny all involvement. Much of the equipment was destroyed, as were many tapes and transcripts. Eventually a royal commission under Justice Donald Stewart offered the police officers immunity from prosecution, and later decided the tapes were genuine but the officers’ summaries were not sufficiently reliable to be used in criminal proceedings. Wran’s interventions had caused not only a long delay but also the destruction of much potentially valuable evidence.

The phone tapping was not the rogue operation that Wran’s comments suggested. Its origins went back to 1967, when police commissioner Norm Allan was looking for more effective ways to attack organised crime. NSW police were impressed by the FBI’s techniques for targeting and tracking such suspects, and a series of police commissioners handed the system down to their successors.

Justice Stewart concluded that some convictions would never have occurred if the unlawful interceptions had not helped in the gathering of evidence. Journalist Evan Whitton offered two cases: the first, the arrest in January 1978 of Wood’s old sculling partner, Murray Stewart Riley, and his conviction, with nine others, for attempting to import drugs; the second, the arrests in Bangkok of Warren Fellows, Paul Hayward and William Sinclair on heroin charges in October 1978 based on information gained by a phone tap on notorious crime figure “Neddy” Smith. As Justice Athol Moffitt, who led the first royal commission into organised crime in 1973, wrote later, “It seems clear the illegality of the tapes was not complained of for some years until politically damaging contents were published in the Age.”

With the fallout from the Age tapes threatening to run for months, and with the respite offered by Justice Cross’s findings on the false allegations, Wran seized the political initiative and called an early election for March. Labor won, but with a much reduced majority. Afterwards Wran made the double-edged boast that if he had had the material Greiner had, he would have won easily, and that the opposition dropped the ball by taking its eye off corruption issues.

Justice Murphy’s figuring in the phone taps began a series of political and judicial processes to explore his behaviour. A Senate committee was convened in late March 1984 and reported in August, split along party lines. A four-person second committee was formed in September and split three ways, with the chair, Labor’s Michael Tate, and Australian Democrat senator Don Chipp concluding that on the balance of probabilities Murphy was guilty of misbehaviour sufficiently serious to warrant removal from the bench.

On the basis of testimony given to the Senate committees by Briese and by Justice Paul Flannery, the federal director of public prosecutions, Ian Temby, decided to lay charges against Murphy. The first trial began in June 1985, and in July the jury found Murphy guilty of one charge but not the other. In a second trial in April 1986, Murphy was found not guilty, but controversially chose to make an unsworn statement — a procedure introduced to protect the illiterate — that allowed him to avoid cross-examination. Murphy wanted to return to his position on the High Court, but several of his fellow judges resisted. A parliamentary inquiry into allegations of misbehaviour was closed down when Murphy was diagnosed with cancer, and his death in October brought a huge outpouring of sympathy.

With the election behind him, and with his friend Murphy squarely in legal and political sights, Wran’s rhetoric became increasingly reckless. After Briese testified at the second Senate committee, Wran said, “His evidence raises grave questions about him, his conduct and his future. Obviously a very large question must now be hanging over him and his position as chief magistrate.” After Murphy was found not guilty at the second trial, Wran said of Briese, “He hasn’t enjoyed my confidence for a while but all the less because of this verdict.” He also suggested Briese was having secret dealings with the Liberal Party.

Wran’s statements moved several figures to come to Briese’s defence. Federal Labor attorney-general Lionel Bowen said Briese had his confidence, and Sir Laurence Street and five other Supreme Court judges wrote to Wran saying there was not the slightest justification for any action against Briese. Temby decided Wran should be charged with contempt of court.

Despite his outraged rhetoric, it should be remembered that Wran does not figure directly in the police tapes and transcripts at all. Ryan is heard talking to Farquhar, to Murphy and to Saffron. Wran figures only as a shadowy presence whom others talk about. Indeed at one point, Ryan tells a friend that Wran is straight.

The only claim against Wran himself in this controversy was made by Senior Sergeant Paul Egge, who said he had seen a transcript of Wran saying he would help Abe Saffron get the Luna Park lease. There is no trace of this transcript anywhere, and Egge said it was destroyed by his supervisor because it was “too hot.” This is the only such reference I have seen to a transcript being destroyed because it was “too hot.”

In sum, the Age tapes provided no evidence of Wran engaging in any corrupt behaviour. But his violent rhetorical responses were central to how the public controversy developed, and undermined any hope of a rational and informed debate.

Corruption became a running sore in the last years of Wran’s premiership. The simplest explanation for why this happened is that Wran himself was corrupt. Some closely involved people decided this was the case: Briese says that he, investigative reporter Bob Bottom, and state Labor minister Barrie Unsworth all “came to suspect that Wran himself was part of the problem of corruption in NSW, and for that reason was not interested in a conclusion.”

But Briese produces no evidence. He relates how, when he became chief magistrate, Farquhar asked whether he would handle sensitive cases for the premier, and said that such requests would come through Morgan Ryan, but Briese later writes that no such cases ever came.

When we are trying to decide whether a political leader or a government is corrupt, we are faced by two opposite but equally important obstacles. One is the secrecy surrounding corrupt behaviour. The other is that false accusations and groundless rumours aren’t unusual, especially about successful politicians.

Despite gossip to the contrary, no persuasive evidence exists to support the view that Wran was corrupt in the sense of seeking personal financial gain. Nor is there persuasive evidence that Wran directly or indirectly sought to advance any criminal interests, or had any direct or indirect relationships with such criminals.

What is offered as evidence of Wran’s corruption can sometimes be laughable. Herald Sun journalist and co-author of Underbelly, Andrew Rule, recounts that a businessman who knew Wran saw Saffron waiting in a brasserie presumably to have lunch with someone, then saw Wran walk in, look around and walk out again.

The greatest question mark hanging over Wran’s behaviour was his loyalty to Murray Farquhar. Wran never offered a word of criticism, even though staying silent flew in the face of clear evidence, defied colleagues and risked a political price. Perhaps this was because they had had corrupt transactions. If so, there were very few of them (although that would not excuse them) and they would amount to a very tiny tip of a much larger iceberg of controversy.

Wran’s ten-year premiership was a period of transition. Before it came the entrenched, unchallengeable corruption of the Askin era. A decade after Wran’s departure, important reforms had been enacted, creating a politically independent director of public prosecutions, an Independent Commission Against Corruption, the very thorough Wood royal commission into police corruption, and reforms to the police force.

Characteristically, Wran vociferously criticised the establishment of ICAC and predicted an incrimination free-for-all. “Each one will feed the crocodile in the hope that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last,” he said. “Under cover of fighting the evils of crime and corruption, we may discover we have forfeited the basic freedoms which distinguish the democratic system from a totalitarian state.” This is not only an inaccurate prediction of how ICAC developed, it also neatly overlooks that such bodies also protect citizens’ rights against the abuse of executive power.

Wran’s recalcitrance on corruption issues is best explained by his political strategies and inclinations. He played party politics harder than most. Justice Donald Stewart, in many ways an admirer, also thought “Wran was a good hater.” Wran played his politics so hard that he refused even to speak to Nick Greiner, except once at a public function in 1985 when he roundly abused him.

Wran’s political strategy was to control the public agenda. Corruption allegations were a threat to this aim, and so his first inclination was to contain their damage. But this meant that he consistently gave a higher priority to political expedience than to public accountability, and his responses more often hindered than helped any efforts to increase transparency and secure meaningful reforms.

Wran’s strategy was not simply an attempt at political pragmatism that failed. It resulted from a moral compass indifferent to the larger issues that corruption posed for the health of a democracy. •

The post Was Neville Wran corrupt? appeared first on Inside Story.

During the 2019 campaign, the Coalition successfully branded Labor’s franked dividend proposals a “retiree tax” and its negative gearing and capital gains tax proposals a “housing tax.” Labor was even accused of supporting a “death tax.” Leader Bill Shorten’s big-spending plans were badged as “the Bill Australia can’t afford,” and the party was also accused of betraying blue-collar workers in regional mining communities by supporting a Greens agenda.

As a result, Labor has abandoned its negative gearing and capital gains tax policies, having disavowed its franked dividend plan earlier this year. Now it has announced its support for Coalition tax cuts that will benefit higher-income earners, including men over women, and Albanese has assured coalminers of Labor’s support for their jobs and employment rights.

Of course, abandoning taxes and supporting tax cuts means losing the revenue that helps fund government programs. Albanese has tried to neutralise domestic opposition by arguing that additional revenue will be generated by “making sure” multinationals pay their share of tax, though the practicalities of doing that haven’t been made clear.

These reversals have led to disquiet within the party. But Albanese’s rationale, in Michelle Grattan’s words, is that “whatever policies Labor has, they are useless unless it can win power.” Grattan cites Gough Whitlam’s pragmatic argument against the Victorian Labor left of his day: “the impotent are pure,” he declared, but only electable parties can implement policies. It may be no coincidence that Albanese tweeted “We miss you” on the recent 105th anniversary of Whitlam’s birth.

Whitlam was no stranger to fear campaigns. During their long years in opposition, he and his colleagues fell victim to Coalition-fuelled fear campaigns, including the fear of socialism and communism that had been used to defeat the Labor government of Ben Chifley in 1949.

Whitlam also wrote about how the fear of China played a major role in Australian politics. Fifty years on, during the 2019 election, the Coalition charged Labor with being soft on China. Albanese has acted to neutralise such accusations by endorsing US foreign policy approaches under Joe Biden and critiquing China on human rights and the South China Sea, while also arguing for improved Australia–China relations.

Whitlam argued that the role of government should be “to reduce fear, not raise it,” signalling that his party, if elected, would deal with the fear of unemployment, the fear of poverty in old age, the fear of being unable to afford necessary health treatment, and the fear of educational disadvantage for one’s children. In other words, Whitlam pledged, like most social democratic leaders, to make citizens feel secure and protected.

Albanese has been doing his best to hose down potential fear campaigns against Labor. But has he done enough to encourage those positive emotions, to make voters feel that a Labor government will look after them?

Labor has certainly exploited Scott Morrison’s “protective masculinity” fail on Covid by suggesting it would do a better job of managing the pandemic and keeping Australians safe. Labor’s message that Morrison has failed in his two main tasks — quarantine and the vaccine rollout — appears to be cutting through and is reflected in the polls, where it is currently ahead 53–47 on a two-party-preferred basis.

Labor hopes that the blokey image of “Albo” will help to counter the equally blokey one of “ScoMo,” including among male blue-collar voters. It has made a major effort to humanise “Albo” by reminding us how he was raised by a single mother in council housing and arguing that his background drives his commitment to social justice for ordinary Australians.

Albanese pledges to tackle traditional social democratic issues such as infrastructure and education, and ensuring better-paid and more secure employment. He emphasises that “Labor will always fight to protect your job and your rights at work.” Partly to counter business-funded fear campaigns, though, he has also pledged to consult with industry to create the conditions for full and secure employment. As I argued earlier this year, that cooperation may turn out to be more difficult than Albanese suggests, given that Labor wishes to increase wages and improve working conditions.

Despite his efforts, Albanese’s latest Newspoll satisfaction rating was five points lower than in March, and he still trails Morrison as better prime minister 36–49. Australians may be hearing Labor’s critique of the Morrison government’s pandemic performance, but are the positive messages about Anthony Albanese, and what he represents, cutting through?

Neutralising Coalition fear campaigns against Labor is not sufficient. If Labor wants to increase its chances of winning the next election, it needs to make voters feel that it is Labor, rather than the Coalition, that will protect them and create a better future. As Whitlam was aware, that means government action to reduce everyday fears regarding incomes, jobs, health, welfare and equal opportunities. Anthony Albanese needs to be seen as the leader who can deliver that; otherwise, Labor may face yet another “miracle” win by the Coalition. •

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It remains to be seen whether these shifts will help Labor win the next election. The initial reaction was not promising, with an Essential poll reporting a sharp decline from 41 to 34 per cent in favourability for Anthony Albanese. And despite an appalling month for Scott Morrison, his commanding lead as preferred PM was unchanged.

We shouldn’t make too much of this. It’s always difficult to attribute changes in polls to particular current events, though this is exactly what the Labor “hardheads” have done in attributing the party’s narrow loss in 2019 to particular tax policies. By the same logic, it will be hard to disentangle the effects of Labor’s tax policies whether it wins or loses next year.

What can be said with more certainty is that, even if Labor wins the 2022 election, its capitulation on tax policy will make holding office for more than one term very difficult. The concession on negative gearing, while regrettable, was mainly symbolic. The lost revenue could be made up in other ways, or else with tolerance of a modestly higher budget deficit.

But the tax cuts are big. They will cost the budget around $15 billion in their first year of operation and the cost will rise steadily after that. That’s more than the entire annual value of the spending commitments Labor took to the 2019 election, which would have reached $11 billion in 2022–23, according to the Parliamentary Budget Office.

In other words, to offset this concession, Labor would need to abandon its entire program, and then find even more savings.

Richard Denniss and Matt Grudnoff of the Australia Institute have argued for a “Buffett rule,” inspired by American billionaire Warren Buffett’s views on the responsibilities of the rich, which would apply a minimum rate of tax on income for high-income earners before deductions. Although Anthony Albanese has advocated such a policy in the past, it’s hard to see him putting this, or any other new tax policy, forward before the election.

The other option is to allow the budget deficit to expand further. But the scope to do this is limited by the productive capacity of the economy. Unless employment can be increased greatly, additional recurrent public spending must come either at the expense of private spending or through higher imports. Domestic shortages or a fall in the Australian dollar will then cause inflation, reducing the real value of both public and private expenditure.

In this context, it’s worth pointing out the fallacy of claims by some (not all) economists associated with Modern Monetary Theory that tax cuts for “the rich” don’t fuel inflation because rich people don’t respond to changes in their income by spending more. Households with incomes between $200,000 and $400,000 have plenty of ways to spend more money, whether in Australia or overseas. And having paid down debt during the pandemic, many will be eager to spend any government largesse.

Labor is already preparing to be a do-nothing government. Announcing the party’s decision on the stage three tax cuts, shadow treasurer Jim Chalmers said Labor would be more responsible in its spending than the Coalition. “We think we can get better value for money for the Australian people. That means spending it more effectively on some of the priorities that we’ve identified.” In practical terms, this means that any new spending will be financed by cuts to other programs.

Labor will instead campaign on the argument that the Morrison government deserves to be kicked out for its failures in dealing with the pandemic. While that’s a fair judgement and a plausible election strategy, it’s scarcely a basis on which to form an effective government.

What options are open to those who would like to see a genuinely progressive government? The logical alternative is the Greens, a party that has long been closer to traditional social-democratic views than Labor. But it has remained stuck at around 10 per cent of the vote nationally.

There seem to be three main reasons for this ceiling on the Greens vote. First, there is an enduring association with a flaky New Age image. The pandemic ought to have dispelled this to some extent: rather than being dreadlocked Greens-voting hippies, the anti-vaxxers are dominated by the political right, including prominent government backbenchers like Matt Canavan and George Christensen. Labor hasn’t been spectacularly good either, most notably in Anthony Albanese’s attempts to work both sides of the street on AstraZeneca hesitancy. On economic policy, the Greens have been consistent and principled, unlike either of the major parties.

The second problem is that many people, including many political commentators, fail to understand how the preferential voting system works and imagine that a primary vote for Labor is more effective than a first-preference vote for the Greens with Labor ranked second. In the usual case, where the Greens finish behind Labor, the two ways of voting are effectively the same. And in the rare case where the Greens finish ahead of Labor, they are more likely to attract (mainly Labor) preferences and defeat the Coalition candidate.

The final obstacle to a Greens vote is rusted-on identity politics of the kind exemplified by Albanese himself, who regularly appears to equate voting Labor with barracking for the (traditionally working-class) South Sydney Rabbitohs. On this view of politics, Labor’s adoption of right-wing tax and expenditure policies is of no more importance than a decision by the Rabbitohs to poach players from the (traditionally silvertailed) Sydney Roosters. It’s loyalty to the team that matters.

Only the threat of losing seats to the Greens (and particularly seats that can’t be dismissed as being filled with inner-city elites) is likely to divert Labor from its current course. In the absence of that unlikely event, we can look forward to years of right-wing government, alternating between two parties with no higher ambition than to buy votes with tax cuts. •

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It’s not just that they keep their plans close to their chest because their priority is to take office. It’s mostly because circumstances determine what governments do. The world inflicts events on countries, and governments respond in certain ways. It’s true, though, that the nature of the people and party is revealed in their response. Hawke didn’t go the full Thatcher–Reagan route; his government was more considerate of people at the bottom of the economic ladder.

You can repeat this exercise for all prime ministers. As former independent MP Tony Windsor told the Guardian’s Katharine Murphy, “the moment maketh the man.” It was her article, pondering what kind of prime minister Anthony Albanese would make, that set in train the thoughts outlined here.

The answer to Murphy’s question is simple: it depends on what happens. Being opposition leader requires a totally different skill set from that needed to be prime minister. Kevin Rudd’s downfall is partly explained by his inability to shake off the “small target” strategy that had been useful on one side of the chamber but wasn’t on the other. Between 2013 and 2019, shadow treasurer Chris Bowen seemed to think channelling treasurer Paul Keating was sound politics. If you’re in opposition and you really must emulate the greats of the past (though actually you really shouldn’t) then you should be looking at how they got into office rather than what they did when they got there.

Would Albanese, if elected, go down in history as a great prime minister? Will Scott Morrison? Longevity in office is a requirement, and that mostly relies on a buoyant economy, which in turn depends largely on what’s happening overseas. Howard enjoyed the developed world’s longest period of growth since the postwar boom. And while the 1980s had its economic challenges, it also constituted a boom. Then the 1990–91 recession hit and… next thing you know, we have a new prime minister.

Morrison at the moment is like Paul Keating after 1993 — one more win and we can declare him truly unbeatable — although without any signs of having an ambitious agenda.

Over the past eighteen months the coronavirus has propped up and heightened the authority of government leaders of both stripes. But the story has been more complicated on the opposition benches, where we’ve seen clear partisan divergences. Liberal oppositions, wherever they are, have been forced by their party rooms and support bases into politically disastrous calls to end lockdowns and open up borders. Labor oppositions have merely been reduced to carping on the sidelines — the usual opposition’s lot, only more so.

The next election on the calendar is the federal one, either this year or next. The main question is whether the Covid incumbency factor extends to that sphere. Opinion polls suggest not, or maybe just a bit.

Morrison’s nightmare would be that the state and territory governments provide sufficient security to keep voters feeling comfortable. With them in control, changing horses at the federal level is not a big risk. On top of that, the federal government’s star has waned, and it is now being blamed for the poor vaccine rollout even by the Coalition government in New South Wales.

Forget the nonsense about primary votes and leaders’ personal ratings; if recent opinion poll results were repeated at the ballot box, Labor would very likely win the national two-party-preferred vote, deprive the government of its majority and maybe take office in its own right. We don’t know how “accurate” those polls are, of course.

Would it assist Labor’s election cause to change leaders? It probably would, but not for the reason you might think. Obviously it would depend whom the party turns to. The best choice would be Tanya Plibersek: her elevation would produce a honeymoon — a surge in Labor voting-intention figures (at the expense of both the Greens and the Coalition) and in the leader’s ratings — and observers would marvel at her difference from her predecessor. Commentators would declare her a breath of fresh air who has “cut through.” Her “message,” presumably some Bidenesque rhetoric about making things in Australia again, would enjoy wide appeal.

But eventually that would all settle down. Both she and Albanese have their strengths and weaknesses; the equation would return to the status quo ante. We prefer Labor on health and education, its plan sounds appealing, but can it be trusted with the economy? Will it cause me financial stress?

The real benefit of a leadership change would be an end to the subtle destabilisation of Albanese — by Joel Fitzgibbon most obviously, but also by the phone box’s worth of Bill Shorten supporters who, every so often, seem almost about to declare their hand. These troublemakers would accept that they’re stuck with the new leader until the election.

With an election on the horizon, it would be your typical killing-season change: a Tony Abbott (2009), Rudd (2006), Mark Latham (2003) or Howard (1995). Stretching further back we get Andrew Peacock (1989) and Hawke (1983). A mixed bag in terms of eventual success, but all could boast a largely united post-coup team.

And for an opposition, that kind of unity is not to be sneezed at. •

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But it turns out the hapless Debnam was unintentionally playing the long game. By letting them win, he helped destroy an entire generation of Labor politicians.

Labor, now even more on the nose, was massacred at the following election in 2011. When the blood finally dried, just twenty seats were left to its name. If the party had lost as expected in 2007, the defeat would doubtless have been smaller and the political fallout more manageable.

Since then, the party has churned through six leaders in ten years. The latest, Chris Minns, seized the toxic tankard from Jodi McKay just last week.

On the face of it, the forty-one-year-old Minns’s elevation looks like much-needed generational change. He was brought up in the Sydney suburb of St George, went to the University of New England and then attended Princeton University, where he gained a master’s degree in public policy. He’s worked in the charity sector and as a firefighter. For a time, he was a stay-at-home dad.

Refreshingly, Minns says he wants to fight the Berejiklian government with a positive agenda. Speaking of his Coalition opponents, he told the Sydney Morning Herald, “I think I can make my point, criticise them and engage in a debate… and then we can joke about it as we get off the [parliament] floor.”

But dig a little deeper and Minns’s career path looks more like that of any other ambitious Labor MP. He joined the party when he was eighteen, and as a good Catholic boy — he still attends mass — became part of the right faction. He was president of Young Labor and did a stint in local government as Hurstville’s deputy mayor. He spent time in Sussex Street as assistant general secretary of the party’s NSW branch and worked as a ministerial adviser in Macquarie Street.

Elected to parliament for Kogarah in early 2015, his first tilt at the leadership came in late 2018, when he lost to Michael Daley. He had another go in June 2019, this time losing to Jodi McKay.

His career looks like a series of strategic moves by a man with his eye on the prize. Back in the 1990s, a teenage Chris Minns was surely sitting in his bedroom avidly reading about the superstars of the NSW Labor right — Paul Keating, Laurie Brereton, Bob Carr — while taking careful notes.

He also knows how to get things done in the modern party. Under Labor’s rules, a leadership spill is decided by a vote of both caucus and the membership. It can be a lengthy, life-sapping process. Labor MP Penny Sharpe, for example, was interim leader for 135 days before Jodi McKay was declared party leader in 2019.

But if a candidate is unopposed, there is no need to delay things by involving the membership. And that’s exactly what happened.

Back in March, unions friendly to Minns supplied the media with polling figures that “showed” McKay was unelectable. Last month’s Upper Hunter by-election was built up into a leadership test for McKay — though Labor hasn’t won the seat since 1910. Labor elders Morris Iemma and former foreign minister Laurie Brereton lobbied the waverers in caucus on behalf of Minns.

If the leadership vote had gone to the membership, the Minns ascension might have got a bit nasty.

In the early days of the challenge a document titled “Why Chris Minns and Jamie Clements Can Never Run the NSW Labor Party” was circulated within the party. Clements is the disgraced former secretary of the NSW branch who resigned in the wake of sexual harassment claims in 2016. The Independent Commission Against Corruption subsequently heard evidence that he had been given an Aldi bag stuffed with $100,000 in cash by a Chinese property developer. Clements is a friend of Chris Minns, and the godfather to one of his sons, according to the new leader’s 2015 inaugural speech to parliament.

After a decade in the wilderness, Minns’s party is divided and demoralised. Former leaders Jodi McKay and Michael Daley still sit in caucus. And the Berejiklian government, for all its faults, is beloved for its handling of the pandemic. Another wipe-out for Labor in 2023 isn’t out of the question.

But there is one possible bright spot for Minns. ICAC has not been kind to Liberal premiers; both Nick Greiner and Barry O’Farrell lost their jobs because of ICAC scandals. Last October the voters of New South Wales discovered that their saintly premier, Gladys Berejiklian, had conducted a long, secret affair with the subject of an ICAC inquiry, former Liberal MP Daryl Maguire.

ICAC has yet to hand down its report on Maguire. For Berejiklian it could be a bombshell, or a damp squib. Minns must be praying for the former. •

The post Sixth time lucky? appeared first on Inside Story.

A swing to the National Party of roughly three percentage points has politicians scrambling over journalists to make the most portentous declaration about Labor’s future. Needless to say, Joel Fitzgibbon, the disgruntled MP whose electorate of Hunter shares half the name of the state one, is the go-to man.

In the mad scramble, Upper Hunter, an electorate Labor hasn’t held since the second decade of the last century, has suddenly become the party’s “base.”

As I’ve written many times here, by-election results tell us nothing about parties’ electoral prospects. With so little at stake, electors feel free to vote on all sorts of things. The results usually swing to oppositions, but whether they do or not, they have zero predictive power.

Off a primary vote of 31 per cent, and with around 55 per cent after preferences, it’s actually a historically mediocre vote for the Nationals. The “swing” was off a suppressed vote in 2019, when Shooters, Fishers and Farmers candidate Lee Watts, a high-profile local councillor, received 22 per cent of the primary vote and issued how-to-vote cards recommending that voters who “want change” should put the Nationals last. (Watts also kept the Nationals’ 2015 vote down when she ran as an independent.)

The usual suspects are out, intoning about a Labor “brand” caught up for too many years in trendy issues like climate change and, according to Fitzgibbon, anti-racism. You know the script: “not listening to the regions,” losing “blue collar” voters, and inevitably Western Sydney pops up. They said the same after Tasmania’s Liberal government was re-elected on 1 May, but curiously sat out big Labor victories in Western Australia, Queensland, the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory over the past year. Which, together with Labor-held Victoria, account for a majority of the Australian electorate.

Something about this “brand” theme doesn’t quite work.

Now, it’s true that the NSW Labor opposition isn’t looking good, but we know that from the statewide opinion polls. And anyway, which opposition of either stripe is doing well in our Covid times?

South Australian Labor has only been trailing a little in 2020–21 YouGov polls. And federal Labor, actually the healthiest-looking of any Australian opposition, is generally about even, or a little ahead. But the polls were terribly wrong at the 2019 election, and we have no particular reason to believe their creators have lifted their game. In the United States, polls were out in 2016 and, after four years of introspection and methodological tweaking, were out again in 2020, by about the same amount in the same direction.

Naturally the consensus is that Upper Hunter is bad news for Labor leader Anthony Albanese — which is true, but only because so many people, including impressionable caucus members, believe it.

The Morrison government, meanwhile, is giving every indication it is in no rush to see this Covid business over, at least until after the next election, which may well be this year. It’s disturbing to contemplate any government deliberately damaging the country by prolonging the pandemic. But what are we to make of its behaviour? Health minister Greg Hunt was verballed somewhat on Friday, but only somewhat, when he gave the impression he’d be quite comfortable for older people to wait for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines later in the year.

The government’s nightmare must be that its Covid-heightened authority, which has seen spectacular results at second-tier elections, is mostly just that — a second-tier phenomenon, with premiers and chief ministers soaking it all up. And if, as some theories have it, the next election is held just as mRNA vaccines are finally raining on the country, might voters believe that, with their strong premier firmly in control, a change of federal government wouldn’t make much difference?

The Upper Hunter’s big danger for Labor is that it strengthens the party’s conviction that electoral salvation can be found in the minuscule percentage of the population involved in mining. Parties get into trouble when they fetishise subgroups over the broader electorate. •

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Probably the least useful version simply transposes the advice-giver’s own preferences onto the wider electorate. So person A demands that Labor announce a slew of policies what he or she would like to see. It’s surprisingly common in mainstream punditry and — not surprisingly — across social media.

Then there is the command that Labor must “stand for something!” and “seize the agenda!” In the real world, voters find too much swashbuckling from oppositions rather off-putting.

Anthony Albanese’s budget reply speech on Thursday night is (as I write) attracting predictably bad reviews. Predictable because hopes had been high for some derring-do, a bit of “cut-through” and “passion.” Laura Tingle on the ABC’s 7.30 found it “flat” and David Crowe in the Nine papers reckons it was “far too cautious in the middle of a pandemic that requires big ideas from both sides of politics.” For Dennis Shanahan in the Australian “the opposition leader’s new policy offerings neither sink the budget nor offer an exciting alternative.”

But can anyone recall an opposition leader’s sudden “big idea” or “exciting alternative” delivering the electoral goods?

Of course, many Labor true believers just wanted Albanese, faced with the Morrison government’s spendathon, to go further, nationalise everything and double the minimum wage. From across the spectrum, meanwhile, comes the inevitable call to “reconnect with the working class.”

I reckon it was a good speech, in the sense that it mostly avoided succumbing to those demands. Any disengaged voter who happened to be watching the ABC at that time would have caught a few well-crafted motherhood statements, and perhaps be reminded of Albanese’s struggle-street beginnings. It will be forgotten in a few days, which is fine. Where does it say that budget replies must be earth-shattering?

Okay, life isn’t that simple. Because commentators have marked it down, voters will hear how uninspiring it was, which will feed into perceptions that Albanese is not doing a great job. These will loop back into his approval ratings in published opinion polls, which his enemies will use to create mischief. So if it does end up being part of the narrative that brings him down, it will be remembered, after all, as having really been part of that saga.

But the alternative — the hasty adjusting of behaviour for week-by-week survival — is itself a recipe for failure.

Succumbing to demands for the reply to offer something “big” would have been obviously gimmicky and reactionary. Lots of questions about detail would need to be answered, creating the opportunity for gaffes from frontbenchers and backbenchers. And in the longer term those big ideas would have accentuated the electorate’s doubts about Labor’s big-spending proclivities. That perception is much more important than “is the opposition leader doing a good job?” because it’s the sort of thing that can cost a party an election.

And while the Morrison government has undeniably given the opposition fiscal wiggle room, there is no need to exploit it immediately.

Two years into the job, Albanese’s challenge is twofold. One is to be opposition leader at the next election, and the other is to win that contest. When leaders reach this stage, they find the two demands can conflict, or at least seem to. They start making announcements simply to placate the team. I put February’s big IR drop in that category; it (and particularly the gig economy part) made winning the election harder.

The last opposition leader to truly generate media-bubble excitement was Mark Latham, from late 2003 up to the October 2004 election. He ticked all the storytellers’ boxes about what someone destined for victory should do; the Australian’s Paul Kelly even labelled him a “conviction politician” — just like John Howard!

Then, on election day, Labor recorded the worst result of any opposition since the one led by Latham’s mentor, Gough Whitlam, in 1977.

No matter how attractive the idea of a big, ambitious speech generating excitement and momentum and eventually leading to victory, history has never panned out that way. Reality has tended to be more mundane: the opinion polls start to show a government looking like it might lose, narratives are adjusted, and events are retrofitted to that expectation.

Politicians are hostage to timing and luck, much more than they, their parties and (particularly) professional campaigners like to admit. There are highly winnable elections, which can be stuffed up by inept leaders and strategies. (See the Latham experiment, above.) May 2019 was winnable for Labor, too, but ruined by big, complicated policies.

Until Covid came along, the next election was looking wide open: a nine-year-old government still labouring under sluggish economic conditions and negligible wages growth. But the pandemic has upped the authority of incumbents. The big question is how much this remains the case, and for how long.

Albanese’s internal enemies will undoubtedly use Thursday’s non-event as backgrounding ammo. But they would have used a big-bang speech that way too. Whoever had become Labor leader after the last election would be struggling today.

What should Anthony Albanese do? “Made in Australia” is pie in the sky but easy and good politics for an opposition. The “debt and deficits” campaign is worth pursuing only if the aim is to eat into the Coalition’s advantage on the economy. As an exercise in revenge it is pointless: yes, the Rudd and Gillard government’s alleged “debt and deficits disaster” was a con that a lot of the media (not just the usual suspects) bought into. There’s nothing that can be done about that now.

The “On your side” slogan is okay, until people tire of it. It does contain a touch of the dog whistle. On your side against whom? Big business, elites? Migrants who want your job?

There must be potential for that post-pandemic rebuilding theme. Tasmania’s Labor leader Rebecca White talked about it a lot during the recent state campaign, but her party did poorly at the ballot box. The sweet spot might be out there somewhere.

Meanwhile, a star waits in the wings: Tanya Plibersek, receiving support from, of all places (given her left-wing credentials), the Australian. Maybe it’s a ruse and once Albanese is fatally wounded they’ll switch to Jim Chalmers. The media loves a leadership stoush.

But the news isn’t all bleak. This week in parliament Scott Morrison threatened the Labor leader with an early election. That would be risky for the government, and might represent Albanese’s best chance of still being in the job when the election eventually comes around. •

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Workers in insecure employment were often the first to lose their jobs. Low-paid, precarious work has helped spread Covid-19, with poorly paid hotel security guards forced to work second jobs and other struggling workers finding it difficult to take time off even if they may have been exposed to the virus or have minor possible symptoms. All of this has served to highlight the prevalence of low-paid and precarious work in the Australian economy

Meanwhile, despite the government’s earlier promises of setting aside ideology and working cooperatively with unions, the ACTU argues that the Coalition’s proposed industrial relations legislation will actually increase insecure work and facilitate wage cuts.

It all seems fertile ground for a party that last defeated a sitting Coalition government at least partly by campaigning against John Howard’s WorkChoices legislation. Albanese no doubt hopes that a focus on industrial relations will also shore up his leadership and reduce dissension among Labor party members and MPs who claim Labor has been neglecting its working-class base. His focus will be on creating more better-paid, secure jobs while expanding access to employee entitlements and ensuring those entitlements are portable in insecure industries.

To this end, the Labor leader proposes a Hawke and Keating–style compact between business and labour, arguing that “the best governments in our history have understood the need for a compact between capital and labour to advance their mutual interests.” The argument aligns with Albanese’s view that Labor’s populist rhetoric against the “big end of town” was one of the reasons it lost the 2019 election. “The language used was terrible,” he argued at the time. “Unions and employers have a common interest. Successful businesses are a precondition for employing more workers.” As I argued before the election, widespread business opposition will hurt Labor if voters become concerned that private sector investment, and consequently jobs, will be at risk.

But Albanese faces a number of obstacles. To begin with, the Hawke-era consensus between business and unions rested on an Accord process that traded wage restraint, and increasingly real wage cuts, for a compensatory “social wage” in the form of increased government services and benefits. In other words, it was based on businesses paying lower wages than they otherwise would. The introduction of enterprise bargaining also saw reductions in workers’ conditions. No wonder many businesses were favourably disposed.

By contrast, Albanese will be attempting to develop a compact between business and labour based on higher wages and better conditions. Some far-sighted businesspeople, especially in highly profitable industries, may see the advantage that higher wages and more secure employment will have in increasing consumption. After all, the Reserve Bank has long argued that the fall in consumption due to wage stagnation is a significant problem for the Australian economy. But other sections of industry might not wish to increase the wages and conditions of their own workers in difficult economic times.

Despite Albanese’s criticisms, Bill Shorten also argued that wage increases would be a “win-win” for business, workers and the economy in general. But he still faced significant resistance from business. Predictably, Albanese’s IR plans have already elicited major business opposition. For its part, the government claims that Labor’s policy would cost business $20 billion, extinguishing many firms and jobs in the process.

Labor has a history of critiquing some sections of capital while supporting others. Prime minister Ben Chifley demonised the banks and prime minister Gough Whitlam the multinationals, but both supported Australian manufacturing. Albanese seems to be focusing on critiquing the gig economy while hoping to win over other businesses by supporting industries that offer better pay and more secure conditions and offering them preference in government contracts.

Even this could backfire. Rideshare drivers and food deliverers currently suffer the most obvious effects of “Uberisation,” but many other industries could introduce precarious app-based employment. Numerous tasks could also be competitively outsourced via platforms such as Airtasker, including to workers in lower-wage countries. And a range of industries already use the labour-hire measures that Labor is also targeting.

Albanese therefore faces two major challenges in turning Labor’s IR policies into a successful electoral strategy. First, he needs to convince business that this is another occasion on which social democracy needs to save capitalism from itself, as Kevin Rudd argued was the case during the global financial crisis. In this instance, neoliberal attacks on unions and workers, along with cuts to government benefits, have resulted in a crisis of consumption by reducing incomes and deepening inequality.

Second, Labor needs to convince workers that industrial relations reform is the best way to increase living standards. Labor attempted to do this during the 2019 election campaign, but many voters, unconvinced that Labor in government would be able to ensure higher incomes and jobs growth, opted for Morrison’s promises of lower taxes instead.

The ACTU’s Change the Rules campaign, which should have helped Labor win the election, also faced a dilemma. Some of the industrial relations rules in need of changing had been introduced not by the Coalition but by previous Labor governments. In other words, past Labor government policies have contributed to a lack of confidence in the ability of governments to improve wages and conditions. That — rather than climate change or so-called “identity politics” — was one of the major difficulties Labor faced at the 2019 election.

Whether Anthony Albanese can overcome these problems, or even save his own leadership, remains to be seen. In the meantime he hopes to make the next election “a battle for the things which matter most to Labor” and “a contest between two very different visions for the future of Australia.” In one sense he is undoubtedly correct. As a social democratic party, Labor has no choice but to try to tackle Australia’s rising inequality and the growth of precarious work. The issue is whether Labor will be able to turn that into a successful electoral strategy. •

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You could tell a wonderful story about the Liberal Party’s fatal estrangement from its suburban heartland using what was once everyone’s favourite bellwether seat, Macarthur, in Sydney’s outer southwest fringe. For almost seventy years until 2016, Macarthur was held by the Liberals whenever they formed government. As recently as 2013, the party’s Russell Matheson stormed home with 54.3 per cent of the primary vote and 61.4 per cent after preferences. But less than six years later it’s very comfortably Labor-held; all the Libs could manage last year was a miserable 30.9 per cent, and just 41.6 per cent after preferences.

The party’s abysmal fortunes can be seen close up in Wedderburn, a classic middle-income Macarthur suburb that the Liberals could once take for granted. Just seven years ago, 48.4 per cent of voters there gave the party their first-preference vote; last year it was just 25.9 per cent. If the Liberals can’t win Wedderburn, how can they win elsewhere?

You see what I did there? It’s called cherrypicking. I searched the election returns to find an electorate that would fit a preconceived narrative. Most egregiously, I ignored the big 2016 redistribution that shifted the electorate into Labor territory, though that only accounts for about eight of the twenty-point two-party-preferred turnaround, and doesn’t explain any of the changed sentiment in Wedderburn (a suburb I’d never heard of until I dug it out).

How to explain the rest of the difference? Most of all, it reflects changes in the personal vote, from Matheson, the popular sitting Liberal, to Mike Freelander, a popular sitting Labor MP. The 2013 starting point was exceptionally high, coming off a very big 8.3 per cent swing that was more than twice the state figure. The Coalition’s 2013 national vote was better than its 2019 one, so all else being equal you’d expect declines everywhere. Also contributing would have been demographic changes and other factors I’m not aware of.

In other words, if you want to tell any old tale about elections and back it up with a dramatic “example” it’s usually easy to do. Lies, damn lies, statistics and all that.

Sorting the data the other way to find for the biggest tale of Labor woe gets you Capricornia in North Queensland. It’s a perfect case if you want to illustrate Labor’s low stocks among coalminers, and here’s federal MP Clare O’Neil doing just that in the Financial Review last year:

Capricornia in far north Queensland is a blue-collar regional electorate of Australians Labor strives to represent. And we used to. In 2007, 56 per cent of the people of Capricornia gave us their primary vote… On May 18, fewer than a quarter of voters in Capricornia gave Labor their primary vote.

Capricornia has been cited several times in similar fashion since the last election by Labor supporters of a blue-ish (as in Blue Labour) hue, who urge the party to cast off its post–Arthur Calwell pretensions and return to its working-class roots. (The abysmal electoral record of the pre–Gough Whitlam party goes unmentioned.) Rather inexplicably, they seem to see coalminers as emblematic of this shrinking cohort, though what people actually on low incomes think of this elevation of people earning multiples of the median wage is unclear. It seems to be part of the intra-party climate wars.

Note O’Neil’s (and others’) starting point of 2007, when Labor recorded its best national vote since the 1980s and (with a Queenslander as leader) a rare Queensland-wide two-party-preferred majority. If O’Neil had used 2004 instead, the primary vote would have been 47 rather than 56 per cent. Like Macarthur, the switch from a well-regarded Labor MP to a well-regarded Liberal National MP is a big factor in the Capricornia turnaround.

(And Labor undeniably performed abysmally in Queensland last year, particularly in seats like Capricornia, and the Adani mine played a part. Climate change is challenging for both parties, but particularly for Labor.)

The back-to-the-suburbs/mines strategy of emphasising primary vote support rather than two-party-preferred is also a sleight of hand. For most of the time after its federal introduction in 1918, our compulsory preferential voting system favoured the centre-right, but since the late 1970s, with the rise of the Australian Democrats, it has assisted Labor. The Greens, from 2001, turbocharged this dynamic, and for more than a decade now around one in ten voters have opted for Greens first, and about 80 per cent of them have preferenced Labor over the Coalition regardless of how-to-vote cards.

It’s two-party-preferred votes that win seats. And the primary vote slide is not confined to one side. The Coalition’s worst flogging since the creation of the Liberal Party, in 1983, saw it receive a higher share (43.6 per cent) than at last year’s “Morrison miracle” (41.4 per cent).

Has Labor lost the suburbs? Here’s a graph of Labor two-party-preferred votes since 1983 using the Australian Electoral Commission’s socio-demographic categories. Has the outer-metropolitan line, a proxy for the cohort at hand, been particularly bad for the party? Its lowest point across the whole period is actually 2004, when Labor set its sights on this part of the country under a leader, Mark Latham, who professed to know suburbanites intimately. Can it be that strategising with a particular section of society in mind ends up looking a bit weird, and gets you the worst of both worlds?

Oddly enough, the recent 2016 result — while far from Labor’s best outer-metro vote in absolute terms — stands out relative to the other lines. That was the year the party won another fabled “bellwether,” Lindsay, yet remained in opposition. (That election also saw outsized swings to Labor in low-income electorates, and much of the ballyhooed movement the other way last year can be seen as corrections for this.)

There’s only so much a graph like that can show. But it does suggest that a rising tide lifts all lines.

It’s not Capricornia, or Macarthur, or Wedderburn that particularly matters, it’s achieving two-party-preferred majorities among Australians. That’s what usually (though not always) wins government. •

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Invariably, the real Australians turn out to share the political views, usually conservative, of the speaker. Despite the evidence of opinion polls and plebiscites, real Australians are generally held to oppose marriage equality, not to want to do much about climate change, and to reject progressive taxation.

The latest entrant is Chris Bowen, the member for McMahon in Sydney, who tells us that Labor needs to win the trust of suburban voters. Taken literally, this claim has the merit of being trivially true. Labor never wins a majority of seats in country areas, and virtually everyone who doesn’t live in the country lives in a suburb. So, Labor can only win government if it wins most suburban seats.

Bowen seems to think, however, that lots of voters (though not enough to give Labor a majority) live in a place he calls the “inner city,” and that Labor is paying them too much attention. Does this stand up to scrutiny? Let’s look at the electoral outcomes for the Sydney metropolitan area in 2019, when Labor’s performance was pretty disappointing. (Hat tip to Peter Brent, who posted this on Twitter just when I needed it.)

Sydney since the 2019 election. Australian Electoral Commission • Click to enlarge

If we define inner city in the way I would understand it — meaning an area close to the CBD where most people live in apartments or terrace houses — the only clear contenders are the electorates of Sydney and Grayndler, both of which Labor holds. Even on a slightly broader definition taking in the eastern suburbs and the North Sydney area, there are only a handful of seats, most safely conservative.

Presumably Bowen means to say something more than simply observing that one or two electorates in Sydney (and a couple more in other major cities) don’t constitute a majority.

So, let’s divide the Sydney suburbs into three roughly equal groups:

• “Silvertail” suburbs (Wentworth, the North Shore and the Northern Beaches), where Labor can’t expect to do well.

• Inner and middle-ring suburbs (the arc from Parramatta to Cook), of which Labor holds seven and the Liberals hold Reid, Banks and Cook.

• Outer suburbs, of which Labor holds six and the Liberals hold Lindsay, Mitchell and Hughes.

The map shows that Labor, even in a disappointing year, hasn’t lost touch with non-elite suburban voters in the way that Bowen implies. And the seats Labor could plausibly hope to pick up don’t have any obvious commonalities beyond being suburban. Nor are they massively different from the neighbouring seats Labor holds.

Although the result of the 2019 election was a disappointment for Labor, it was every close. If the party had won a couple of seats in the inner and middle-ring suburbs of Sydney and a few more in Brisbane and Melbourne, Bill Shorten would now be prime minister. Half a dozen wins in outer-suburban seats would have produced the same outcome. To identify some particular part of Labor’s support base for special attention while attacking another part would be an exercise in futility.

To put it another way, Labor’s support base consists primarily of non-elite urban voters while the Coalition depends mainly on rural, regional and well-off urban voters. This would be unsurprising if it weren’t for the fact that so much political commentary, including Bowen’s, assumes the opposite.

Even less surprisingly, Labor needs to get more votes (or Greens’ second preferences) than the Coalition in order to win government. In this context, it’s worth observing that despite spending most of the period since 2000 in opposition, Labor has averaged 49 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote in the seven federal elections held this century. If two in a hundred Australians had consistently voted differently, Labor would have been the dominant party.

As Labor’s troubles at the federal level have shown, there’s no magic recipe for winning those extra percentage points. Labor would do best to present a coherent centre-left platform and seek to appeal to all its current and potential supporters rather than focus on some and deliberately alienate others. •

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Biden’s win means that just about every major advanced economy has committed to driving net emissions down to zero by 2050 (or 2060, in the case of China). Every major advanced economy except one, that is — the one led by Scott Morrison, who declares that he won’t commit to such a target without a plan for how to achieve it and an understanding of the costs.

This prompts two obvious questions. Didn’t your government sign up to the Paris climate agreement more than four years ago? And why on earth haven’t you developed a plan and carried out an economic assessment yet?

The odd thing is that it really shouldn’t be that hard for the government to commit to net zero by 2050. Morrison himself has said that net zero is “absolutely achievable” and that a 2050 deadline is “desirable.” Energy minister Angus Taylor has said the government wants to achieve net zero emissions “as soon as possible,” though he refused to commit to doing it by 2050.

But the reality is that it isn’t politically costless, at least not among his own colleagues, as the Australian Financial Review’s political columnist Phillip Coorey reminded us earlier this month. In fact, the Coalition is probably more fragile on climate change than Labor. You need only look back at what happened to Malcolm Turnbull to understand how fragile.

Fitzgibbon might point to what happened in his own seat at the last federal election to highlight the potential electoral costs of a progressive stance on climate. His seat is ground zero for thermal coalmining in Australia, and Labor suffered a negative swing of 14.2 per cent there, with most of the lost votes flowing to a coalminer representing One Nation, who managed to win 21.6 per cent of the vote. Similar results were seen in other coalmining and gas-extraction regions, in seats normally seen as marginal, across Central and North Queensland.

These swings against Labor don’t just reflect concern that emissions reduction policies would hurt employment, of course. But the fact that the Coalition chose to campaign so hard on this issue in Central and North Queensland suggests that party polling had revealed it to be an important factor.

It’s on the question of jobs that perceptions and reality have most obviously parted company. The reality is that greening Australia’s energy supplies won’t come at the expense of very many jobs in coal or gas, simply because the production of these products is primarily driven by exports. Just 24 per cent of Queensland and New South Wales’s thermal black coal production is consumed domestically, while the figure for metallurgical coal (the main product in Queensland) is a tiny 2 per cent. For gas it’s 30 per cent.

In fact, analysis by my firm, Green Energy Markets, indicates that employment in renewable energy and energy efficiency projects in 2019 significantly exceeded employment in either coal or gas. And the employment advantage in clean energy becomes overwhelming once you compare it to employment in gas and coal production intended for domestic consumption.

Sources: see below.

Australian coalminers face little threat from policies aimed at reducing Australia’s carbon emissions. Those who are employed in coal and gas power stations most certainly do, but these power stations simply don’t employ enough people to turn an election. The number of people employed in coal-fired power stations across Queensland adds up to just under 1400. For gas power stations it’s 250. If concern about emissions reduction policies really was a major factor in turning Queensland seats to One Nation and ultimately the Liberal National Party, it was because voters were made to believe that the threat to jobs from emissions reduction is far greater than it is. The Stop Adani campaign probably made an important contribution to this misunderstanding.

Those figures give a lead to those of us pushing for a fast transition to renewables. Back in January, I wrote that greater electoral support for emissions reduction would only come with a shift away from campaigns framed around stopping or shutting down polluting facilities. Crucially, emissions reduction policies need to be tied in voters’ minds to the construction of new clean energy projects, and the attendant transmission lines, that they could readily understand would create work for tradies and lower-skilled workers.

Unfortunately for economic efficiency, an emissions trading scheme doesn’t fit that bill. It’s difficult to explain why trading permits or certificates is a more effective way of reducing emissions, and better for voters’ wallets, than directly funding clean energy projects. Tony Abbott and many of his colleagues exploited this confusion to foster suspicion that emissions trading was less about the environment than about raising tax revenue.

Joel Fitzgibbon hasn’t publicly articulated a way forward for Labor that would enable the party to maintain its advantage on climate change while recognising the concerns of working people. Luckily, it’s into this void that the unlikely saviour, Gladys Berejiklian’s NSW government, has emerged. The state’s energy minister, Matt Kean, and its deputy premier, John Barilaro, have somehow worked through their differences to produce a plan that state and federal Labor parties would never have been brave enough to conceive.

The politics of climate change policy in Australia has been the story of good people trying to vainly break the nexus between energy and carbon emissions by delicately tweaking and working within the existing market-oriented structures, usually heavily guided by the incumbent industry and regulatory organisations. Instead of trying to unpick this Gordian knot, Kean and Barilaro decided they would cut straight through it with a sharp instrument. Their Electricity Infrastructure Roadmap, released this week, will supplant the existing market by setting up new government authorities to rebuild the electricity system anew, much as state governments did four decades ago.

The scale of the plan might be audacious, but it will probably strike the person in the street as plain common sense. The owners of four of the state’s five existing coal-fired power plants, representing 87 per cent of capacity, have indicated they intend to close them between now and 2035. At the same time, they say they will have trouble financing replacement plants because of regulatory uncertainty about carbon emissions. Kean and Barilaro have therefore laid out a program to remove the investment uncertainty and underwrite the construction of the renewable power plants, energy storage and power lines needed to replace the coal plants before they close.

The plan carries a real risk of creating white elephants, with electricity consumers ultimately carrying the can for any mistakes. But the risk of leaving the electricity system a prisoner of the culture wars is far greater.

Politicians opposed to climate action can hardly complain about this lurch away from markets (although the NSW proposal will uphold and support private-sector ownership). They are the ones — Tony Abbott among them — who have talked of sending in the army to seize control of privately owned power stations and nationalise them. They are the ones — Matt Canavan and Angus Taylor among them — who have proposed that governments build and own new coal- and gas-fired power stations in their preferred locations because they’re unhappy the private sector doesn’t consider them to be wise investments.

For federal Labor, the NSW plan provides a template for a national scheme that would allow it to present climate change policy as a great big construction bonanza rather than a great big tax.

Another element to this strategy can also help Labor in the Hunter and Central and North Queensland. Emissions reduction policies and technology plans do pose a real and significant threat to coal and gas workers, but they are not the plans put forward by Labor. Rather, they are the policies of governments in places like Germany, Britain, California, South Korea, China and Japan, as well as those of president Joe Biden.

According to BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy, Europe’s demand for coal is less than half of what it was back in the 1990s, while in North America it is 40 per cent lower. Renewable energy has recently overtaken coal in power generation in the United States, while in Britain it is rare for the electricity system to use any coal at all. In fact, Britain is using less coal now than it did in 1769, when James Watt patented his steam engine.

In Asia, on the other hand, demand for coal imports has been growing significantly, and this is what has underpinned the viability of Australian coalmines. For thermal coal, though, this growth has come to an end. According to the Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources, India, China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are all expected to reduce their thermal coal imports between 2020 and 2025.

Thermal coal’s future involves a steady erosion of jobs and wages as companies face a bitter battle to survive in a contracting market. With China’s economy evolving towards services, and with countries beefing up their emissions reduction efforts, metallurgical coal will confront the same fate by around 2030. Neither Labor nor the Coalition has any power to stop this.

If it remains wedded to a strategy of backing coal to the grave, the Queensland branch of the Morrison government has no help to offer these communities. The new coal power station in Townsville or Collinsville perpetually promised by the Liberal Nationals would be horribly inefficient if it needed many more than 200 people to keep it running.

Labor still has a task ahead of it to explain why the fate of coalmining does not rest with it or the Coalition. Unlike the Coalition, though, Labor can offer an alternative. Thousands of jobs would be created by a two-step program of decarbonising Australia’s electricity supply and then exporting clean energy products. The new jobs would offer opportunities to a wide array of people, but with the bulk needing either a trade-related skill or relatively modest levels of education and qualifications — in other words, the same people who currently see coalmining and minerals processing as their best opportunity for secure and well-paid employment, and who turned away from Labor at the last federal election.

All this means that if Labor chose to follow Fitzgibbon’s advice and mimic the Coalition on climate policy, it would give away what could be a great source of political advantage in Queensland. •

Sources for chart: Employment in the coal, oil and gas industries is based on the Australian Bureau of Statistics’s March 2020 Labour Market Survey. Employment in coal power generation is based on Green Energy Markets research on employment by each power plant. Renewable energy employment is derived from the Green Energy Markets database of renewable energy projects in construction and operation in conjunction with employment factors per megawatt from the University of Technology Sydney’s Institute for Sustainable Futures. Energy Efficiency Employment is taken from Green Energy Markets.

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But what of those who don’t haven’t faced the voters this year? After eight-plus months of restrictions, the latest Essential Report reveals continuing goodwill for the prime minister and for all mainland premiers (they didn’t ask Tasmanians). Western Australia’s Mark McGowan clocked up a massive 87 per cent approval and New South Wales’s Gladys Berejiklian — ICAC problems all but forgotten — was in second place on 75 per cent. Victoria’s Dan Andrews, who was on 54 per cent before the state’s restrictions were lifted, registered 65 per cent on the weekend.

So Covid-19 seems to have been been good to Liberal and Coalition governments as well, though we don’t have actual ballot papers to prove it. On the other side of the chamber, it has proved more challenging for centre-right oppositions than centre-left ones. Yes, Labor leaders in Tasmania, South Australia and New South Wales seem more puny and relevance-deprived than usual against the turbocharged incumbents, but they’re not being dragged by their backbench, their wider support base and the ever-helpful News Corp cheersquad into saying very silly, unpopular things about borders and lockdowns.

In South Australia on Monday, for example, Labor opposition leader Peter Malinauskas was able to make a gesture of bipartisanship in response to the outbreak of cases there. We can imagine the reaction if his Victorian counterpart, Liberal Michael O’Brien, attempted the same: he would be flayed as a weakling, a socialist and a traitor — and that’s just on the front pages of the Herald Sun. Covid-crazy Liberal MPs would be in meltdown and shadow minister Tim Smith would be mounting a leadership challenge.

Parties in power usually possess the authority to withstand the urgings of a rabid base, but even Scott Morrison felt the need to indulge in partisan pot shots at Queensland’s government, because of this month’s election in that state, and at Victoria’s government because of, well, Dan Andrews. The socialist left Victorian premier is the bête noire of good Liberals around the country. But while the prime minister probably felt he had to fulminate in order to keep the ship afloat, treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s interventions were gratuitous and calculated to boost his own future leadership stocks. There wouldn’t be a single potential Victorian swinging voter who now wishes Andrews had opened up a month earlier, but the treasurer and the PM were performing for the party room and the wider Liberal movement.

While Essential has Scott Morrison on a healthy 66 per cent approval rating, Anthony Albanese registered an okay-for-an-opposition-leader 40 per cent. But Joel Fitzgibbon’s departure from the Labor frontbench last week has awakened a few leadership hares.

We are now eighteen months into this term of parliament, and if you subscribe to the theory that the next election is likely to be next year, we’re also approaching the traditional killing season. A few days after last year’s surprise federal election result, I suggested on these pages that “whoever is Labor leader at the next election should, all things being equal, have a better than even chance of becoming prime minister.” But keeping the job for three years would be a tall order, I added, and the smart move for someone with prime ministerial ambitions might be to sit out the post-election leadership contest.

Whether the first part of this equation still applies probably depends mostly on where we are with Covid-19 (and is, perhaps, a reason to believe in a 2021 poll). Will Albanese still be leader at the next election? Probably not, despite the post-2013 leadership rules; they can simply be overturned by caucus. Who would replace him? Fitzgibbon obviously fancies his chances, as does former leader Bill Shorten. Less preposterously, Chris Bowen might put up his hand. But the smart money would have to be on shadow treasurer Jim Chalmers or former deputy and current shadow education minister Tanya Plibersek — or even a combination of the two as leader and deputy. But in which order?

Plibersek, in parliament now for twenty-two years, has more experience and more political nous. She’s in the left faction and has a “left-wing” reputation but rarely says anything that particularly meets that criterion.

Chalmers is a Queenslander, the site of so much damage last year. And he is in the right faction and makes reassuring noises about the coal workers many in the party see as their road to salvation. Albanese has been accommodating the “back to the future” sections of the party who believe success lies in reconnecting with blue-collar workers, but that’s still where the pressure on his leadership is coming from. Chalmers’s perceived credentials fit that bill — which makes him not necessarily the best choice, but the most likely. •

The post Post-pandemic politics appeared first on Inside Story.

Contrary to Scott Morrison’s blustery claim — “I tell you what, our policies will be set here in Australia” — most of the important decisions about our energy future will be made elsewhere, by governments in Washington, Beijing and Brussels, and by energy companies and financial institutions headquartered in New York, London, Frankfurt and Tokyo.

Their decisions are reflecting the widening realisation that the world must abandon coal sooner rather than later, that our reliance on oil must also end and, increasingly, that gas is part of the problem rather than of the solution. As many commentators have noted, commitments to net zero emissions by China, Japan, South Korea and other major emitters, as well as the election of Joe Biden in the United States, have left the Australian government increasingly isolated. A recent New York Times article linked Scott Morrison’s climate denialism to that of Brazil’s authoritarian demagogue Jair Bolsonaro, someone who certainly won’t be welcome at the White House after 20 January.

Yet the government and its supporters are working on the assumption that commitments by most of our trading partners to net zero emissions by 2050 (or 2060 in the case of China) are rhetorical gestures with no real-world implications. Whatever Coalition ministers might say, they are assuming business as usual, particularly in relation to coal and gas.

The plausibility of that assumption has been gravely undermined in recent weeks by a series of announcements from the heavy engineering companies that build coal-fired power stations. After adverse publicity for their involvement in the Vung Ang 2 project in Vietnam, Samsung and KEPCO announced they would take on no further coal-fired projects. General Electric, Black & Veatch, Siemens and Toshiba have all made similar pledges over the past two weeks.

These moves reflect two main factors. First, many of these companies have global brands that are being tainted by their association with coal. Samsung stated as much in its announcement. Second, just as the pipeline of coal-fired power projects has shrunk, many existing plants have been operating at a fraction of their capacity. With the added pressure of the pandemic, the argument for getting out of coal now rather than later has proved overwhelming.

A couple of dominoes remain standing, but they are likely to fall soon. The biggest remaining Japanese firm in the field, Mitsubishi Heavy, faces the same problems as Toshiba and Samsung, with the toxic reputational effects of coal damaging its entire Mitsubishi brand. Other parts of the corporation, such as Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, have already dumped coal assets, taking big losses in the process. In South Korea, the Doosan Heavy group, which is involved in Vung Ang 2, is deeply indebted and facing intense pressure to pull out of coal. In India, Bharat Heavy and other firms are operating at 50 per cent capacity, the result of a shrinking pipeline of projects and intense competition from China.

At this stage, indeed, it is only China that is keeping the global coal industry afloat. Provincial governments have embarked on a program of building coal-fired power stations as a form of fiscal stimulus. Finance for new coal projects depends heavily on Chinese banks and on Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative. And, with the withdrawal of most of their competitors, Chinese heavy engineering firms like CITIC will have the business of building coal-fired power plants all to themselves.

This is a major foreign policy problem for Australia. As the Xi regime becomes more repressive domestically and more aggressive internationally, our economic dependence becomes more and more problematic. Our differences with China have already led to informal trade barriers being imposed on a wide range of products, including coal. Moreover, as its announcement of 2060 zero emissions indicates, the regime is capable of rapid policy shifts. If Xi decides to mend fences with the Biden administration, firm action to stop uneconomic coal-fired projects would be an easy first step.

Labor needs to make a choice between following the government’s line — according to which we have already done everything we need to — or committing to a policy framework consistent with the Paris agreement’s goal of holding the increase in mean global temperatures well below 2°C. Until now, the policy has been as non-committal as possible in an attempt to satisfy the majority of the party’s supporters, who want strong action, and those who pretend that inaction is a serious option.

Joel Fitzgibbon’s resignation gives Labor the chance to resolve the issue. By aligning Australia with Biden’s pro-climate position, it can regain the initiative and avoid the prospect of global isolation. •

The post On coal, oil and gas, Australia is becoming more isolated appeared first on Inside Story.

Yes, the US presidential election saw a centre-left candidate win office from opposition with a strong climate policy. But was it “central”? Maybe. Biden managed not to let it get in the way of the voters’ main task, which was to kick out the dreadful incumbent.

That presents a pretty good template for the job of most oppositions in democracies: voters need to be inclined to toss out the government, and the other side gently tills this fertile soil. Nothing too scary; don’t make yourself hard to vote for. Afterwards, the victor gets to tell the tales of conviction and derring-do, of how the battle was fought and won, for journos to internalise and repeat.

An ambitious climate policy was necessary to keep the Democratic ship together, to keep the left wing on board and keen to turn out, but political life would be easier for both the Democrats and our own Labor Party if global warming were not a thing.

In the particular case of Fitzgibbon, who quit as shadow resources minister this week, it’s difficult to determine exactly what he doesn’t like about Labor policy, as there’s little there to speak of. Zero net emissions by 2050? This is why he spat the dummy?

The member for Hunter warned this week against “demonising coal workers.” Okay, that’s good advice — on the off-chance his party’s leadership was considering adopting this strategy. He’s on firmer ground when he says that winning the next election should be prioritised over policy purity, but actually he’s saying more than that. His favoured approach would be little or no action on climate change.

He also reckons that “Labor can’t form a government without winning at least two central-north Queensland electorates… and a couple around the rim of Perth,” which is obviously untrue in any literal sense, given the existence of the other 147 seats. What he means is that you can’t win without miners and mining communities, but that’s not right either. There just aren’t enough of them.

It’s true that people shouldn’t be thrown on the scrapheap in the change to renewable energy. Important policies often produce losers (usually short-term) and winners (often the country as a whole, eventually), and mitigating the plight of the former should be prioritised and hasn’t been sufficiently in the past. That’s not what he’s on about either. He simply doesn’t want to see coal phased out.

But something more fundamental is at play, a fight for the soul of the party. These barneys tend to be heavy on rhetoric and light on facts and figures. Clichés abound. It’s not really about those four mining seats, or any seats. It’s about something otherworldly: about Labor once again being the party of “the worker” rather than “progressives.”

And it’s not really about winning elections, although Fitzgibbon and others pretend it is. The same criticism was levelled at Labor when it was led by Gough Whitlam. The “dregs of the middle class,” as Kim Beazley Snr famously complained a year before the party took office for the first time in twenty-three years. The same criticism was levelled across all five of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating’s consecutive terms. Hawke’s finance minister Peter Walsh was the highest-profile proponent of this friendly fire: the party was selling out the working class for eastern-suburban trendies in Sydney and Melbourne. Sure it was good politics, said Walsh, but it was immoral.

But when Labor is losing elections, the “straying from its original mission” meme can seem to have explanatory power too; cue the banalities about “battlers” and “the base.”

Here’s the deal, as ol’ Joe might put it. Labor hardly ever won federal elections before Whitlam. Success comes from appealing to that largish cohort called Australians, in all their various shapes, sizes and backgrounds. Chasing a particular section of the electorate is a recipe for misfire. Remember 2004, when Mark Latham was going to bring back the outer suburbs — after all, he personified them, didn’t he? On election day those areas led the charge — to the Howard government.

Fitzgibbon’s “blue-collar” voters, depending on how you define them, are a shrinking cohort, still predominantly vote Labor, and any depletion has had a minor effect at the ballot box.

Glorifying the old days when Labor won a big majority of “tradesmen”— as if a salaried plumber in the 1960s is the same thing as a self-employed one with a couple of offsiders today — is pretty pointless as well.

When Fitzgibbon goes to bat for miners on between $150,000 and $200,000 a year (his characterisation) he really gives the game away. Labor was formed to fight for the interests of people on double the median full-time wage to the detriment of those below who would benefit from a growing renewables sector?

One major sleight of hand in all this is the assumption that the last election result was in any non-trivial way due to Labor’s climate policy. Those with memories longer than goldfish might recall it was the opposition’s politically ambitious economic agenda, burdened by franking credits and negative gearing — and with a fictitious “death tax” thrown in — that took centre stage, with global warming a supporting act. (If the opposition had offered a smaller target, climate policy might have attracted more attention.)

Parties trade off policy and politics. This or that might be a great reform, but it’s not something we should take to an election; maybe once we’re in office. When you’re in government you can (or could, under more agreeable Senates) spring change on voters and trust they’ll have forgiven you by the next election. These days, of course, with journalists demanding so much be ruled in or out, it’s more complicated.

Global warming will largely be taken out of Australia’s hands anyway. If the world acts, overseas demand for our minerals will dry up. If we continue to be laggards on the domestic front — insisting on coal-fired power stations, for example — other countries will price the emissions into our exports or even hit us with tariffs. It’ll be a bit like ending White Australia; we were dragged into the second half of the twentieth century by international pressure.

It should also be like cutting tariffs three decades ago: a general bipartisanship with cynical politics restricted to the edges. (Keating boasts about his political courage now, but he was quick to capitalise when the Liberal opposition proposed something more adventurous.) The fact that Australian action can’t directly deal with the climate problem within our borders facilitates a level of irresponsibility. It doesn’t help that powerful sections of the Coalition, inside and outside parliament, encouraged by News Corp, are off with the denialist fairies.

For the next election Labor should, like Biden, promise enough to make clear it’s the only party serious about climate change but that it also remains a safe option to vote for. Identifying that sweet spot is the hard part. •

The post The fight for Labor’s soul appeared first on Inside Story.

Neither victory was a surprise, but their extent was. In the ACT’s case, that’s partly because media commentary (apart from Inside Story’s) ignored the only reputable opinion poll and last year’s federal election voting in assuming the Liberals had a strong chance of victory.

Covid-19 certainly played a role in both Labo(u)r victories: it has demonstrated the importance of good government as nothing else has since the second world war, and that gave the parties in government an unequalled platform to demonstrate their competence — or otherwise.

These two election outcomes add to the probability that Annastacia Palaszczuk will receive a similar endorsement from her voters on 31 October — and that Donald Trump will be turfed out for his incompetence in handling the virus when Americans vote four days later.

ACT chief minister Andrew Barr’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis was smooth and successful. The city has had only 113 cases, mostly acquired overseas. No cases have been diagnosed for three months. Some restrictions remain, but the crisis has been handled with less panic and more pragmatism than in most of Australia.

It has allowed a leader whose popularity was wearing thin to re-establish himself in the eyes of his electorate. In the televised leaders’ debate two weeks ago, Barr came over well: warm, reassuring, an apparently safe pair of hands. By contrast, Liberal leader Alistair Coe campaigned by staging a series of juvenile stunts — in the final one, pulling a rates notice out of an esky to publicise his pledge to freeze rates. He seemed to underrate the intelligence of Canberra’s voters.

The biggest winners were ACT Greens leader Shane Rattenbury and his team. After two disappointing territory elections, the Greens have surged back, winning close to the vote they get there at federal elections. They have earned the right to take on a much bigger role in the next Labor–Greens coalition government.

That government, which began back in 2001, will continue until at least 2024, matching the twenty-three-year federal government of Sir Robert Menzies and his successors from 1949 to 1972.

When counting ended on Saturday night, Labor had won ten of the twenty-five seats in the ACT Legislative Assembly, and the Greens five. The Liberals had won only eight seats, and two were still in doubt: one between Labor and Liberals, one between Labor and Greens.

In net terms, the Greens have gained either three or four seats. The Liberals have lost either two or three, and Labor could end up with no net change, or a loss of one or two seats.

(Yes, these are different from the figures Antony Green gave last night in wrapping up the ACT’s election coverage. Antony is usually excellent, and I can only assume that last night he was on screen so much that he didn’t have time to take a close look at the complex preference distributions circulated by the ACT Electoral Commission, showing provisional results based on votes cast electronically in pre-poll booths.)

Because of Covid-19 fears, even the Covid-free ACT had its election shaped by the virus. Everyone was urged to vote at one of thirteen pre-poll centres, and two-thirds of the voters did so. Almost all of them voted using an electronic screen, which meant their votes could be counted and preferences distributed and posted by 9pm.

On first preferences, the Greens’ vote climbed 3.6 per cent from the 2016 election, and the Liberals’ vote slumped by 3.6 per cent. Labor was down 0.1 per cent. After preferences, the swing was even bigger: on my estimates from the provisional preference distribution, the three-party vote for the Greens has soared by 4.5 per cent, with the Liberals down 4 per cent and Labor down 0.5 per cent.

The Liberals’ position will improve slightly today and in coming days as postal votes and pre-poll votes on the traditional paper ballots are counted. But this is where the votes ended up last night in the ACT’s five Senate-style electorates:

Brindabella (outer south, district of Tuggeranong): was Liberals three, Labor two; now two-all with one in doubt. The three-party swing against the Liberals was 7 per cent, mostly to the Greens. Liberal MLA Andrew Wall’s seat has been lost to either Labor or the Greens. Last night Labor led by thirty-five votes or just 0.08 per cent.

Murrumbidgee (middle south, Woden and Weston Creek): was Liberals two, Labor two, Greens one. Despite Liberal expectations of gaining a third seat, thanks to a favourable redistribution and the retirement of the Greens MLA, those numbers remain the same. Emma Davidson will be the new Greens MLA, replacing Caroline Le Couteur, while Labor MLA Bec Cody lost her seat to running mate Marisa Paterson.

Kurrajong (inner suburbs, north and south of the lake): was Liberals two, Labor two, Greens one; now Liberals one, Labor two, Greens two. As in last year’s federal election on the same turf, the Greens outpolled the Liberals after preferences. At the cut-off point on the provisional preference distribution, the Greens’ second candidate, Rebecca Vassarotti, had 15.2 per cent of the vote to 13.3 per cent for Liberal MLA Candice Burch. That’s too big a gap to make up on the count remaining.

Ginninderra (middle northern suburbs, Belconnen): was Liberals two, Labor three; now Liberals one, Labor two, Greens one, and one in doubt. This is where the Coalition hoped its veteran one-time leader, Bill Stefaniak, could take a seat from Labor for his Belco party, based on resentment that Belconnen has been left out of the Barr government’s largesse. Not so: instead, the Greens’ Jo Clay has claimed one seat, probably from the Liberals, but possibly at the cost of Labor attorney-general Gordon Ramsay.

Yerrabi (outer north, district of Gungahlin): was Liberals two, Labor three. Now Liberals two, Labor two, Greens one. Alistair Coe’s own electorate was the only one to record a swing to the Liberals, and a strong one at that — but still not big enough to claim the last seat. Instead the Greens’ Andrew Braddock has unseated the capital’s first Indian-Australian MLA, Deepak-Raj Gupta.

On first preferences, the night finished with Labor on 38.4 per cent, the Liberals 33.1, the Greens 13.9 per cent and others 14.7. But whereas the preferences of the “others” in 2016 largely favoured the Liberals, this time they have spread more evenly among the three biggest parties. Crucially, that has lifted the Greens’ share of the three-party vote to 18 per cent — in a voting system where 16.67 per cent is the threshold to win a seat.

Hence the dramatic rise in their representation from two seats to five or six, almost a quarter of the Assembly. It still fell short of the 20 per cent the Greens won at last year’s federal election, but it makes the partnership with Labor less unequal, and lifts them to a new level of importance in the government.

After patiently biding his time as the Greens’ sole minister since 2012, Rattenbury hinted last night that he will demand a bigger share of portfolios: particularly planning, where Labor’s pro-development policies have put it offside with resident groups. Barr might well be happy to pass on that hot potato to his coalition partner.

As in New Zealand, a new term will intensify demands on the government to implement Labor’s stated goals of looking after those worst-off: something the Barr and Ardern governments have both failed to do. Coe had promised, if he won, to appoint former Labor chief minister Jon Stanhope — one of Barr’s sharpest critics — to chair an inquiry into poverty in the ACT. Barr would be well advised to try to make peace with his old boss, and invite him back inside the tent to help shape policy.

A dark fiscal cloud overshadowing the coming term will be the government’s pledge to build a second tramline from the city to southern Canberra, in the wake of its popular but expensive tramline to Gungahlin in the outer north. Canberra has been designed for cars, not trams, and the new line will be costly both to build and to operate. Initial estimates are around $2 billion, in a city of 430,000 people.

The impact of building something you can’t afford is that everything else has to make room for it, and therefore becomes a lesser priority. Canberra’s rates and taxes have risen, and its service levels in many areas have fallen. Labor’s 2016 plan to redevelop Canberra Hospital was recycled as its plan for the 2020 election.

So why weren’t the Liberals able to take advantage of this? On Saturday night, retiring MLA Vicki Dunne blamed the failure on the way Covid-19 has put governments centre-stage in controlling the agenda. With respect, that hardly applies in Covid-free Canberra. Part of the Liberals’ problem, surely, was that their young, stunt-addicted, ultraconservative leader did not come across as a credible chief minister for a place like the ACT.

In Massachusetts, the Republicans keep winning government because they put up liberal leaders who fit the state’s political culture. In Victoria, the Liberals have won just one election this century, and that was under the liberal Ted Baillieu. In New South Wales, they have won three elections in a row under three moderate leaders. It’s not a hard lesson to learn; it’s just too hard for the conservative wing of the party to accept. And in the ACT, the conservative wing rules.

By 2024, Labor will have been in government for twenty-three years. It was after twenty-three years of federal Coalition government that Gough Whitlam was swept to power on the slogan “It’s Time.” Whitlam had positioned himself, his frontbench and his party well to offer themselves as the alternative government. Can the ACT Liberals learn the lesson and position themselves to be a credible alternative government in 2024? •

Friday 23 October update

Counting on Thursday effectively confirmed that the Greens have relegated the Liberals to third place in the central electorate of Kurrajong. Rebecca Vassarotti, a community activist with wide experience, is set to replace Liberal MLA Candice Burch in the Assembly. The Greens recovered lost ground in the first preference count, while Vassarotti expanded her lead in the count after preferences to 786 votes.

In Ginninderra (Belconnen), after preferences, Liberal lawyer Peter Cain maintains a ninety-eight vote lead over Labor’s attorney-general Gordon Ramsay. Labor still hopes it can hold the seat, as it is doing better on the postal vote count in Ginninderra than elsewhere. But it has to spread those votes between three candidates, whereas the Liberals only have two in the race.

The southern seat of Brindabella (Tuggeranong) remains on a knife-edge. At the end of Thursday’s counting, Green candidate Johnathan Davis was twenty-three votes ahead of Labor’s Taimus Werner-Gibbings. But between them is Andrew Wall, the Liberal MLA whose seat one of them will take. Wall can’t win the seat, but if Labor can overtake him when postal votes are distributed, it believes his preferences could then lift its man over the Green, and secure him the final seat. Possibly — but first he has to overtake Wall, and in Brindabella the Liberals have outpolled Labor in postal votes.

The first preference count is now almost over and the deadline for postal votes to be received ends at 5 pm tonight. The roughly 20,000 postal votes are being scanned into electronic form, and the computer will distribute their preferences on Saturday to give us the final result.

On the current count, Labor would win ten seats (down two), the Greens six (up four) and the Liberals nine (down two).

Greens members voted on Wednesday night in favour of remaining with Labor in a coalition government. This is expected to see them have two ministers in the next government instead of one, with leader Shane Rattenbury in a key portfolio.

The post Will the Liberals ever learn? appeared first on Inside Story.

The loving, glowing tributes she’s received from all corners of society invariably mention her sharp intelligence, her zest for life and her warm personality. My guess is that, until she died and all this was put on the record, the new generation of women who applauded her appearances on The Drum knew just a fraction of what she gave to this country. As for me, the news of her death plunged me into shock, as it did so many, and set off a flood of memories. So I am here to tell the story of how our long friendship began.

Susan and I met in the early 1970s when we were both single mothers, swept away from difficult marriages on that tumultuous feminist wave and drawn ineluctably to the women’s liberation movement. But she had a more pragmatic vision than many of us, and among them I include myself.

With a federal election looming in 1972, Women’s Electoral Lobby was born. Now there were two kinds of feminism, one deemed radical, the other decidedly reformist. Susan gravitated to the reformist WEL, and was a founding member of its Canberra branch, while I stood firmly in the radical camp. Radical or reformist, though, the word revolution tripped happily off our tongues, especially in Canberra, with its small, politically engaged population, where a women’s liberationist one minute could pop on her WEL hat the next, and vice versa. “Revolution” has been in very bad odour for decades now, and whenever I hear it uttered in clips of us at that time I’m touched by our naiveté but also by our splendid bravado.

Just before the Whitlam government was elected in December of that year, I got a job with the Australian News and Information Bureau; by 1973 I had been seconded to a minister’s staff and had joined the Labor Party. Susan, meanwhile, was working in the interests of government schools as executive officer of the Australian Council of State School Organisations and had started a local Labor Party branch. When Whitlam called a double dissolution in 1974, she decided to run for preselection for the new Canberra seat of Fraser.

She gathered a bunch of feminist party members and, sooner than I realised, I was helping run her campaign. Our first task was to get more feminists signed up to the party — in other words, to do some branch stacking. Some of the older, largely male, members were furious, calling us “groupers” (after the Catholic activists within the party and the unions in the early 1950s) and worse. But we pressed on. There wasn’t a single female member in the House of Representatives, and we were determined to change that.

It was a tight contest. Peter Wilenski, Whitlam’s principal private secretary, was a candidate. So was Megan Stoyles, press secretary to Bill Hayden, both of whom had done so much to get Medibank (as it was then, though stymied by the Senate) up and running. As Susan’s backers we couldn’t have come any greener, and being American-born with little more than a rudimentary understanding of how politics worked in Australia, I was greenest of all.

After Megan Stoyles dropped out, it was a three-way contest between Susan, Peter and Ken Fry, the ACT branch president and a member of the ACT advisory council, forerunner of the ACT Legislative Assembly. When Gordon Bilney, Wilenski’s campaign manager, sidled up to me one night, whispering, “What’s your number?” I thought he was planning to proposition me and walked away. He was actually looking for our preferences if Susan was knocked out.

The vote was taken and — to Wilenski’s disappointment and Bilney’s disgust — Ken Fry was the winner. Both Fry and Wilenski believed that Susan’s preferences got him over the line, but to this day I’m not sure this was true. I don’t remember our directing preferences at all. But their belief secured Susan’s reputation as a powerbroker, and Ken Fry continued to acknowledge his debt to her throughout his parliamentary career.

The rest, as they say, is history. In 1975, after a stint on the advisory council herself, Susan ran for the second ACT Senate seat and won. But that was the year Whitlam lost in a landslide. Right away she was in the shadow ministry, and I, by this time working in the prime minister’s department, found myself serving a government I deplored for the part it had played in Labor’s dismissal.

I know she was disappointed in me, as many were. But there was little I could say publicly about how necessary it seemed for me to stay in the department and try to maintain the reforms for women initiated under Whitlam. When this was no longer possible, I resigned from the service to chance my arm as a writer, and Susan helped me, as she had so many others, by giving me the job of drafting the ALP women’s policy that would eventually be implemented when she became a minister in the Hawke government — a contribution that could be my proudest. And when, years later, she resigned from parliament and went to work at Penguin, without my bidding she reissued my first novel, West Block, which had come out in 1983, the year she became Labor’s first ever female cabinet minister.

Thus ours was a friendship that went right back, to the beginning of what we’d scarcely dared believe was to be her brilliant career. Watching her up close and from afar she seemed to grow into herself more than anyone I knew. To risk a hackneyed phrase, she became larger than life, a commanding figure wherever she happened to be.

My shock is slowly subsiding, and for the first time since her death I am able to shed tears as I write this, as more and more memories of her come floating back. Little things, but in a way these are the most indelible. Like the time we went to see the movie of Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls, and when an older, heavily rouged woman with dyed black hair came on the screen, Susan grabbed me and cried, “Look! She’s just like my Irish aunts!” Or when we went to Melbourne together for one of the first women’s liberation conferences and shrank into ourselves as the militant Spartacists tried to take it over.

Then there were our battles with male delegates at the UN Conference on Women in Mexico, as we sought to keep our plan for the coming decade intact, crossing out words at their insistence then slipping them back in when they’d wilted. It was an endurance test worse than any interdepartmental committee I’d participated in, and certainly good preparation for what would be her lone voice in cabinet.

There was the time, too, when we stayed up all night singing every Tin Pan Alley song we knew, one schmaltzy ballad after the other. And how, the night she became a senator, the group of us sang, yes, Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman.”

The thing about Susan Ryan is we all have such stories, and will be forever holding them close to our hearts. •

The post Remembering Susan Ryan appeared first on Inside Story.

“Historical,” you say?

The article itself, by Simon Benson, is a little less assertive, reporting a 2 per cent first-preference Coalition increase from a fortnight ago and a “corresponding fall for Labor, which has returned to near-historical lows of 34 per cent.”

In Newspoll terms there’s nothing historical about it; the Gillard government of 2010–13 often registered primary-vote numbers less than 30 per cent, bottoming at 27.

But in the context of actual election results the Australian is on safer ground. A 34 per cent primary vote would be, well, historically very low, although an improvement on the 33.3 per cent Labor got at last year’s election.

Still, there’s no getting around the fact that 34 per cent is a small proportion of the electorate. Past Labor leaders, successful or otherwise, would find it hard to believe the party could sink so low.

Can Labor win with 34 per cent? Not if the Coalition is on (as this Newspoll has it) 43, the Greens are on 12 and One Nation is 3. It would probably lose with about 49 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote, which happens to be Newspoll’s estimate. But if the previous fortnight’s Newspoll was replicated at the ballot box — 36 per cent for Labor versus 41 for the Coalition — Labor would get a two-party-preferred vote of about 51 per cent in today’s climate, which is usually enough for victory.

It’s the “c” in “compulsory preferential voting” that keeps Labor competitive at the federal level. If it were an “o” for optional (like in New South Wales) you could shift another 1 or 2 per cent (more like 2) from Labor’s two-party-preferred column into the Coalition’s.

Way back in the decade before last, Labor “sources” seeking to undermine their leader — those who denigrated Simon Crean because they wanted a return to Kim Beazley, and then those among the Crean/Gillard forces getting their own back against Bomber — would confide to journalists that “it,” the Labor primary vote, “needs a four in front of it” if the party is to be at all competitive. (Usually this would be prefaced by “mate,” because it is written somewhere that this is the preferred mode of address of party apparatchiks when dealing with our fourth estate.)

Then Labor won a slender two-party-preferred majority in 2010, with 38 per cent of the primary vote. (That involved overhauling a five-point primary-vote deficit with preferences, mostly from the Greens. It was only the second federal election at which the primary-vote loser won the two-party-preferred vote; the other was the Hawke government’s second re-election in 1987.)

So for the last ten years it’s been “(mate,) it needs to be in the high thirties.” But the truth, in our voting system, is that neither side’s primary vote means much in isolation; the result depends on what the other side gets, and what the minor parties and independents receive and where their preferences flow. One of Labor’s worst results ever, the landslide after the 1975 dismissal, came off a 42.8 per cent primary vote, which the party would have killed for at any election over the past decade. (Preferences in 1975 barely improved it, to an estimated 44.3.)

It is little noted that in 2019 the Coalition’s 41.4 per cent was its second-lowest primary vote since the second world war and the creation of the Liberal Party. Its lowest was in 1998, which those with long memories will recall the Howard government survived despite losing the national two-party-preferred vote by a Trumpish 2 per cent.

You get the picture: it’s two-party-preferred votes that count, not primary ones.

Still, there’s no getting around the fact that Australia’s oldest political party attracts barely a third of the national primary vote. Is it on the way out? You bet it is. So are the Liberals and Nationals. It’s not if, but when.

In the meantime, there are still elections to contest and two-party-preferred majorities to aim for. •

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Winning is tough, especially from opposition. Many capable leaders and solid campaigns will fail. But as journalist, biographer and academic Chris Wallace insists, every election is winnable, and this loss was unnecessary. Given the narrowness of the loss, the vulnerability of the incumbent and the scale of Australia’s still-unmet policy challenges, she is right to insist on understanding what went wrong.

To this end, she has published a brisk, partisan and boldly titled analysis that provides a checklist of ten critical lessons Labor needs to learn to avoid a repeat.

Chris Wallace is a former press gallery journalist who was proprietor of an excellent Canberra drinking hole, Das Kapital. She is also the biographer, sometimes controversially, of John Hewson, Germaine Greer, Don Bradman and Julia Gillard. Now on staff at ANU’s School of History, she writes as an entertaining insider. Even while choking down another reflux of regret, most party supporters will recognise the inherent common sense in many of her recommendations, which cover leadership, policy, politics, communications and mindset.

Wallace is not the first, of course, to offer advice to Labor following the debacle of May 2019. The party has published a forensic review by party elders Craig Emerson and Jay Weatherill, which attributed the defeat to “a weak strategy that could not adapt to the change in Liberal leadership, a cluttered policy agenda that looked risky, and an unpopular leader.” The pair made twenty-eight recommendations covering the party’s philosophy, organisation, campaigning, research and platform. More recently, academic researchers (me among them) have provided their own analysis and explanation of what they called “Morrison’s Miracle.”

The problem comes in the implementation. How does any organisation, collective and path-dependent, agree to change behaviour? How does a political party learn?

Wallace uses a sporting analogy to suggest that Labor might emulate a successful football team in which everyone in management and on the field is imbued with “a culture of permanent attention to performance and accountability.” But that’s quixotic, she concedes.

Political parties, after all, are not unitary actors. No one is really “in charge.” On the contrary, power is widely dispersed across multiple locations, functions and spheres of influence. At work are factions, rivalries, hierarchies, ambitions and traditions. All of which is to say that parties are political. It’s hard for them to agree on and follow a single course of action, they forget the lessons they learned in previous cycles, and they frequently fail to reach optimal efficiency. They usually “want” to win elections, but they often don’t do so.

Directed at a collective “Labor,” Wallace’s recommendations don’t single out any one person or group as responsible for giving effect to her changes.  Electing the leader is the role of caucus (and, sometimes, the members). Allocating frontbench jobs is the role of the leader (influenced by caucus and factions and regions and chambers). Determining policy is the job of — where do you start? — the party’s national conference, or the caucus, or the shadow minister, or the members. Anything to do with the economy, industry or industrial relations must involve the trade unions. Choosing the market researcher and running the ad campaign is the job of head office.

So implementing Wallace’s recommendations is easier said than done.

Take her first recommendation: “Elect a leader who can do the substance and theatre of politics.” Her discussion of this point highlights the importance of performance in democratic politics, and zeroes in on opposition leader Bill Shorten’s low polling numbers relative to Labor’s, and his “wooden ways” on the campaign trail relative to prime minister Scott Morrison. Where Morrison seemed to radiate energy and interacted enthusiastically with voters, Shorten, she writes, was too self-controlled, “smiling but slightly distant, looking ahead to the next person whose hand had to be shaken almost before he finished shaking the one in front of him.”

True, and I would have added a critique of Shorten’s other hand, too often stuck in his pocket. Trying to look cool and casual no doubt, but coming over like he didn’t really want to engage with the voters in front of him.

Wallace’s recommendation is radical surgery: elect a different leader (as opposed to, say, referring the existing one to a consultant for advice on loosening up and lifting his or her performance). In 1983, caucus did exactly this, dumping Bill Hayden for Bob Hawke and ensuring a great victory.

Could the same have happened to Shorten before 2019? He was protected by the 2013 rule change that prevented caucus coups after the Rudd–Gillard–Rudd bloodshed; this had bought welcome stability, which in turn strengthened Shorten’s leadership. He had campaigned well enough in 2016 and in the by-elections of 2018. And there was no Bob Hawke prowling on the sidelines.

Perhaps the question is, at what point in the electoral cycle does caucus start considering this advice in relation to the current leader and the next election?

Another of Wallace’s hard-to-do recommendations is to “make regional variations work for you, not against you.” Pointing to Labor’s glaring lack of MPs from Queensland, where the Coalition gained a swing of 4.3 per cent, Wallace condemns Shorten for “straddling the barbed-wire fence” on the Adani coal project. His attempted finesse — to require the mine project to secure environmental approvals — satisfied neither coalmining communities in regional Queensland nor green-leaning voters down south.

Wallace suggests Shorten should have engaged in sustained personal engagement with Queenslanders, including the pro-mine unions, listening to their concerns and developing a workable solution to the impasse. It would have included a well-funded transition package: imperfect perhaps but fair, and better than the alternatives on offer in the election. Turning regional variations to advantage, rather than getting skewered by them, would demonstrate leadership and a capacity for good government.

As Wallace points out, Labor has done this in the past in relation to difficult regional issues: uranium, the Murray–Darling and (1983 again) the Tasmanian dam (though it’s often forgotten that Labor lost all five Tasmanian seats in that election):

It is Labor’s problem to solve. The Adani divide is mirrored within Labor itself. If the party reaches a robust agreed internal position bridging sunset industrial era development and jobs to sunrise information era development and jobs consistent with planetary survival and thriving, it will be unified, electable and ready to govern well.

As far as it goes — that is, as a policy process rather than a policy solution — this argument is fine. The irony, of course, is that in relation to other elements of its election platform, Labor followed Wallace’s advice. She is highly critical of shadow treasurer Chris Bowen and his politically toxic reforms of negative gearing and franking credits, but these reforms were aimed at ensuring Labor’s promises were fully funded within a budget surplus — arguably, showing Labor as unified, electable and ready to govern. It’s true that they created policy losers — breaching another of Wallace’s recommendations — especially after being transformed into “death taxes” by the Coalition’s negative advertising; but any Adani package would struggle for a win–win.

Which brings us to Noah Carroll.

This name does not appear in Wallace’s book, nor in the Emerson–Weatherill review. It should, because Noah Carroll was Labor’s national secretary and, as such, the campaign manager of the 2019 election.

When Wallace says that Labor must improve its polling and polling analysis, must produce brilliant advertising and must wise up on social media, she is talking about head office functions that were the responsibility of the national campaign manager.

Even more damning, when Emerson and Weatherill conclude that Labor had no persuasive strategy to win the election, no simple narrative to unite its many policies, no formal campaign committee or other forum to execute the campaign strategy; and when they find that Labor targeted too many seats and didn’t reframe its campaign after “daggy dad” Morrison replaced “top end of town” Turnbull, they are talking about the failures of Noah Carroll. Spare him no blushes. He walked away from head office after the defeat and was last seen working for a Big Four management consultancy.

Wallace makes ten recommendations, Emerson and Weatherill twenty-eight. In the interests of parsimony, I reckon I could boil it down to one single, vital, structural recommendation. There needs to be proper functional separation between the leader’s office and a head office run by a national secretary with the capacity to manage a professional national campaign. The leader’s office does the policy, the media, the front-of-house — but the party office has to turn it into a campaign strategy and execute it.

There are very few iron laws in election campaigns. But it is difficult to find a successful modern (post-1972) campaign, Labor or Liberal, in which that separation was not evident. The Liberals broke the iron law in 1993, losing their unlosable election; Labor broke it in 1996, and again in 2013.

In 2019, it seems, Labor did it again. The strategic void, the research failures, the inability to target the right message about the right issues to the voters who mattered in the seats that mattered — all these suggest a head office lacking professional campaign management. Perhaps Carroll — favoured son of the Victorian right, architect of the 2014 state election campaign that took Labor’s Daniel Andrews to power, and close confidant of Bill Shorten — wasn’t able to provide the scepticism, independence and separation essential to the job. The Liberals, it has emerged, knew what seats they needed to win to scratch out a narrow but famous victory; Labor had too many paths to victory and never managed to choose any of them. •

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Childe was born in 1892, at a time when dreams that Australia would be a workers’ paradise, free of the poverty and invidious class distinctions of the Old World, were shattering in Australia’s first great depression. Strikes by maritime workers, shearers and miners were all defeated, and from these reversals came labour-based parties resolved to marry industrial action and parliamentary representation.

By the time Childe came of political age at the University of Sydney in the years before the first world war, Australia’s labour parties were well established in all the states and the new Commonwealth had a Labor government, led by the Scottish miner Andrew Fisher. Also well established was Labor’s distinctive mode of organisational discipline, developed to ensure that Labor’s parliamentarians remained true to the workers’ interests when they acquired a middle-class role and salary. The Labor MP represented the Labor movement, and should he forget this and choose to follow conscience or individual conviction rather than the will of caucus, he would be expelled.

During Childe’s time as a student, NSW Labor premier Jim McGowan, himself a good unionist, used the power of the state to break a strike of militant gas workers. Childe’s sympathies were with the strikers rather than the Labor leaders. At Oxford during the first world war his radical convictions strengthened; he was opposed to the war and to conscription. As a visitor to Britain he was exempt from military service, but many of his friends were jailed for their conscientious objections. He joined the Oxford University Fabian Society, where he mixed with other idealistic young radicals, including Douglas and Margaret Cole and a budding communist, Rajani Palme Dutt, with whom he set up a Socialist Society.

Despite his outstanding results at Oxford, and despite having published a scholarly article on Minyan ware in the Journal of Hellenic Studies, Childe’s radical reputation prevented him from getting continuing academic employment when he returned to Australia in 1917. He was placed under surveillance by Australia’s military intelligence agency, on advice from MI5, and lost a position as a university college tutor because of his anti-war sympathies. Eventually he found employment as private secretary to John Storey, the Labor opposition leader in New South Wales.

It was a difficult time for the Australian labour movement. The party had split over conscription during the war, and Labor prime minister Billy Hughes had taken his supporters into a new Nationalist government. This not only exposed different views about state power and personal liberty; it also reflected Labor’s difficulties in holding its parliamentarians to party policies, the inevitability of “rats” like Hughes, and the inherent limitations of the parliamentary road to socialism. With the opportunity to study these dilemmas from the inside, Childe increasingly doubted that a Labor government would ever introduce bold legislation to achieve social equality.

He returned to Britain in October 1921 to take up a research position in the office of the NSW agent-general, but when the Labor government fell six months later he lost his job. In Australia, he had established himself as a labour intellectual — lecturing, writing, advising, debating. With time on his hands in London he completed the manuscript of How Labour Governs, picked up part-time political work and rekindled his interest in archaeology, where he eventually found secure employment.

Childe published the first of his books on European prehistory, The Dawn of European Civilisation, in 1925. Countering the view that there was no civilisation in Europe before the Bronze Age, he argued that the material remains of these earlier societies showed practical humans making their worlds with labour and enterprise. Following Marx, his was a materialist concept of society and of progress, focusing on the means of production and the movement of practical innovations with migrations of craftspeople.

In fact, Childe was the first scholar to conceptualise the shift of humans from hunters and gathers into settled agriculturists. This Neolithic revolution supported larger settlements of people with more complex socials structures. He went on to write twenty-five more books, the most popular of them, What Happened in History, selling 300,000 copies in fifteen years.

Terry Irving gives us a good sense of Childe the person, a hardworking, driven, rational man who had friends but no intimate personal relations, dressed eccentrically and was sometimes mocked for his plain looks. His friend Jack Lindsay believed he wore a sardonic mask because of his inability to reveal what he really felt. Today we would probably say he was “on the spectrum.” He didn’t return to Australia until his retirement. Then, after receiving honours and visiting old friends, he jumped to his death at Govetts Leap in the Blue Mountains in 1957.

Irving takes the mystery surrounding Childe’s death as his starting point. With no suicide note, and at the height of the cold war, friends like Bert and Mary Evatt wondered if he’d been pushed by people who thought he was a spy. Only years later was the mystery solved. Just before Childe took a taxi from the Carrington in Katoomba to the fatal cliff, he had sent a friend in England what was effectively a suicide note, to be opened ten years after his death.

The note was not a conventional account of a personal existential crisis so much as an argument for voluntary euthanasia. “The progress of medical science,” it began, “has burdened society with a horde of parasites — rentiers, pensioners, and other retired persons whom society has to support and even to nurse.” Venerable counsellors “hanging round the fringe of learned societies or university institutions can slow down progress and blast the careers of younger, innovative thinkers.” A sane society, he said, would offer euthanasia as a crowning honour.

In his own case, Childe wrote, his memory was starting to fail and he saw no prospect of settling the problems that interested him most on the available data. When his pension ran out, he would become a burden on society. “I have always intended to cease living before that happens… Life ends best when one is happy and strong.” As Irving writes, Childe wanted his friends to know “that in his chosen way of dying he was defiantly continuing his commitment to progressive and humanist values.”

Irving’s discussion of Childe’s experience of labour politics is densely researched and immensely detailed. It is a reminder of the intensity of the investment radicals once made in working-class politics, both in Childe’s time and again in the 1960s and 1970s when many of those studying labour history were also activists, using the mistakes and achievements of the past to inform present political action.

I wanted more in this book, though, about Childe’s archaeology — his methods and the sites he dug — and why he was so passionate about it. And I also wanted more straightforward accounts of his contribution to the discipline, not just the deep structures of his thinking but what he actually argued. When I finished the book I was still somewhat unsure why Childe was so important to archaeology.

As a labour historian, of course, Irving is more interested in Childe as a labour intellectual. He would likely say that Sally Green has already written the detailed story of Childe as a prehistorian, but The Fatal Lure of Politics is the only biography of Childe I am likely to read, and its subtitle meant that I was hoping to encounter that part of his life as well. •

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Of course, none of these interpretations was self-evident to those who sought to make sense of the event at the time. As senior journalist Phillip Coorey wrote on the morning of the challenge, “Only six months ago… Mr Rudd and his government appeared unassailable.” Since then, the popular and scholarly analyses of the night of 23 June 2010 have had one thing in common: they have attempted to draw historical meaning and political precepts from an event that bewildered much of the electorate.

In the years following Gillard’s ascension, Labor MPs argued vigorously for their preferred interpretations of Rudd’s downfall. The first wave of history-making took place in February 2012, when Kevin Rudd made his initial attempt to return to the leadership. Gillard loyalists used the media to expose the dysfunctionality of his government as they saw it. Gillard ultimately won that battle over Labor’s recent history and immediate future by a margin of 71–31.

Labor’s partisans clashed again in 2015 in ABC TV’s three-part documentary, The Killing Season. Rudd talked of a “coup”; Gillard referred simply to “the leadership change.” Presenter Sarah Ferguson suggested that the goal of the series was to put the leaders “side by side and let the audience decide,” but senior ministers such as Wayne Swan and Craig Emerson have told me they felt its account was decidedly pro-Rudd.

Finally, the debate was taken up in the published memoirs of key players and observers. Both Rudd and Gillard explained the challenge as they saw it, within broader accounts of their careers, as did their senior colleagues Wayne Swan, Greg Combet, Peter Garrett and Craig Emerson. High-profile backbench MP Maxine McKew joined in, as did Australian Workers’ Union leader and reputed “faceless man” Paul Howes, and one-time Rudd speechwriter James Button. Despite the inevitable flaws in these subjective accounts, they cumulatively reveal much about the structural challenges that led to it.

The close personal friendships and political alliances among members of each camp shape the picture of history that emerges from these memoirs. It’s also important to remember that political memoirists don’t craft their narratives on their own: as the former chief executive of Melbourne University Publishing, Louise Adler, once wrote, modern political memoirs are constructed with the help of “the unacknowledged ghostwriter, the credited co-author, advisers, researchers, fact checkers and a legion of loyal staff.” To this throng I would add the “friend,” the “parliamentary colleague,” the “internal supporter” and others.

Members of the Gillard camp, in particular, have acknowledged these wider groups. Wayne Swan and Julia Gillard both thanked one another directly in their acknowledgements. In his memoir, The Good Fight, Swan also paid tribute to Stephen Smith and Stephen Conroy, fellow “roosters” in the party’s national Right faction. Gillard thanked Craig Emerson, cabinet minister and key supporter, for offering “valuable feedback on sections” of her book, My Story. Emerson in turn thanked Greg Combet, another Gillard minister and loyalist, for “encouragement” and Gillard herself for “wise counsel” during the drafting process of his book, The Boy from Baradine.

When asked about these literary interactions, the memoirists have revealed that they spoke with one another, swapped drafts and corroborated memories. Combet, author with Mark Davis of Fights of My Life, confirmed to me that he and Gillard “did liaise over some of the elements.” Gillard recalled that her deputy, Wayne Swan, “shared his manuscript” with her during his own writing process. When I asked him if his account was partly intended to support Gillard’s legacy, Craig Emerson responded, “Definitely, and I discussed it with Bob Hawke, not in fine detail, but having had that discussion he said, ‘History will judge Julia Gillard well.’”

When Rudd published his own two-volume memoir, the contest of peers gave way to a contest of pages. Recognising the “minor phalanx” of memoirs arrayed against him, he produced an account of the challenge, in The PM Years, that spanned six chapters and ninety-four pages.

In different ways, then, the friendships forged during these political battles shaped the form and content of the memoirs produced by those who sided with Gillard. They told a version of history in which a good government was in terminal decline prior to June 2010, largely because the prime minister was almost totally dysfunctional. Cabinet ministers in particular recorded dozens of examples of Rudd’s poor interpersonal skills, his inability to make decisions and the centralisation of power away from cabinet and towards the prime minister’s office.

Peter Garrett (in Big Blue Sky) and Wayne Swan both accused Rudd of “micromanagement.” Combet explained that Rudd “took all responsibility upon himself,” which “made decision-making slow.” Gillard referred to Rudd’s tendency to “kick the can down the road” by “announcing an inquiry” rather than making a final policy decision. Even those on the edge of the process, like speechwriter James Button writing in his book Speechless, found that Rudd’s “fretful need to obtain more data… was constantly holding up the workings of government.”

In Swan’s account, Rudd’s style became increasingly corrosive over time, and “infected the way officials and staff interacted with him, his office and the cabinet.” Garrett bluntly described Rudd as a “brute” in his handling of both the bureaucracy and his colleagues.

Even those who ultimately supported Rudd recognised his weaknesses. Discussing Rudd’s return, in his book Diary of a Foreign Minister, foreign minister Bob Carr recorded in his diary, “plans are not Kevin’s strong suit.” What is astonishing is not that insiders are critical of Rudd’s governing style but that those criticisms are repeated regardless of factional or personal loyalties.

These memoirs also present a consistent picture of deteriorating cabinet processes. Swan claimed that Rudd was “an extremely poor chair of cabinet meetings,” while Combet recorded that “[m]any ministers felt excluded from discussion of the policy and political implications of decisions.” In the throes of the global financial crisis, the government was led by its four most senior ministers (Rudd, Gillard, Swan and finance minister Lindsay Tanner) in the Strategic Priorities Budget Committee; by 2010 that, too, had broken down. Its “agendas became unwieldy, the meeting schedules erratic,” wrote Gillard.

For Craig Emerson, one of the virtues of the Gillard government was that “the cabinet processes worked, in stark contrast to the shambolic Rudd processes.” Against these charges, Rudd mounted the relatively weak reply that his cabinet process was “as systematic as it could be.”

These flawed processes ultimately led to failed policies. In late 2009, with the number of asylum seeker boat arrivals growing rapidly, Rudd made the crucial decision to send an Australian customs vessel, the MV Oceanic Viking, to assist a distressed boat of Sri Lankan refugees, without having consulted immigration minister Chris Evans. When the vessel arrived at an Indonesian processing centre, the refugees refused to disembark. As Swan wrote, “Not only was [the failure to consult Evans] very poor protocol in a system of democratic cabinet government, it was politically disastrous.”

At the same time, Rudd was seen to be mishandling the government’s contentious carbon pollution reduction scheme. According to Gillard, climate minister Penny Wong “did not know whether her political instructions from Kevin were to get a deal or to crash the prospects of a deal… Kevin was obviously equivocating on, indeed hiding from, such a profound decision.” Ministers were shocked when Rudd dumped the scheme; Garrett wasn’t alone in saying that the decision to defer this crucial plank of climate policy “wasn’t communicated to cabinet before being made public.”

Again, as the Rudd government began to develop its proposed resource super profits tax on minerals wealth in May 2010, key ministers were left unconsulted. Gillard claimed that Rudd sidelined them “to prevent leaks,” while Swan recorded that Rudd “distrusted [resources minister Martin] Ferguson because he was close to the industry.” Policy failures and political headaches were the inevitable product of the Rudd government’s warped cabinet processes.

That’s the policy substance, but what of the sales pitch? In most of these memoirs, the Rudd government engages in a form of media manipulation that, by June 2010, had failed. In James Button’s assessment, “the audience did not matter to him, only the media.” From the backbench, Maxine McKew saw a prime minister who was obsessed with presentation. “Rudd was a puzzle…” she wrote in Tales from the Political Trenches. “[H]e could be persuasive and sophisticated, but on other occasions, he seemed to struggle with deciding which Kevin the public should see.”

The government’s quest to manipulate the media cycle, by McKew’s account, was relentless, culminating in a “command and control” system of political messaging. For union leader Paul Howes, writing in Confessions of a Faceless Man, the decision to abandon the carbon-reduction scheme revealed Rudd as a cynical media performer, “all spin and no substance.”

In the absence of a clear policy vision and sound administrative processes, Rudd would be fatally exposed when his supremacy in the public opinion polling began to wane. In accounts from the Rudd and Gillard camps, polling proved central to the question of whether the events of June 2010 were justified.

In the first of the “insider” accounts of the event, McKew argued that public polls and commissioned internal polls were the “principal tool in the enterprise” of Rudd’s removal. In The PM Years Rudd pointed to the last Newspoll taken before his ousting to show that he was still running a good government that had “recovered a solid lead” over the Coalition, and that “the Australian public did not share the views of the plotters on the allegedly terminal state of the government I led.”

Gillard’s camp referred to party polling that pointed, according to Howes, “not just to defeat, but to electoral annihilation.” For Gillard, “as the polling tightened,” a sense of panic developed in the Labor caucus. Rudd is, of course, right to say that the public polling was not bad enough to validate the move against him, but it is significant that in his narrative the polling appears to be his last line of defence, and one that became shaky when the public and party findings contradicted each other.

Did Labor insiders see the change of leadership coming? In their accounts, several prominent members of the Rudd ministry confessed surprise at the series of events in which they were swept up. Combet admitted he had “no inkling of the move against [Rudd].” Craig Emerson, aware of the disaffection with Rudd in caucus, claimed that until the night of 23 June 2010 he “didn’t place a lot of weight” on the media reports that warned of a leadership change. Peter Garrett, who was overseas at a conference about whaling, recorded that he had left Canberra “with one prime minister in charge and flew back in to find another.”

If others perceived Rudd to have been jittery about his support in mid June, Rudd’s own memoir offered a picture of total surprise when Gillard moved against him. Referring to the article that triggered the event — a story in the Sydney Morning Herald by journalist Peter Hartcher claiming that Rudd now distrusted his deputy leader — he wrote, “It suggested a leadership crisis when, to the best of my knowledge, there was none.” For the majority of those involved, the events were fast-paced and unexpected.

At the core of their accounts, Rudd, Gillard and Swan confront the essential meaning of the event. For Rudd, the only explanation of 23 June 2010 was ambition and opportunism: “the coup was primarily about personal ambition, power and, in some cases, revenge,” he wrote in The PM Years. In his version of history, the leadership change had little to do with either the administrative processes or the policy outcomes of his government, and was sealed by a broken promise for more time.

For Swan, on the other hand, the events were an attempt to save Labor from the dysfunction of its leader: “Kevin had brought these events upon himself and we now had no choice but to make the best of the situation.” For Gillard, who considered her partnership with Rudd to have been the backbone of the Labor government, the Hartcher story sounded the death knell of the “only remaining bond holding the government together.” The differences between the Rudd and Gillard–Swan narratives are wide, with little or no agreement about issues of policy, process or, especially, polling.

A decade after the event, what lessons can be drawn from these insider accounts? First, cabinet remains the central institution in Commonwealth administration. To misuse or abuse that institution in the 2010s was to create a large vulnerability for one’s leadership. The removal of Tony Abbott in September 2015 was equally premised on the need to “restore” cabinet government.

Second, bad process breeds bad policy. The Rudd government’s missteps on asylum seekers, the carbon pollution reduction scheme and the resource super profits tax were all products of poor consultation, a tendency to stifle policy debate, and a chronic fear of leaks.

Third, though it never pays to be naive in politics, spin is rarely a sound substitute for substance. Rudd’s quest to control the media cycle was central to the story of the dysfunctionality of his leadership.

Finally, the political class’s obsession with opinion polling — an obsession confirmed and reiterated in most of these accounts — was a key part of the structural weakness of Australian politics in the 2010s. Having alienated much of his parliamentary party and failed to enlist the support of key groups in the community, Rudd had to live or die by the polls, which left him critically exposed in June 2010.

Both Labor and the Liberals have since altered the rules for selecting their leaders in the hope of slowing the churn of the past decade. But the events that led to June 2010 could still be repeated. A leader who sidelined cabinet and governed by spin might not be replaced by the party room, but a political crisis could still unfold swiftly.

If history is never to be repeated, policymakers and bureaucrats must read and learn from those who have lived it, made it, and published it for posterity. Amid the self-serving arguments and coordinated narratives propagated in this group of political memoirs, there are key lessons about how not to run a government. •

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Out of that intervention came Victoria’s current factional system, which found itself displayed on 60 Minutes last Sunday and the front page of the Age the following morning. The 1970s power-sharing scheme, designed to ensure that no faction dominated, helped create the incentive for aggressive branch stacking.

In electoral terms, today’s Victorian branch is a very different beast from that of half a century ago. Factional intrigue and bastardry (including accusations of branch-stacking on both sides) are never far away, but this didn’t stop Labor from becoming the natural party of state government in the early 1980s and, since then, a constant source of electoral strength for federal Labor. The occasional factional brawls have probably seemed irrelevant to voters more focused on issues such as health and education.

Inevitably, this week’s revelations raise the question of whether the current round of branch-stacking is different in kind or degree. Perhaps the main difference lies in the vulnerability of the perpetrators to state-of-the-art video and audio surveillance. Indeed, the quality of the evidence obtained by Nine and the Age would excite envy within the security services of some small nation-states.

Even the silliest politicians know that they are often just one indiscreet observation away from a surreptitiously recorded career-killer (think Hillary Clinton and the “deplorables”). But who would have thought that the same risks could attend a factional leader discussing a bit of branch-stacking with his closest (taxpayer-funded) comrades, with audio accompanied by video for good measure. You can’t trust anyone, can you?

The offence for which right-wing faction leader Adem Somyurek was dismissed is, of course, the least of his problems. A swearing politician is hardly novel, and while some of the boundaries he crossed may have brought back memories of Richard Nixon’s White House, quite a few MPs will be relieved that some of their own office outbursts have not (as far as they know) been recorded. Alas, emails can be equally revealing, as Somyurek’s factional colleague Anthony Byrne has discovered. Do you get the impression that these folks don’t delete many emails? This electronic warfare must be expected to continue.

Assessing how much of the branch-stacking and related activity constitutes criminal (as opposed to internal party) offences is best left to the legally trained, although the spectacle of a minister of the crown attempting to induce a party member to forge signatures might be characterised (in Sybil Fawlty’s words) as “a little tricky.” It is probably safe to assume that sufficient of the video and audio evidence would be admissible if charges proceed.

What the current turmoil may presage is a change in the Victorian electorate’s tolerance of factional warfare, since the loss of three ministers (at time of writing) would seem to fall into Oscar Wilde’s “careless” category. Voters prefer that the premier is in charge of the state, and suggestions that he was in any way beholden to Somyurek (who was able to indecently push his way back into cabinet three and a half years after his dismissal for sexist bullying in 2015) might raise uncomfortable questions.

In premier Daniel Andrews’s favour, the next state election is nearly two and a half years away. Indeed, another federal election will be held before Victoria goes to the polls, and the involvement of Victorian federal Labor MPs makes this Anthony Albanese’s problem too. It is virtually impossible to envisage Labor winning the next federal election without the usual solid contribution from Victoria.

Revealingly, in all of Somyurek’s colourful observations, there was nary a mention of policy or ideology: the agenda was completely about the acquisition and maintenance of power and control. The cliché about concern with “power for power’s sake” is no less true for being a cliché.

This should serve as a useful reminder that factional labels are not what they used to be. The days when left and right represented competing political philosophies and policies, to be accommodated within a broad church, are largely gone. Only senior citizens can recall battles within the party over communism and foreign policy, and those with memories of the passionate debate over uranium mining are no longer young either. Today, the nearest thing to an ideological breach is over asylum seekers.

Supporters of the factional system will cite its value in enabling its leaders to sort out behind closed doors any policy differences that do emerge, thus avoiding “party split” headlines. While this contention is not without merit, others would see value in a political party having an open and democratic exchange of views involving a wider range of participants.

If factions and factional control are often about patronage and the dispersal of the spoils of office, the problem has only been deepened by an important parliamentary reform in 2003. A restructured upper house has meant more winnable positions for Labor, tipping more safe seats into the “patronage pot” previously occupied solely by very safe lower house seats. The need to select electorally appealing candidates for marginal single-member upper house seat contests has gone.

In that context, a glance at Labor’s upper house membership reveals either a marvellous triumph of multiculturalism or an ethnic patronage system in which Somyurek was a master practitioner. Perhaps it is both, but it would be naive to ignore the role of branch-stacking in this outcome. And, of course, MPs are only a part of the picture: MPs have staff; ministers have even more staff. The tapes make clear that a keen interest in policy is not a key selection criterion for at least some of those staff positions.

Sunday’s 60 Minutes reminded viewers of the customary rationale for what some may criticise as ethnic patronage: “A disadvantaged community is empowered and Labor’s base is broadened” — presumably even more so if the new members are actually aware of their party memberships? In passing, one wonders whether, if an “Anglo” faction leader had been seen to be manipulating ethnic groups in the manner revealed, certain ugly questions might not have arisen.

Steve Bracks and Jenny Macklin seem suitable enough appointees to oversee the administration of the Victorian branch for the next three years, although the case for the work to be done by other than former politicians was not unreasonable. Bracks has already identified some of the obvious challenges — such as ensuring that people counted as members have actually made a conscious decision to join the party. The fact that as few as 16,000 members are on the books (not all of whom can possibly be genuine) is a timely reminder of how unrepresentative all political parties have become. The activities exposed in recent days almost certainly (partly) help explain why.

Preselection (for federal and state elections) will be a key issue in the administration period and a likely source of conflict. History tells us that an interregnum like this often favours the status quo, with sitting members re-endorsed. The obvious proviso is that any who are implicated in criminal activity might need to seek alternative employment.

Bracks and Macklin are not running a political science seminar, but it might be useful if they considered the realistic and desirable role of party branches and party members in the twenty-first century. A subset of that issue is the role of factions. The fit-for-purpose question looms large over this exercise. Finally, the role of electorate and ministerial staff also warrants consideration, perhaps more so given that they are publicly funded. An interesting three years beckon. •

The post Spoils of office appeared first on Inside Story.

Back then, Labor’s Victorian branch was tightly controlled by the left. The bitter fight over alleged communist influence in the party, which had caused the disastrous Labor split of 1955, was still raging. The breakaway group, the Democratic Labor Party, or DLP, had captured a small but decisive share of the vote, its preferences shoring up the Coalition’s performance at state and federal elections.

In Victoria, premier Henry Bolte’s Liberals remained firmly in control, as they had since 1955. Federally, the Coalition was twenty years into the longest unbroken run in government by any party. Labor’s protracted spell in the wilderness marked the lowest ebb in the party’s history.

A major problem for Labor had been the loss to the DLP of large sections of its traditional Catholic vote. The wily Bob Menzies, Liberal prime minister since 1949, had gained the support of many Catholics with a program of state aid for Catholic schools, initially aimed at providing science-teaching facilities but later broadened to include general funding.

Labor’s left — especially influential in Victoria — remained resolutely opposed to state aid, seeing it as capitulation to B.A. Santamaria’s Catholic Social Studies Movement (known simply as “the Movement”), which it believed had provoked the party split. When opposition to state aid was reaffirmed at a crucial national conference in 1965, it became clear that Labor was dividing between traditionalists/ideologues and modernisers/pragmatists. The conference decision also stymied back-channel efforts to mend the split, as was confirmed for me years later by both Santamaria and Gough Whitlam, who was deputy leader at the time.

Whitlam — in his characteristic “crash through or crash” style — was engaged in a running war with the left-dominated national executive, whose members he described as “witless men.” Campaigning in a by-election in 1966, he stepped up his attack, issuing a statement criticising the “extremist controlling group” for using the party “as a vehicle for their own prejudice and vengeance.” Unless the party embarked on urgent structural reform, he added, it risked being reduced to “a sectional rump.” He only narrowly averted expulsion from the party.

Once he wrested the leadership from the veteran Arthur Calwell in 1967, Whitlam turned to what he saw as the epicentre of the party’s problems, the left’s Victorian stronghold. He was convinced that significant change in the branch was necessary if the party was to improve its dismal performance at the polls. The expected resistance emerged immediately. Calwell formally charged him with disloyalty and unworthy conduct after Whitlam had accused him of “debauching” the debate on the Vietnam war; the executive found against Whitlam and he was reprimanded.

Incensed, Whitlam resigned his leadership in order to recontest and win a mandate to pursue reform in Victoria. In the subsequent leadership ballot he was opposed by a Victorian left-winger, Jim Cairns, who posed the question to fellow party members: “Whose party is this — ours or his?” The members weren’t of a single mind on the question, and Whitlam scraped in by an uncomfortably narrow thirty-eight votes to thirty-two.

While Whitlam succeeded in pushing for the party’s parliamentary leaders to sit on the national executive and for a softening of its opposition to state aid, the problems in Victoria persisted. His sense of frustration was compounded when Labor made significant gains at the 1969 federal election, winning 47 per cent of the national vote, but managed just 41.3 per cent in Victoria.

The bubbling tensions erupted again in Victoria in 1970. During the state election early that year, Labor leader Clyde Holding campaigned strongly on the new federal policy of state aid for non-government schools. To Holding’s amazement and embarrassment, the party’s state president, George Crawford, and secretary, Bill Hartley, both stalwarts of the left, announced in the week before the election that a Victorian Labor government would not support state aid. A furious Whitlam refused to campaign, and Holding was forced to repudiate his own policy. The Bolte government was comfortably returned.

Just months later, the issue erupted again, this time at the party’s state conference. Whitlam was censured and the party’s left dug in, but events had reached a crossroads that the party could no longer ignore, especially with the 1969 federal gains having put it within striking distance of government.

It was at this point that federal Labor decided to intervene in Victoria. National president Tom Burns and party secretary Mick Young were installed as temporary administrators pending a new power-sharing arrangement in 1971.

The intervention paid a handsome dividend when voters went to the polls in 1972. Labor significantly improved its state vote, winning 47.3 per cent in Victoria against a national figure of 49.6 per cent and helping Whitlam sweep to power. This was a sharp improvement on Victoria’s previous three federal figures: 41.3 per cent in 1969, 35 per cent in 1966 and 40.4 per cent in 1963. The party picked up three seats in Victoria, recording some of the biggest swings in the land: 10.2 per cent in La Trobe, 7.9 per cent in Holt, 7.7 per cent in Diamond Valley and 7.7 per cent in Casey. The national swing to Labor was 2.6 per cent; in Victoria it was 6 per cent.

The intervention also brought lasting cultural changes to the Victorian party. Among them was the rise of the Participants, a group mostly made up of lawyers, which became a force in the election of John Cain’s reforming Labor government in 1982 and contributed to the success of the early Hawke governments. Outstanding federal ministers including John Button and Michael Duffy had been active in the group.

The malaise in 2020 is qualitatively different: where it was a matter of factional tyranny in 1970, today it is factional subversion. And the party itself has changed enormously. It is in office in Victoria with a comfortable majority, its electoral performance is sound, and it is ably led by premier Dan Andrews, arguably the stand-out leader through the twin crises of bushfire and coronavirus.

Andrews’s prompt and deservedly brutal response to branch-stacking revelations this week had all the hallmarks of a professional hit. It remains to be seen how the party will emerge from the process he has initiated. But if 1970 is any guide, there will be changes, and they will be far-reaching. •

The post Crashing through appeared first on Inside Story.

The two-party-preferred swings in the 2016–19 term ranged from 7.2 per cent towards the government — specifically towards Barnaby Joyce, who was Nationals leader, in New England — to 7.0 per cent towards Labor after Malcolm Turnbull’s resignation in Wentworth. But the Wentworth figure was counted out by the electoral commission purely for interest’s sake: the Labor candidate didn’t make it into the final round, and it was independent Kerryn Phelps who defeated Dave Sharma 51.2 to 48.8 per cent.

(Because Phelps didn’t run at the previous election, there could be no two-candidate-preferred swing either. Yes, one figure was widely reported — the difference between Malcolm Turnbull’s 2016 two-candidate-preferred vote and Sharma’s in 2018 — and at 19 per cent it made great headlines, but it was meaningless.)

In Bennelong the previous December, Labor’s Kristina Keneally had achieved a 4.8 per cent swing, which wasn’t too bad considering sitting Liberal John Alexander had recontested. Little was made of the result. Scribes didn’t furiously plot that 4.8 per cent on the pendulum to produce an oh-my-God massive Labor victory at the next general election. But they did after Longman, Queensland, eight months later, despite the swing to the opposition being a smaller 3.7 per cent (assisted in this case by a new personal vote for Labor MP Susan Lamb, who had been elected in 2016). Longman set the hares running — apply that 3.7 per cent to seats across the board, and woaaah! — and resulted in prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s demise two months later.

But the truth is that by-elections can rarely tell us anything about a party’s prospects at the next general election, precisely because voters aren’t (except in rare cases, in a hung parliament) deciding who should form government. This frees them up to vote for other reasons.

And folks should never ever plot a by-election swing onto the pendulum. Yes, it’s tempting, but don’t do it! Yet virtually everyone in politics is convinced, or pretends to believe, that by-elections are dry runs for the big event. Perhaps we got this unfortunate habit from the Brits.

This takes us to Eden-Monaro, where voters will cast their ballots on 4 July to select Mike Kelly’s replacement. Five weeks ago I ventured that, “factoring in the likelihood of a strong [Liberal] candidate,” the government would probably retain the seat.

That strong candidate (an Andrew Constance or a Jim Molan; I didn’t mention state Nationals leader John Barilaro, but he would have fitted the bill) didn’t eventuate, and instead they’re running Fiona Kotvojs, who also contested in 2019. (Not that she’s a bad candidate, but she doesn’t possess star power.)

Labor, by contrast, seems to have wrung maximum bang out of its buck with the mayor of Bega Valley Shire, Kristy McBain. She is reported to have enjoyed a profile boost during the summer bushfires (though not as much as Constance), and around a fifth of Eden-Monaro’s voters live in her jurisdiction. (And for all I know her recognition might extend well beyond the council boundaries.)

The key theme of that earlier article was that Kelly’s popularity, and hence his high personal vote, made the seat appear more Labor-friendly than it actually is. Redistributions over the last decade and more have favoured the Liberals, and Kelly’s presence on the ballot paper at all of the last five outings (even in 2013, when he was unsuccessful) disguised this reality.

Put it this way: if Kelly had retired at the last election, Kotvojs (if she had been candidate) would now be the MP. If he’d waited and retired at the 2022 general poll, the Liberals would probably retake it, unless Labor has a particularly good New South Wales result (like 2007, say, or 1993).

But this is a by-election, and by-elections are unpredictable, though they usually swing against governments. Even if we take away 5 per cent for the loss of Kelly’s personal vote, just a Bennelong-sized swing would get Labor over the line.

So, in the absence of that turbocharged candidate, I’m withdrawing the earlier prediction and climbing onto the fence. It could go either way.

From McBain’s point of view, the chances of entering federal parliament next month are better than if Kelly had delayed retiring until 2022. And if she does win, it will increase her chances at the next election because she’ll have almost two years to consolidate her personal vote and employ the resources of incumbency. Defending a seat is easier than trying to take it.

What issue could Labor urge Eden-Monaro voters to “send a message” to the government about on 4 July? At time of writing, industrial relations potentially holds promise.

Needless to say, Anthony Albanese has more to lose from Eden-Monaro than Scott Morrison, because seats usually swing to oppositions at by-elections, don’t they?

A Liberal win wouldn’t tell us anything about the next general election, but lots of political players will believe it does, and others, Albo’s internal enemies, will pretend to. •

And if you want to dig in a bit deeper, see this graph of votes at groups of Eden-Monaro booths over the past sixteen years.

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Yet, as Liam Byrne reminds us in this remarkable book, both men risk being overshadowed by their contrasting fates as prime minister. Byrne, the ACTU historian, argues that there is much more to each of their stories. Scullin is too easily dismissed as a tragic and ill-fated figure overwhelmed by circumstance; Curtin risks sanctification, his stoic leadership “obscuring the real man who bore the nation’s burdens and suffered the cost.”

Recounted here are events that took place in the early twentieth century, long before each man became prime minister. Byrne details their long and often arduous experience in Labor politics, noting how each in his own way came to influence the growing party at a time when it was alive to the spark of new ideas. Each was from Irish immigrant stock, an outsider in an Anglo-dominated world, who found an intellectual and spiritual home, not to mention camaraderie, in the party.

It was a time of intense political ferment, and the radical Curtin and the moderate Scullin frequently found themselves on the opposite sides of the debate about what Labor stood for. Was it seeking to reform the capitalist system from within or radically restructure society along socialist lines?

With an exquisite eye for detail, Byrne recounts how both men became intellectuals and powerbrokers in the wider labour movement, addressing meetings, writing articles, arguing, persuading, cajoling and, above all, leading. Interestingly, Scullin, the former timber-cutter and grocer, and Curtin, the former factory estimator and union official, both became influential newspaper editors — the former at the Evening Echo, a Ballarat-based Labor daily whose readership extended far beyond that town, the latter at the Timber Worker and the Westralian Worker. Curtin revelled in his role at both papers, carefully dissecting the issues of the day and keenly focused on both educating and raising the consciousness of the working class.

Scullin’s and Curtin’s lives and lived experiences were deeply entwined with the emerging industrial and political wings of the movement as they grappled with the complexities of capitalism, which makes this is as much a history of the nascent Labor Party as it is a study of two of its luminaries. An illuminating quotation from Curtin about his time as an estimator at the Titan Manufacturing Company shows how work, often tedious, repetitive and poorly remunerated, shaped his worldview: hour after hour, day after day, “I calculated, measured and otherwise evolved the precise cost to a gentleman profiteer of importing wire from Germany.” Did it have to be like this? Curtin set out to educate himself, devouring books, haunting public libraries.

Sport also figured large in his life, and his sporting connections led him to socialise with men involved in politics, bringing him into the circle of Frank Anstey and later the British union leader Tom Mann, whose time in Australia had a marked impact on the labour movement.

More than a victim: James Scullin in the 1920s. Detail from a photo by Johnstone, O’Shannessy & Falk/National Library of Australia

Scullin, who excelled as a debater, had been selected in 1906 to run for Labor against prime minister Alfred Deakin. While he failed to win the seat, his performance attracted notice, drawing him into the circle of the influential Australian Workers Union powerbroker, Ted Grayndler, a pragmatist sceptical of socialist dreams. He became a political organiser for the Australian Workers Union, travelling through country Victoria to spread the message and draw recruits.

The Great War was a testing time for Labor, which split for the first time when Billy Hughes and his followers defected over conscription. Scullin, a devout Catholic, supported the war effort — albeit, as Byrne notes, with stoicism rather than enthusiasm. He was in favour of compulsory military training, and addressed a Victorian Labor conference on the issue. Curtin was an ardent anti-conscriptionist.

Discontent over the cost of living erupted after the war, resulting in widespread industrial action. The Labor moderates struggled to retain control of the party, in 1919 adopting a Victorian motion for “the democratic control of all agencies of production, distribution, and exchange.” Fearing a rising radical tide, Scullin and his colleagues decided on a rhetorical shift, embracing the concept of socialist change, but all the while emphasising that such a transformation belonged not to the present but the distant future.

Events far away were beginning to add spice to this already volatile mix. The rise and apparent success of the Bolsheviks in Russia emboldened elements of the far left, and a number of small socialist groups formed the first Communist Party of Australia. Issues came to a head at the All Australian Trades Union Conference in Melbourne in 1921. From the chair, Melbourne Trades Hall Council secretary Jack Holloway referred to “lightning changes all over the world” and the view that, to some at least, the gradualist program of the Labor Party was already becoming obsolete.

This was perhaps the most crucial gathering yet of political labour, and Scullin and Curtin were key players. Scullin was among the moderates gathered around the AWU, while Curtin lined up with the parliamentary socialists associated with the Victorian Socialist Party. Further to the left were the International Workers of the World–inspired group advocating One Big Union, founding Communist Party member Jock Garden, and a delegation known as the Trades Hall Reds.

Fiery debate and endless procedural distractions ensued, but the eventual compromise was an agreement that the party would pursue “the socialisation of industry, production, distribution, and exchange.” Scullin and Curtin were both elected to the committee to oversee its incorporation into the party platform.

At the subsequent Labor national conference in Brisbane (which Curtin could not attend due to illness), the “socialist objective” was again heatedly debated, with arguing it was abstract to the point of meaninglessness. Labor was “being prostituted by communists,” said Queensland premier “Red Ted” Theodore, moving an amendment to the effect that “nationalisation” would apply only to industries “which are used under capitalism to despoil the community.” Scullin led the opposition and the amendment was defeated. Labor got its socialist objective, democratic socialisation, but it was not quite (as radical) as the socialists wanted. Scullin’s moderates carried the day.

In a final chapter, Byrne offers a thoughtful critique of the present-day party, lamenting the absence of the kind of working-class intellectual that Scullin and Curtin represented. “No more does Labor draw upon leaders with direct experience of working-class life,” he writes, and much has thus been lost of its rich tradition:

Labor has lost the capacity to host alternative worldviews of commitment to social change within the structures of the party. It has ceased to be a site of intellectual creation, where ideological contest — expressed through articles and pamphlets, but also motions at conferences, arguments in branches and other traditional forms of power distribution and meaning-creation — generates ideas and forces up-and-coming leaders to defend their perspective and hone their persuasive capabilities.

In short, it has ceased to be a party of ideas; it no longer articulates a vision of what might be. Byrne argues that while the socialist tradition is now merely historic, and that the prevailing moderate tradition, devoid of its historic rival, has become enervated and incapable of devising new schemes for transformative change that would fundamentally alter Australia over the longer term.

While the objective (as vague as it is) has long been the subject of controversy both within and outside the party, its symbolic importance cannot be overstated. It represents both a critique of prevailing conditions at the time it was conceived and the essence of a way forward, with a boldness and audacity that are no longer in evidence. But Labor was founded as a party of change and transformation, writes Byrne, and — as Curtin’s and Scullin’s careers attest — it can be so again.

This is an extraordinarily engaging book by a rising young historian. Liam Byrne brings the past to vibrant life in way that is both subject-focused and intellectually cogent, vividly depicting a lost world of ideas, debate, vision and leaders who fought tenaciously for a better world, no matter how hard the road. And Scullin and Curtin are mercifully rescued from caricature. •

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At the National Press Club yesterday Scott Morrison announced not only that he would be abandoning his anti-union “ensuring integrity” bill but also that his government would be bringing together unions and businesses to sort out changes to a broken industrial relations system. “It is a system that has, to date, retreated to tribalism, conflict and ideological posturing,” declared one of the country’s chief tribalists, conflict merchants and ideological posturers.

This is no Accord-style proposal, and there is enough half-cooked history out there already without adding more to the pot. The Prices and Incomes Accord was not a meeting between government, business and unions; it was an agreement and partnership between the Labor Party, then still in opposition, and the Australian Council of Trade Unions. It did not include business. It was not based on the idea of a government sitting down with one interest among many and having a pleasant chat about industrial relations law. It assumed that unions — or at least their leading officials — would be brought into the policymaking processes of government. And to some extent, over the years ahead, that is what happened.

The Accord was a trade-off in which unions agreed to wage restraint in return for the legislative benefits sometimes called a “social wage.” One aim was to contain inflation, which the Labor Party and the ACTU could agree was a problem for both workers and the national economy. Another — especially on the union side — was to ensure that its members would benefit from Labor in government. Medicare is one of the Accord’s progeny. Compulsory superannuation would become another.

Nor was the Accord an effort to reform the industrial relations system. On the contrary, it depended on the existence of strong unions, a centralised system of wage determination and an empowered Arbitration Commission — the combination that had underpinned Australia’s industrial relations system since the early years of the century. Once that system was gradually wound down from the late 1980s and replaced by enterprise bargaining, the Accord became increasingly unimportant, even as it moved through to an eventual Mark VII (or Mark VIII, if you count the one never implemented because Labor lost the 1996 election).

It is also fundamentally mistaken to imagine that having an Accord is somehow at the other end of the spectrum from doing what Scott Morrison and the Coalition have spent a great deal of energy and effort trying to do: coerce the unions. The Accord — if I may borrow an evocative phrase used by the late Peter Coleman in quite another context — was a combination of the “open smile” and the “broken bottle.”

It was all smiles if unions behaved themselves. But if they didn’t — if they were like one of the ancestors of the CFMMEU, the Builders Labourers Federation — they could expect to feel the full force of the government’s iron fist. The BLF was deregistered when it refused to play ball — by federal and state Labor governments. The Federation of Air Pilots was treated with no greater tenderness when it demanded wage increases of almost 30 per cent.

Far from representing some personality change, Scott Morrison’s plans for sweetness and light between government, unions and business look more like cover for his necessary decision to abandon a bill that was going nowhere and had become an embarrassment in a political and economic environment transformed by a pandemic. The iron fist won’t be far away: Morrison will not play to Sally McManus in the way Robert Menzies did to her distant predecessor Albert Monk, or Malcolm Fraser did to Bob Hawke, because he doesn’t have to. Monk and Hawke led an ACTU that represented half (or more) of the workforce, in an industrial relations system that did organised labour plenty of favours. McManus, while widely respected, leads a union movement that enjoys none of these advantages.

The Accord had its critics at the time. Even during the 1983 election campaign, a young shadow treasurer, Paul Keating, in one of the more embarrassing of the campaign’s gaffes, admitted that he did not know whether it would work. It was not a good look for a party that was using the Accord to show that it could rebuild a failed economy in partnership with the unions. For the right, the Accord gave unions too much influence over a government led by a former ACTU president. For critics on the left, all the sacrifices seemed to be on the union side. The benefits to workers seemed meagre, especially once the government became increasingly preoccupied with cutting expenditure during the economic crises of the mid 1980s — which Keating warned might otherwise turn Australia into a banana republic.

Observers frequently confuse the Accord with the National Economic Summit of April 1983. Held in the House of Representatives chamber of the old Parliament House, the summit was a rather dramatic statement by a new government about its own priorities. It included business as well as unions, state governments and even the odd representative of the community sector. The whole affair was treated as a great triumph for Hawke — he had supposedly signed up both the unions and business to his economic agenda — but it was in many ways an enlarged and polite version of the blokey world of horsetrading and deal-making in which Hawke had flourished in the 1960s and 1970s. Most of the major interests that we would now regard as needing to be represented on such an occasion — First Nations people, women, the unemployed, people with a disability — were absent. It was of its times, a meeting of men in suits.

Those times have changed, but Hawke continues to mesmerise the political class, even on the right, his governing style seemingly the gold standard ever after. He remains the prophet of “consensus” as surely as Menzies is the prophet of “the forgotten people” and John Howard of “the battlers.” “Bringing Australia Together” — a 1983 Labor campaign slogan — is now treated as the only viable alternative to the aggressive and snarling partisanship that seems to have been the default position of Australian politics for a generation. But democracy is about contention as well as consensus.

The Accord envisaged a cooperative but empowered union movement, one that still represented about half the workforce. Its critics on the left today, including political economist Elizabeth Humphrys in an important recent study, argue that it left in its wake a neoliberal economic order and a union movement so bereft of rank-and-file power that it could no longer offer any serious challenge to government or bosses. The kind of sweetheart dealing between unions and employers — often at the expense of members — uncovered by the trade union royal commission was one fruit of its creeping frailty. Another has been the flat wages, wage theft and deteriorating employment conditions — especially for casual workers — that have dogged the economy for years.

If it is far from clear what the unions have to offer Morrison, it’s hardly more so what he can offer the unions. He has placed on the table issues such as “award simplification” (whatever that means); “enterprise agreement making” based on the need to “get back to the basics” (of course we do); casuals and fixed-term employees (about which he offers no views); “compliance and enforcement” (followed by a reference to unions and employers doing “the right thing”); and “greenfields agreements for new enterprises” (at this point, union official breaks out in a cold sweat). There’s not much for unions to get their teeth into here, but plenty that ought to worry them in the hands of a government that has been relentlessly anti-union since the moment it took office.

Is he going to provide unions with greater opportunities to organise than current labour laws allow them? That would go down like a lead balloon among the Coalition’s “base,” business donors and barrackers in the right-wing media. Is he prepared to do anything to encourage union membership, given that he’s recently discovered how terribly helpful unions can be? (After all, unions do have to be paid for, and those who pay their union dues are often underwriting the wages and conditions of the many more who don’t.) What support is he prepared to offer coal workers certain to be restructured out of their jobs in the years ahead? Or are we just going to get continuing reruns of the false hope that workers and communities will have a bright future if only Labor and the Greens can be kept at bay? As ever with this marketing man as prime minister, all that is solid quickly seems to melt into air.

Whatever the outcome of this initiative, let’s not pretend that we are seeing the return of the Prices and Incomes Accord. It had its faults, but it was at least based on the idea of workers getting something in return for stagnant wages. By way of contrast, Morrison offers… what? It’s hard not to see this as an example of the kind of frontrunning and kite-flying Morrison was prone to as treasurer, at least according to Malcolm Turnbull’s recent memoir. •

The post Are we in Accord? appeared first on Inside Story.

Nearly thirty years later, Turnbull has published those memoirs, A Bigger Picture, but readers will look in vain for the most salient and salacious details of that extraordinary episode. Why, I wonder, has Turnbull skated so lightly over the acrimonious climax of his relationship with Packer?

The key events unfolded in late 1991, at the tail-end of the most turbulent period of media ownership in Australian history. The upheaval had begun with the Hawke government’s changes to media ownership rules in 1987–88. The new policy, devised by Paul Keating, prohibited a company owning both a newspaper and a TV channel in the same market and abolished the old two-station rule, thus allowing one network to own channels reaching up to two-thirds of the Australian population.

The new policy advantaged Packer (who owned no newspapers) and Murdoch (who, having become an American citizen, would have had to sell his Australian TV stations anyway) and disadvantaged the other two big groups — Fairfax and the Herald and Weekly Times — whose cross-holdings of media outlets made any expansion almost impossible. It was later revealed that, of the four, only Murdoch and Packer had been consulted beforehand.

The new policy led to a frenzy of acquisitions, with many cashed-up aspirants seeing this as the last chance to buy into television. Alan Bond bought the Nine network from Packer for a billion dollars (twice what it was worth, writes Turnbull). Frank Lowy bought the Ten network and Christopher Skase bought the Seven network, both at greatly inflated prices.

Rupert Murdoch saw his opportunity, and took over the Herald and Weekly Times. After a shake-out of its various properties, this left him in control of newspapers accounting for two-thirds of daily metropolitan circulation, a much greater degree of concentration than in any other democracy.

The most irrational of the ownership moves owed more to family fantasies than financial calculation. Egged on by a group of shady characters, Warwick Fairfax — know universally as Young Warwick, to distinguish him from his famed father — privatised the company, buying out his relatives and other shareholders, and accumulating enormous debt in the process.

The ownership changes transformed the media landscape. The nineteen metropolitan newspapers were reduced to eleven after all the afternoon titles closed. Twelve hundred journalistic jobs were lost, with commercial TV staff numbers peaking in 1988 at 7745 and declining, three years later, to 6316. Within three years all the new TV network owners had left the industry under mountains of debt.

The architect of the scheme, Paul Keating, was unrepentant. The result, he thought, was “what I think is a beautiful position compared with what we did have.”

Turnbull was involved more closely in more of these deals during those years than any other person. He helped Packer sell Nine to Bond and, later, to buy it back. He sought to help Warwick Fairfax deal with his debt problems, and later tried to help him sell the Age to Robert Maxwell. He acted for Westpac when it put the Ten network into receivership, with the bank acquiring ownership for a few years before onselling it to CanWest.

Turnbull’s chapter about these events in A Bigger Picture, “Moguls, Madness and the Media,” is a rousing recital of triumphs and frustrations. Missing, though, is any hint that he saw any public interest dimension to this wheeling and dealing.

The most dubious transaction was Westpac’s takeover of the Ten Network. After its owner, Frank Lowy, had become disillusioned with television, he had sold a fifth share of the network to Steve Cosser’s Broadcom, which took over day-to-day management. Ten showed signs of a revival but was still losing money at a dramatic rate. Turnbull, acting for Westpac, forced the company into receivership, and ousted Cosser in September 1990. The new management, headed by former Nine executive Gary Rice, set out to “radically cut costs,” in Turnbull’s words, with the goal of being “the most profitable television station, not the top-rating one.”

Other options didn’t seem to be welcome. When ad-man John Singleton started to put together a group to make a bid, he received “the angriest phone call of my life from Turnbull,” as he later told journalist Roy Masters, even though Westpac would have been expected to welcome a bidding process.

Rugby League games were the station’s most consistently high-rating programs. The new management’s first move was to renege on a payment it was about to make for broadcast rights. When Ten then said it would pay $4 million rather than the agreed $16 million a year, Rugby League took back the rights. In the new auction, Nine acquired them for $6.5 million, offloading various fixtures including club matches back to Ten for $7.7 million — thus making an immediate profit while keeping the most profitable parts, such as State of Origin, for itself. As Paul Barry wrote, it was “a remarkable deal for Packer and a disaster for Ten.”

Ten’s cuts affected its programming so greatly that some commentators took to saying that Australia’s old structure of three commercial networks had become a two-and-a-half network system. By 1991 Nine employed ninety-five journalists in Melbourne and Sydney, but Ten had only twenty-nine. Nine spent $49.3 million on news and current affairs, Ten just $15.1 million.

Not surprisingly, Ten’s audience share declined from 29 per cent in 1988 to 21 per cent in 1991 in Sydney; and from 30 per cent to 20 per cent in Melbourne. The other networks sought to take advantage, with the Financial Review reporting that “Networks Nine and Seven are trying to persuade the country’s advertisers that Network Ten is a spent force to justify rate increases of up to 14 per cent.”

Cosser charged that Turnbull, who had been a member of the Nine board until he resigned to work on Westpac’s move on Ten, was an agent for Packer. Turnbull vehemently denied this. But if he had been Packer’s agent it is hard to imagine what he would have done differently.

Although the Ten changes had profound public interest implications and attracted considerable attention in the business pages, they passed almost unnoticed in the general media. By contrast, the prospect that Packer might gain control of Fairfax provoked a more widespread and stronger public response than almost any other issue in Australian media history.

Warwick Fairfax’s folly climaxed with the company being put into liquidation in December 1990, ending the almost 150-year relationship between the family and the Sydney Morning Herald. The company’s receivers set about trying to get the best price for the company.

Packer, meanwhile, was at the apogee of his power. According to Turnbull, he had bought back control of Nine for about a third of what he’d sold the network for. And with the other two networks in the hands of receivers, his was the only cashed-up commercial broadcaster.

Now he set his sights on Fairfax. Because of the cross-media laws — from which he had profited more than anyone else — he could only own up to 15 per cent and could not exercise “control.” With that in mind, he formed the Tourang syndicate to mount the bid. The idea was that Packer would own just under 15 per cent, Canadian press baron Conrad Black 20 per cent and the American hedge fund Hellman and Friedman 15 per cent, with the rest floated on the stock exchange. Among the several other bidders, the early favourite was the Irish food and media magnate Tony O’Reilly.

Showing great entrepreneurial agility, Turnbull became the agent for the American “junk bond” holders. Junk bonds are issued by embattled companies to raise needed capital, but because the companies already have significant outstanding debts they need to promise higher returns to compensate for the risk involved. Fairfax had — probably foolishly — engaged in such capital raising the previous year. To emphasise the pivotal role of these bond holders, Turnbull launched an action against Fairfax on their behalf for $450 million, charging that they had been deceived when they made their investment. Looking for a partner for the junk bond holders, he soon teamed up with Tourang.

As the months passed, opposition to further media concentration — and especially to Packer — mounted. Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, who had barely spoken to each other since the momentous constitutional crisis of 1975, shared a political platform for the first time. A dozen prominent ex-politicians, including Fraser and Whitlam, signed a letter about the threat of media concentration; though they didn’t name Packer, their target was clear. A bipartisan petition gathered 128 of the 224 MPs’ signatures in a matter of hours. Public rallies attracted thousands. A new group, the Friends of Fairfax, attracted strong support among journalists. It was becoming harder for the Hawke government to ignore the reaction.

Publicly, Packer maintained that he would simply be a minor shareholder, with just 14.99 per cent of the company, and would in no sense control the company. Interviewed on Nine, he declared that “for fifty years of my life, Fairfax has been competition to me and my family. The idea that I can end up buying 15 per cent… amuses me.” Much more immediately successful was Packer’s appearance before a House of Representatives committee, where he bullied MPs and refused to respond to awkward lines of inquiry.

But concern was growing inside Tourang. If its bid succeeded, Fairfax’s new chief executive would be Trevor Kennedy, who had been a Packer employee for almost twenty years. Packer had been spending increasing amounts of time with the representatives of the two overseas companies — Daniel Colson (a solicitor for Conrad Black) and Brian Powers (from Hellman and Friedman) — who were helping manage the bid in Sydney.

Colson and Powers thought that Kennedy’s involvement was a political problem because he was seen as Packer’s man, and accused him of not pulling his weight in the takeover team. Eventually, in mid October, Kennedy resigned. His public statement blamed the “McCarthyist” campaign against Packer, but in truth he had been forced out by the other parties to the bid, and he particularly resented Packer’s lack of support.

A month later Colson and Powers moved against Turnbull. According to Conrad Black, “a number of the banks didn’t wish to deal with him. And he rather severely aggravated some of the other participants.” Turnbull was enraged that Packer wouldn’t take his calls. Of course, Turnbull didn’t depart as meekly as Kennedy had.

The Tourang partners demanded Turnbull’s resignation on Friday 23 November. Talks went on over the weekend, and media interest intensified. The crunch moment arrived on Sunday.

As I wrote in the Age in 2006, and repeated in a Four Corners program in 2008, Turnbull met with the head of the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal, Peter Westerway, in the early evening on a street in Kirribilli. Westerway, a former Labor Party official who had worked in the TV industry, had announced an inquiry into the takeover a few weeks after Packer’s parliamentary performance. Sitting in Westerway’s car, Turnbull handed over documents about the Tourang bid.

All that Westerway ever said publicly was that a public figure known to him had telephoned him earlier in the day. His source told him that “he, his wife and family were all at risk,” and Westerway judged that “he had a genuine apprehension.” Later he said the source wasn’t Kennedy.

The most important of the documents Turnbull leaked to Westerway were notes made by Kennedy, especially those made immediately after he had been forced out. They showed Packer planning to be far more involved in running Fairfax than he had admitted. When he told the parliamentary committee he had no plans for controlling Fairfax, he challenged them to either “believe me or call me a liar.” In fact, he was lying. If Kennedy’s notes had become public, they would have skewered the bid.

On 26 November, about three weeks after Packer appeared, Westerway told the same parliamentary committee, without elaborating, that he was initiating an inquiry into the Tourang bid. The tribunal immediately sought papers from the participants, the specificity of its request indicating it knew exactly what to ask for. Kennedy’s notes would show that Packer exercised and intended to exercise much more influence than had been admitted. Westerway now sought to obtain officially what he already knew unofficially.

Two days after Westerway’s announcement, Packer sensationally withdrew from the bid. Later, in a revealing choice of words, he accused Kennedy and Turnbull of “treason.”

The Labor government duly punished Westerway for enforcing the law. Very senior figures in the government had told him that he would head the tribunal’s looming replacement, the Australian Broadcasting Authority. Now they told him that Graham Richardson had vetoed his appointment, and former journalist and high-profile publisher Brian Johns would get the job instead. (Some years later, with me as his supervisor, Westerway wrote a PhD thesis on Aboriginal broadcasting, which he had been very involved in promoting in its early days. He graduated in his mid seventies, and died, aged eighty-four, in 2015.)

Within a couple of days in December, the Tourang bid, minus Packer, was approved by the government and Keating replaced Hawke as prime minister. The new government’s eagerness to please Packer was undiminished. One of Keating’s first actions was to appoint Richardson, nicknamed the “minister for Channel Nine” in Canberra, as transport and communications minister. Over the following years the government turned somersaults on pay TV policy to please the mogul. In return, Packer endorsed John Howard as prime ministerial material as soon as he sensed a shift in the political wind.

When Four Corners covered these events in 2008 it elicited a confirmation of the basic facts from Turnbull, who stressed that he had emerged victorious. Later he gave Annabel Crabb a more expansive account of his dealings with Packer. “Kerry got a bit out of control at that time,” he said. “He told me he’d kill me, yeah. I didn’t think he was completely serious, but I didn’t think he was entirely joking either. Look, he could be pretty scary.” Warming to his theme, he went on: “He did threaten to kill me. And I said to him, ‘Well. You better make sure that your assassin gets me first because if he misses, you better know I won’t miss you.’ He could be a complete pig you know… But the one thing with bullies is that you should never flinch.” He had leaked the documents, he told Crabb, to teach Packer a lesson.

Why, then, is the account in Turnbull’s memoirs so truncated and unsatisfactory? It is not that he thought the episode was unimportant. Indeed, his chapter finishes by recalling “one of the sweetest moments in my corporate life.” At the settlement of the Tourang takeover he picked up his bank cheque and as he turned to leave, the “room seemed very quiet,” except for “the soft sound of the grinding of teeth.”

In a revealing interview last month, David Crowe asked him why about his account of the episode was so sparse. Initially Turnbull replied, “A lot of this is lost in the mist of time. I had a discussion with Westerway at the time but I don’t believe I gave him the Trevor diaries.” This defies belief: giving Kennedy’s notes to Westerway was the central act on which everything else hung. But then Turnbull added a more honest and interesting response: “Anyway, the bottom line is what I said to Annabel related to some threats Kerry made against me, which I deeply regretted having recounted and I resolved I wouldn’t repeat.”

Why such regret? The whole episode doesn’t present Turnbull in a bad light. But it does show Packer to have been a liar with an inflated sense of entitlement who thought he could bully his way to success and showed no loyalty to two people who had given him such long service. So does Turnbull’s reticence reflect regret over his lost friendship with Packer? Is it that his long closeness to Packer means he wants to protect Packer’s reputation in case Packer’s misdeeds reflect back on him?

Turnbull’s memoirs do offer one new anecdote about Packer. He had agreed that Turnbull would receive a $3.5 million success fee after Packer regained control of the Nine network. Instead, Turnbull received a cheque for $3.4 million. He rang Trevor Kennedy to ask why.

“He just wanted to give you a little haircut,” Kennedy replied.

“Why?” asked Turnbull.

“Because he can.” •

• Listen to Kerry Packer’s 1978 interview with Terry Lane

The post When Kerry Packer met his match appeared first on Inside Story.

We’re not very good at talking about these issues. As Abul Rizvi and James Button wrote in the Griffith Review, “government has largely given up making a case for migration as part of building a nation” and Labor has been “cowed into avoiding discussion.” Along the way, Australia — an immigrant nation — has “lost the ability to talk about itself.” The result has been near-silence about the implications of large-scale temporary migration for workers’ rights, democracy, social cohesion and our system of citizenship-based multiculturalism.

But Labor can’t have it both ways. It can’t claim to be encouraging a reasoned discussion about a sensitive and divisive topic while framing the issue in simplistic, binary terms. Senator Keneally called for temporary migration to be reduced to ensure “that Australians get a fair go and a first go at jobs,” but she and her colleagues know that immigration, even temporary migration, is not a straightforward contest between Australian workers and foreign workers. It doesn’t necessarily follow that if “migrants” get jobs here then “our kids” will miss out.

Take international education. If Labor wants to cut temporary migration then student numbers would be the place to start, since they make up the largest cohort of visa holders. In December 2019, before the pandemic hit, more than 480,000 international students were living in Australia and allowed to work for up to forty hours a fortnight. (Around another 90,000 recent graduates can work full-time on a visa class created by Labor prime minister Julia Gillard.) Students are generally young, which suggests they were in Senator Keneally’s sights when she wrote that “the shift to temporary migration means that our migrant intake is younger and lower skilled than it used to be, and this does not help our kids as they join a labour market with 11 per cent youth unemployment.”

Yes, international students work in entry-level jobs stacking supermarket shelves, delivering pizza or attending petrol stations, and in some cases they might out-compete unemployed young Australians for the same positions. But without international students there would be far less work to go around.

International education is Australia’s fourth-largest export industry and supports nearly a quarter of a million jobs. The fees international students pay, and the money they spend on goods and services — including tourism spending by relatives who come to Australia to visit — is worth more than $37 billion to the economy. Without the revenue from international students, as vice-chancellors have made abundantly clear, universities will have to shed staff and abandon research.

Is Senator Keneally referring to international students when she claims that “the shape and size of our migration intake has hurt many Australian workers, contributing to unemployment, underemployment and low wage growth”? It’s not clear, because her article lumps all temporary migrants together in a headline figure of “2.1 million temporary visa holders.” She then goes on to claim that “Australia hosts the second largest migrant workforce in the OECD, second in total number only to the US.”

This figure appears to come from an OECD report on migration, which actually recorded the number of temporary visas issued in different countries rather than the number of migrant workers. Australia does have a high rate of temporary migration, but data elsewhere in the report shows that most Australian visas go to students and working holiday-makers, whereas in the United States (and many other OECD countries) a much bigger share go to “labour migrants.” Since students and working holiday-makers can take up jobs here, that might sound like hair-splitting on my part, but there is nevertheless a difference between dedicated and de facto migrant workers.

It is hardly surprising that on the same day Senator Keneally’s opinion piece was published, ABC radio news bulletins carried a story that morphed her 2.1 million temporary visa holders into 2.1 million foreign workers. This was lazy journalism, but entirely predictable given the message that Keneally was obviously trying to send to an imagined blue-collar Labor base.

The government has also seeded media confusion by using the same 2.1 million figure in a statement about coronavirus and temporary visa holders early last month, but the detail of that media release at least made clear that 200,000 of those people were tourists on visitor visas (with no work rights).

The 2.1 million figure also includes more than 670,000 New Zealanders, who are only temporary in a technical sense, since their special category visa allows them to live and work in Australia indefinitely. Many of those Kiwis arrived before 2001 and are, to all intents and purposes, permanent residents. Others have come for a short period for tourism, business or family visits. To imply that all 670,000 New Zealanders are “foreign workers” is misleading.

Still, if Senator Keneally wants to cut temporary migration, reducing the entry of New Zealanders would be the other obvious place to start. Is she proposing to rip up the Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement that has guaranteed free movement between Australia and New Zealand since 1973?

The next-largest cohort of temporary visa holders are on bridging visas. Many are the partners of Australians, and are enduring a long wait for permanent residency because the government has cut the annual migration intake and processing times have blown out as a result. According to official statistics, at the end of last financial year Home Affairs had almost 90,000 partner visa applications on hand (though some of these applicants would be overseas).

Other bridging visa holders are skilled migrants and asylum seekers who have lodged residency applications and are awaiting determination before the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. As of April, there were more than 65,000 active cases before the AAT’s migration and refugee division.

Another significant group of temporary visa holders are the 118,000 backpackers on working holiday-maker visas. But Senator Keneally seems less concerned about them when she acknowledges that one benefit of temporary migration is that it “fill gaps in the short term” and “horticulture relies on temporary migration to supply a seasonal workforce.”

So perhaps her real beef is with skilled workers on temporary visas. As she points out, “migrant workers don’t just pick fruit: one in five chefs, one in four cooks, one in six hospitality workers, and one in ten nursing support and personal care workers in Australia hold a temporary visa.”

But there are only 139,000 skilled visa holders in Australia — and this figure includes partners and dependent children, which means the number of these people who are active in the labour market is likely to be fewer than 100,000. And more than half the 65,000 primary visa holders present in Australia as temporary skilled workers in December 2019 held a bachelor degree or higher qualification, so they don’t really fit the “unskilled” profile of “cheap… temporary labour that undercuts wages for Australian workers and takes jobs Australians could do.”

In other words, when you break temporary migration down into its constituent parts, the numbers are no longer so alarming, and it is much harder to conflate “temporary visa holders” with “foreign workers.”

And even when we look at temporary migrant workers at the lower end of the skills range, the problem is more complex than Keneally suggests. Why do so many chefs, cooks and personal care attendants (and we might add childcare workers to this list) hold temporary visas? Because wages and conditions in these jobs are poor and Australian citizens don’t want to fill them (just as they are reluctant to pick grapes or harvest pumpkins).

There are three ways we could encourage Australians to take up this employment.

First, we could pay these workers better, which means paying more for our food and making a bigger tax contribution to fund health, disability services, childcare and aged care.

Second, we could allow the temporary migrant workers who currently fill these jobs to become permanent residents — in other words, allow them to become Australian workers. But then, like other Australians, there’s a risk they would quickly shift to other sectors of the economy that are better rewarded and we’d have to bring in more temporary migrants to fill the gap.

Third, we could boost our dilapidated vocational training and education system, which is the best way of getting marginalised and disadvantaged young Australians into long-term employment.

Despite her confusing message, Kristina Keneally does raise important issues. As other contributors to Inside Story have argued, it is a mistake to assume that migration-fuelled economic growth leaves everyone better off, for the simple reason that if population is growing faster than the economy, then GDP per capita will actually fall. Keneally is right to warn that it is lazy to rely on immigration to fuel economic growth. As we are discovering, it is risky too, just as it is risky to rely on international students to fund higher education.

The senator’s warnings about the exploitation of temporary migrants are well founded, as we know from numerous reports and inquiries. Keneally puts a refreshing emphasis on permanent migration as a nation-building exercise, and she emphasises the importance of skills. She writes, for example, that in industries like cybersecurity “we can’t quickly skill up enough Australians to meet demand.”

But this is dodging the more difficult questions, since it is not always high-skilled, high-paid professionals in city-based jobs who are in shortest supply. Often the labour market gaps are for low-skilled or semi-skilled workers in regional areas or in low-status, low-paid jobs — think fruit pickers, meat processors, aged care attendants, disability carers and childcare workers.

A thorough review of Australia’s migration settings is warranted. Unfortunately, Senator Keneally’s contribution does not kick it off in a constructive way. What is more, the immediate migration challenges are likely to be around having too few migrants rather than too many. As Keneally writes:

COVID-19 has closed our international borders. Temporary migrants are going home. No new migrants are coming for the foreseeable future. Borders are likely to stay closed well after all other restrictions ease. When we re-open the borders — in six, twelve, or twenty-four months — migrants will not return immediately.

When the economy slows, migration falls. Which leaves us with the question, who is going to pick our fruit, keep our universities afloat, care for our elderly and deliver our pizzas? •

The post Labor’s mixed migration message appeared first on Inside Story.

Flattening the attendance curve will be a challenge for the Australian Electoral Commission. Extra postal and pre-poll voting might be on the cards.

Retiring MP Mike Kelly has tried to put a positive spin on the timing. Eden-Monaro will benefit, he says, from being in the spotlight for the weeks or months until the poll. But the whole thing will be a headache for his leader, Anthony Albanese, for one simple reason: the Coalition has a very good chance of taking this seat.

Let’s be clear: by-election results tell us three-fifths of five-eighths of bugger-all about a party’s competitiveness at the next election. On the contrary, the very fact that who will govern is not up for grabs frees people to vote with other motivations in mind. Very often they end up giving an arrogant government a kick in the shins.

But by-elections are invested with all sorts of powers by the political class in this country. Remember Canning in 2015? Prime minister Tony Abbott was getting the wobbles and the by-election was declared a test of his leadership. If the swing to Labor was greater than 11.81 per cent (the margin it was held by), Tony was finished. If it was greater than 5 or 6 it might be touch and go. Everyone had an opinion. Then the cart overtook the horse and the story became “we might lose Canning!” (as if that much mattered for a party with a thirty-seat majority). So we’d better make the leadership change now to save the seat! Which they did.

Or recall when, just two years ago, five electorates were voted on in a single day in July. One of them, Longman, produced a modest 3.7 per cent two-party swing to Labor (off a 9.4 per cent primary swing to One Nation, which pretty much came off the LNP primary vote) and ended up triggering Malcolm Turnbull’s demise. It too was crazy. But that’s Australian politics.

Any discussion of Eden-Monaro needs to acknowledge the enormous popularity of Mike Kelly. He held it from 2007 to 2013, lost to Peter Hendy in that big Coalition victory, and took it back in Labor’s better-than-expected 2016 showing. Unlike most candidates, he was a known, popular quantity in 2016. Voters tend to like uniforms — former coppers or soldiers — in candidates anyway, and they particularly like and liked him.

There were accounts that Hendy was a poor local member, but that might just be after-the-fact rationalisation. Unlike many new MPs, the dour economist was not given a “nodding position” in parliament behind the prime minister. (To me, the idea that locals punished him for his part in Abbott’s removal is very far-fetched.)

How do we know Kelly has a high personal vote? We get an idea from this graph, which shows Labor’s two-party-preferred vote in Eden-Monaro and New South Wales as a whole over the past thirty-five years.

The graph is adjusted for redistributions — and the first thing it shows us is how these have benefited the Coalition in recent years. Kelly didn’t really get 50 per cent in 2007; he received 53.4 per cent, but since then boundary changes are estimated to have made his job harder by an accumulated 3.4 per cent. Kelly’s personal vote has masked that — although it’s also possible that, net of redistributions, demographic changes have made the electorate more Labor-inclined.

But on today’s boundaries he received an estimated 50 per cent when Labor’s state vote was 53.7, a deficit of 3.7. Last year his vote was 2.6 per cent higher than the state one, a change of 6.3 per cent.

Notice how the Eden-Monaro line was always below the state one until 2010, and since then always above. (Labor actually held it under the Hawke and Keating governments, but on these estimates would not have on current boundaries.) We don’t know if Labor would have won Eden-Monaro in 2016 with a generic candidate, but we can be certain that Kelly made the difference in 2019, when he hung on by 0.85 per cent.

Kelly also does very well when judged by the difference between a candidate’s vote in the House and his or her party’s vote in the Senate.

The by-election result will depend on many things. What the electorate is thinking of the government at the time of the contest will be a big factor that we simply can’t judge at this stage. We are in strange times. Candidates will matter, perhaps a lot; they matter more at by-elections than general ones. A strong Liberal candidate would stand an excellent chance. Jim Molan has some wacky ideas, but if he can remain disciplined he’d be a strong contender. He’s another ex-soldier, and a very senior one at that. And the other person being talked about, state Liberal minister Andrew Constance, would be even better, because he generated enormous goodwill over the summer fires.

Eden-Monaro is no longer a bellwether, and it’s actually more a natural Coalition seat than it used to be. So the Coalition has a good chance of taking it. In fact, I think (factoring in the likelihood of a strong candidate) it probably will.

The result, whatever it is, won’t tell us anything about the next election. But it will be widely interpreted as if  does. Especially, in the event of a loss, by Albo’s enemies. •

The post No longer a bellwether, Eden-Monaro could still take a toll appeared first on Inside Story.

Labor’s 2019 electoral disaster, then, was in many ways not all that surprising, despite the overwhelming anticipation of victory. The key difference is that, in Howard’s government, Labor had faced a formidable, cohesive adversary, whereas the talent-poor Coalition in 2019 looked irreconcilably divided between its pragmatic centre and its increasingly reactionary right-wing rump. Following his “miracle” election victory, the conservative commentariat were quick to paint Scott Morrison as a political mastermind, but his handling of the bushfires and Covid-19 brought his flaws into the spotlight much sooner than expected.

In 2019 Bill Shorten — surely the most uninspiring federal leader in Labor Party history — was beaten by a policy-free marketing man who demonstrates no particular talent for marketing. The election campaign was every bit as miserable as that sounds, and Samantha Maiden’s Party Animals certainly captures its banality. Political tragics looking for a rollicking read peppered with engaging characters and memorable anecdotes will be disappointed. The storyline — mediocre centre-left politicians and their none-too-clever advisers sleepwalk towards defeat — is so familiar it reads like an Antipodean remake of Shattered, the equally mundane insider’s account of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election catastrophe.

As many commentators and critics have pointed out, the contemporary Labor Party remains in thrall to the mythology surrounding the Hawke–Keating years (1983–96), its last successful period of government. So it is fitting — and disheartening — that the first chapter of Party Animals is framed around the views of Paul Keating and his close ally, former ACTU secretary Bill Kelty. The two old Labor stalwarts were supportive of Shorten and Chris Bowen’s push to find savings through reform of negative gearing and the franking credit tax rorts, but, in purist neoliberal style, they wanted the savings to go towards tax cuts rather than spending on vitally needed services. Kelty was scathing of some Labor frontbenchers’ desire to spend money in their portfolios. “It is good people trying to do unsustainable things,” he tells Maiden. “Big spenders have always been a great danger to Labor.”

Maiden unwittingly demonstrates the extent to which this warped worldview permeates our political and media class by spending a chapter musing on, of all things, a confused and rambling post-election LinkedIn essay by Labor-aligned economist Alex Sanchez. “Australian Labor, once the beacon for how moderate, Centre Left parties govern,” Sanchez writes, “allowed itself to uncharacteristically stroll into the world of Sanders, Corbyn and the climate change zealots… How on earth could the party of Hawke/Keating adopt a big taxing, big government, big climate agenda? Is it really possible that modern Labor could be that out of touch?”

Maiden kindly corrects Sanchez’s countless errors, but she cannot hide the deficit of insight or original thought. This is the same reheated neoliberalism brought out by the Labor right after every defeat, more enamoured of the budget surplus fetishism of the Liberal Party than it is of any great Labor tradition. In fact, a similar critique of Labor’s apparent lurch to the left was published by one of its up-and-coming apparatchiks following Mark Latham’s ignominious defeat in 2004. His name? Bill Shorten.

Depressingly, Maiden was not alone in being bowled over by Sanchez’s “brutal assessment of where Bill Shorten went wrong.” New leader Anthony Albanese was said to be impressed and has since hired the former Latham staffer as a senior economic adviser. And so the cycle goes on. If this is the quality of thinking that commands the attention of the opposition leader, the federal Labor Party is even worse off than I thought.

At a time when governments around the world are being asked to do more, not less, many members of the Labor Party are still spouting the neoliberal shibboleths that have contributed to our present discontent. They pay lip service to the demands of their traditional base of working people, many of whom have recognised the con and abandoned the party for good. Labor’s fortunes would surely be even worse without the lifeline of an electoral system that forces people to choose between two deeply unsatisfactory major parties.

Maiden — ensconced as she is in the Canberra press gallery — seems less interested in this broader context than she is in some rather tedious sideshows, such as the failings of political polling (on this issue the reader is treated to two entire paragraphs repeated verbatim just six pages apart). She is also overly reliant on self-serving commentary from figures we already hear too much from. What value is there in quoting Graham Richardson’s rambling inconsistency, or in having Barnaby Joyce refute the notion that the Liberal Party entered into a Faustian pact with Clive Palmer and then investigating the issue no further?

If there is one thing that Labor has learned throughout its long history of being, in the words of one party official, “always within striking distance of losing,” it’s how to handle defeat with good grace. And so, in an almost unsurpassable backhanded compliment, Labor campaign director Noah Carroll praises Bill Shorten’s “instinctive understanding of how to conduct himself in defeat,” which was “an example of his leadership qualities.” What more could the Coalition wish for? •

The post Always within striking distance of losing appeared first on Inside Story.

Cain’s death on Monday, two weeks after suffering a stroke at the age of eighty-eight, is an opportunity to reassess his legacy, correct the distortions, and refocus on the achievements of this thoroughly decent man, a gutsy, principled reformer who led Labor in Victoria out of the wilderness to become the state’s longest-serving Labor premier.

By nature a loner, he nevertheless reached the top by working closely with and ultimately leading teams of talented individuals bent on following their own paths. Those paths often clashed with the views of powerful people and interest groups — not least, then-treasurer Paul Keating — but his government’s achievements speak for themselves.

As opposition leader during the 1990–91 recession, Jeff Kennett blamed Cain’s government for every business collapse in Victoria and branded Labor as “the guilty party.” Labor certainly made economic mistakes, but it also became the fall guy for mistakes made by others — the Reserve Bank, Keating himself, and the people running the businesses that collapsed. It was guilty of contributory negligence and poor budget management under pressure, but that was it.

Conventional history praises the Hawke–Keating government’s economic achievements, but forgets that the state that led the nation out of recession in the 1980s was Victoria — mainly because the state government stimulated economic activity, reformed its own role, created incentives for economic development and gave the state a coherent blueprint for growth.

When Australia headed into recession in 1982, the new Cain government moved into action, producing a big-spending budget financed by a combination of higher taxes and raids on money squirrelled away in “hollow logs” by state authorities. That budget and its economic reforms saw Victoria displace New South Wales as the state with the lowest unemployment. From 1983 to 1989, when unemployment averaged 8.5 per cent in NSW, it was just 6.75 per cent in Victoria.

Several years ago, renowned journalist and academic Philip Chubb began work on a new biography of Cain, focusing his sharp eye on the contrast between its idealistic, reformist, Keynesian approach and the Hawke government’s market orientation and often conservative political pragmatism. Keating resented alternative ideas from any direction, particularly from Victoria, and many of the Cain government’s problems were exacerbated when Hawke and Keating starved the states of borrowing rights and made them bear the brunt of federal budget cuts.

Chubb’s premature death from cancer cut his project short. Pity: it would have been a very interesting book.

The Cain government’s reforms ranged across virtually every area of government, though thirty years later most are barely visible through the overlay of changes by subsequent governments. No area of social policy was left untouched in its hunger to reform the state after twenty-seven years in opposition. It was the first government to build hospitals in outer suburbs, to get serious about occupational health and safety, and to reduce smoking rates. It liberalised trading hours and liquor licensing, legalised prostitution, ended the electoral gerrymander, developed low-cost outer-suburban housing and brought all public transport under one ticketing system. It forced the AFL to stage its football finals at the MCG, and built the Great Southern Stand to help house them.

Two physical legacies stand out:

• The Australian Open of today could not be remotely the tournament it is without the vision and speed with which Cain grasped the need for the Melbourne Park venue, and his political courage in pushing it through against a self-seeking coalition of noisy opponents, led by then opposition leader Jeff Kennett but also including rail unions, greenies and many others on Cain’s own side of politics. Kennett made his attack personal, dubbing Melbourne Park “Cain’s cathedral.” And so it is. Without him, it would not exist — and the Australian Open would be a minor tournament.

• The Southbank precinct was created under the direction of Cain’s planning minister and close political ally Evan Walker. It quickly became the symbol of a new Melbourne in which people could stroll over the Yarra to a complex of restaurants, shops and bars ranged along the river in an area formerly home to factories, warehouses and used-car yards.

If you want to see the legacy the Cain government left Victoria, that is where you find it.

Some politicians become accidental leaders. John Cain, by contrast, seemed marked out for leadership from birth. Even before he entered politics, he was being pointed out as a future Labor leader. Once he entered parliament, it seemed just a matter of time. And once he became leader, he led Labor to one of its biggest-ever victories.

Before he emerged, Labor’s longest-serving leader and premier in Victoria was his father, John Cain senior. A working-class activist, the older Cain was a commonsense, tough, honest Labor moderate, respected by the public and his opponents. Over his two decades as party leader, 1937 to 1957, he was twice elected to govern Victoria, and did so with some success. But each time he was felled by forces beyond his control — public anger over bank nationalisation in 1947, and the split in the Labor Party in 1955.

John Cain junior, born in 1931, was his only son. He grew up in an austere, grey Victorian home on Northcote Hill, looking down on the city. By the time he was six, his father was Labor leader. One suspects his childhood was a lonely one. He would certainly have stood out at Northcote High when his father was premier, and when he was sent to Scotch College it must surely have felt like enemy territory.

But the boy was bright and diligent. He sailed through a law degree at Melbourne University, became a solicitor in Preston, and was elected president of the Law Institute. He also became an activist in the Victorian ALP, then run by a dictatorship of left-wing unions fronted by state secretary Bill Hartley. Getting into power was not their priority; exercising power within the party was all they cared about.

Cain made common cause with white-collar union leader Barney Williams and a group of other aspiring lawyer-politicians — Xavier Connor, John Button, Richard McGarvie and Barry Jones, among others — to build support in party branches and lobby for the democratisation of the Victorian branch. Victoria was by far Labor’s most unsuccessful state branch: it had been out of power at state level since 1955, and its miserable performance cost Labor the 1969 federal election.

Eventually the federal executive intervened, dissolved the state branch, and reconstituted it in a way designed to prevent any one faction controlling it again. Cain’s group became the Independents, a small but influential faction holding the balance between left and right. In 1976 he himself became the MLA for Bundoora, and was immediately given a frontbench job as shadow planning minister. It was quickly obvious that he was the party’s natural leader.

But that didn’t happen immediately. In 1977, when state leader Clyde Holding decided to move to federal politics, his deputy Frank Wilkes was elected to succeed him. A stolid, self-disciplined man, Wilkes did his best, but the job was clearly beyond him, and he was comprehensively outshone by Liberal premier Dick Hamer. Cain’s first leadership challenge foundered on opposition from the left, but in August 1981, with an election drawing close and Hamer’s successor, Lindsay Thompson, off to a good start, the left dropped its opposition and Cain became leader.

Eight months later he led Labor to a smashing electoral victory. The party picked up seventeen seats, almost all in Melbourne, and won 53.8 per cent of votes after preferences. That victory was offset in the Legislative Council, however, where every two country votes had the same weight as three in the city. The Coalition would retain control of the council almost throughout Labor’s time in government.

Cain had become Labor’s first premier since his father had been defeated twenty-seven years earlier. Labor branches and policy committees still mattered in 1982, and the party came in with a massive reform agenda — much of it led by ministers from the party’s right faction, including Rob Jolly (treasurer), Steve Crabb (Transport) and David White (initially Water Supply, later Health).

It was a government of action. It set out economic plans in great detail, and seemed to be tackling every problem. Its Keynesian pump-priming clearly worked, and despite constant attacks from Kennett, newly elected as opposition leader — and a bitter controversy when Cain sacked the governor, Sir Brian Murray, for accepting a free flight to the United States — it appeared to be heading for a comfortable re-election in 1985.

That didn’t happen. Kennett’s sheer energy kept the Liberals in the contest, and in voters’ eyes he clearly had the better of Cain during the campaign. The Liberals and Nationals, running as a coalition in Victoria for the first time since 1950, won a 3.1 per cent swing and came close to victory. The Legislative Council outcome rested on the seat of Nunawading, which ended up as a dead heat — temporarily resolved when the returning officer drew the name of Labor candidate Bob Ives out of a hat.

That election exposed Cain’s limitations as well as his strengths. He was a warm human being in one-to-one conversation, but found that warmth hard to project to the wider public. To some, he came over as reserved and withdrawn, a stickler for probity, a man said to buy his own stamps for personal correspondence rather than use those provided by the taxpayer. His dismissal of the governor for the minor sin of taking a free flight cost him support among a class of Victorians already worried by the growth in the size and reach of government.

That same sense of probity made Cain refuse to take advantage of the fluke draw out of a hat in Nunawading, which gave Labor a temporary majority in the Legislative Council. Briefly, Labor had the numbers to end the Coalition’s hold on the council by bringing in Senate-style proportional representation (as Victoria has now). But Cain refrained from doing so until the courts had ruled (for a fresh election in the seat) and the voters had voted (electing the Liberal). The Coalition maintained its veto power on legislation and Kennett, for populist reasons, used it to block any tax rises in real terms — until he himself became premier years later.

This put the Victorian budget in a straitjacket. Labor had given priority to stimulating the economy rather than getting the budget back in balance; Kennett’s veto made it impossible to achieve a budget balance except by spending cuts, which the Labor family refused to accept. An inquiry by Melbourne University economist John Nieuwenhuysen came up with a sensible agenda for tax reform, but Kennett’s veto made it impossible to implement.

At the same time, the Hawke government was getting its budget into balance primarily by cutting grants to the states — while simultaneously limiting state borrowing to absurdly low levels. For Cain and his ministers, governing was no longer much fun: little reform could be attempted when there was no money to pay for it.

Cain won a third term in office in October 1988, but only just. The Coalition gained a further 1.2 per cent swing to win 50.5 per cent of the two-party vote. But Labor hung on to all but one of its marginal seats, scraping back with a 46–42 majority in the Assembly but again faced with a Coalition-controlled Legislative Council.

In hindsight, it would have been better for Cain’s reputation had he lost. Victoria was about to enter a whirlpool of financial disasters. The state government really had little or no responsibility for them; they were produced by a cocktail of poor management by executives and directors of the companies and Keating and the Reserve Bank’s terrible misjudgement in raising the cash interest rate to a crippling 18 per cent. At that level, firms were bound to crash, and it was mostly in Victoria that they did.

The problems escalated in early 1990 when the Geelong-based Pyramid Building Society collapsed — just months after treasurer Rob Jolly had assured Victorians it was solvent. In fact, the state’s regulators of building societies were too under-resourced to know what shape Pyramid’s books were really in. Especially in Geelong, depositors who had been lured in by Pyramid’s offer of high interest rates blamed the state government, not the directors, and demanded that their deposits be guaranteed. Cain, with no fiscal room to move, could not do so.

Worse was yet to come. At the government’s urging, the venerable State Bank of Victoria had acquired a merchant bank, Tricontinental, to lend to the flashy end of town, and had appointed a confident young finance guy, Ian Johns, to run it. Neither the bank’s senior executives nor its directors really understood the business or supervised it adequately. The entire Australian banking system was reckless in this era, but Tricontinental, under Johns, picked up the clients the banks had rejected. By the time the bill for losses came in, it was $3.5 billion — more than the State Bank’s entire capital reserves.

By then, Cain had thrown in the towel. Years of increasing party infighting and resistance to government actions had worn down his will to fight. The rail, tram and bus union kept calling wildcat strikes for which the government was blamed. Personal relations among ministers became frayed, former allies became enemies, and the government seemed almost visibly to be falling apart. On 7 August 1990, Cain resigned, and his deputy Joan Kirner took over.

Most political careers end in failure, but Cain’s end was particularly bitter. His government had crashed in the polls, his faction had crashed within the party, and he had few friends left. It was painful to watch the vitriol poured out against this decent man, with virtually no one willing to risk their standing by defending him. He remained a loyal team member, sitting quietly on the backbench until the election two years later; he would not cause a by-election that Labor might lose.

He had some satisfaction seven years later when one of his former staffers, Steve Bracks, defeated Kennett to lead Labor back to power — albeit, leading a far more fiscally cautious, middle-of-the-road government than his own. He returned to public life as chair of the State Library of Victoria and lent his support to fruitless moves within Labor to curb the power of the unions and factions.

Cain wrote his own memoir of his time in government: a typically candid one, which underlined his sense that by their third term in government everyone was looking after their own interests at the expense of the team’s — and that, indeed, the Labor team had more or less ceased to exist. Mutual trust had run dry.

For all that, the first two terms of his government were years of achievement and reform. In many ways, he and his colleagues followed on from Hamer’s reformist government, tackling the areas the Liberals had found too hard. They put a new focus on Victoria’s economic opportunities, and what government could do to foster them.

For better, for worse, they ended Victoria’s long history of autonomous state-owned enterprises and brought all government activity under political control. The public service became more professional but also more oriented to serving the government’s agenda. Ministerial offices grew in power — and so did many arms of the Labor Party that wanted a share of the action.

At the head of this somewhat chaotic body, John Cain set a personal example of stoic courage, integrity and altruistic endeavour. Had the seats at the 1988 election reflected the votes, he would have been remembered for those qualities and for his earlier reforms, rather than for the chaos of the last two years. He was one of the most admirable leaders Labor has produced. •

The post John Cain was a leader of integrity, courage and vision… and still he lost Victoria’s top job appeared first on Inside Story.

But a fallacy underpins much of the report, one that it shares with most 2019 election takes, and it has to do with swings. The biggest electoral narrative to emerge from six months ago is that booths and electorates in low-income urban Australia swung to the Coalition, while high-income ones went the other way. (I refer to booths and seats to avoid being accused of committing the ecological fallacy, but, just between you and me and these parentheses, I believe it’s reasonable to infer low- and high-income voting behaviour from these aggregates.)

These swings have facilitated a lot of drama along the lines of “OMG, Labor lost its base/blue-collar voters/the working class!”

The problem lies in taking those numbers in isolation. A swing is just the vote at the latest election minus that at the previous election. And in this case the previous one, 2016, exhibited some aberrant movements, including outsized shifts to Labor in low-income urban electorates. “Mediscare” must have at least contributed, and perhaps attitudes to prime minister Malcolm Turnbull as well.

Of course, no election result represents the natural or neutral position from which a swing should be judged. Perhaps 2016 itself was in some way correcting for 2013? So it makes sense to examine the longer term.

Labor’s review has a semi-bash at this in its third table, calculating average swings across each of the Australian Electoral Commission’s four geographic categories at the last three elections. But it doesn’t take the obvious next step of adding those together to produce cumulative swings over that period. I’ve reproduced its table here, and added two more columns on the right. You can see they flatten out the trend — “outer metro” in particular is pretty much the same as the national number in both long-term columns — but they do show that the further voters get from the capital-city CBDs the bigger their relative swing to the Coalition. Then again, Queensland, the least urban mainland state, would account for much of that.

Cramming all 151 electorates into one of four groups is a crude exercise. As an alternative I’ve taken a thirty-six-year look at a part of the country that receives disproportionate commentariat attention, Western Sydney. In Sydney as a whole, the aforementioned 2019 swing patterns were particularly pronounced: Liberal seats, most of which sit on the north shore, swung to Labor on average, while lower-income Western Sydney seats swung to the Coalition. In this way, swing-wise, Sydney was a microcosm of the country.

The table shows average two-party-preferred votes at each election from 1983 across Western Sydney, across the rest of Sydney, and for New South Wales and Australia as a whole. (The electorates classified as Western Sydney are listed under the table. Readers might quibble about one or two inclusions or exclusions, but it makes little difference to the data.)

The most important column for our purposes is Western Sydney versus the rest of the city, which unsurprisingly is still strongly Labor. It’s true that May 2019 saw a dramatic closing of the gap, to just 14.8 per cent. But that was off a very high 2016 figure, the largest across this time frame, of 20.5 per cent. So the 2019 swings were in part simply a reversion to the norm.

But it wasn’t just that. Were there one-offs in 2019? Labor’s big policy suite, in particular the “retiree tax” and the fictional “death tax,” along with Bill Shorten’s evasive persona provided a big canvas on which its opponents were able to aggravate doubts about the party’s economic competence.

If there is a long-term trend in this table, it actually seems to be towards greater relative Labor support in Western Sydney, before a reversal this year.

This is in the larger context of New South Wales moving towards the Coalition over the decades (making it no longer the “Labor state,” if it ever was) and movements the other way in Victoria and South Australia.

Note that the smallest gap was in 2004, under the leadership of Mark Latham,whose raison d’être largely rested on “reconnecting” with Western Sydney (and other “battler/aspirational” areas). He was from that part of the world, after all, spoke their lingo, understood their needs. Yet the effect on election day was the very opposite to what had been imagined. Citizens of that part of the country turned out to be less interested in all the “values” guff than things like economic security.

And Latham was a big target, not so much for his policies as for his persona, and self-consciously a “conviction politician” in the John Howard mould — a terrifying characteristic in an opposition leader.

Just like this year, the election before that, in 2001, had seen big swings to the Coalition government in Western Sydney, also off a high base, in this case the 1998 GST election. Again like this year, the result set off copious amounts of Labor handwringing and commentator pontificating about losing the blue-collar workers, on the issue of asylum seekers but also on “values” more generally. This neurosis culminated in the disastrous December 2003 caucus vote that gave Latham the leadership.

And so, in 2019, here we go again. Sections of the Labor Party, and much of the media, are urging the party to recapture the working class, dialling up the melodrama about the split between “progressive” and more socially conservative Labor supporters, as if the party has not always had these pressure points (particularly from the late 1960s, when it became electable for the first time in a decade and a half), as if major parties around the world — including our own Liberals — don’t have them every bit as much. (What do Liberal voters in North Sydney have in common with those in Farrer?)

So Labor’s review, naturally, prioritises “reconnecting” with “low-income voters in the outer suburbs and regions,” with “people of faith” and, of course, with “Queenslanders.”

But as we saw fifteen years ago, chasing after this or that demographic is a recipe for malfunction.

How about “reconnecting” with “Australians” instead? A rising tide lifts all boats, after all. •

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Many commentators also indulge in over-explanation: the winners did everything right, the losers everything wrong. Most Australian elections are won by a fairly narrow margin, but some criticisms seem to imply that the loser was lucky to get a single vote.

Added to the mix this year were several unique features, nearly all of which worked against Labor. The most obvious was the inaccuracy of the major opinion polls, which created so strong an expectation of a Labor victory that one betting agency paid out on the Wednesday before polling day.

According to Labor’s campaign review — possibly the most honest and penetrating election post-mortem by a losing party on record — the general expectation of a Labor victory led many groups to “bank” the win before it happened. In other words, many took a Labor victory for granted and were already putting in bids for commitments by the incoming government.

A second unique factor was the unprecedented amount spent by Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party. In the six weeks leading up to polling day, Palmer outlaid more on advertising than the Labor and Liberal parties combined. After his preference deal with the Coalition, and especially as the election approached, its major theme was anti-Labor, and especially targeted at “Shifty Shorten.”

In strictly electoral terms, with the UAP failing to gain a single seat, this might seem like Australia’s most expensive advertising failure. But it may well have had a significant anti-Labor impact. And Palmer’s pay-off for his lavish spending may be yet to come.

The third unique feature was the increased importance of the digital campaign, particularly as a vehicle for promoting falsehoods. Three years ago, Labor outperformed the Liberals not only in digital campaigning but also (with its Mediscare campaign) in misleading claims. In 2019, the degree of false campaigning progressed to a new level, with a subterranean allegation — mainly in social media, occasionally supported by the Liberal Party itself — that Labor planned to introduce a “death tax.” This sheer invention was repeated frequently, with effects that are impossible to measure. Palmer also promoted a bizarre claim that Mark McGowan’s Labor government in Western Australia had sold an airport to China for $1.

The election result led to months of self-flagellation within the Labor Party. But picturing Labor’s problem as being too far to the left (or even the right), or arguing that its loss demands a radical rewriting of policy, strikes me as misguided. For four reasons, the lessons for 2022 lie more in campaigning skills and priorities than in the overall thrust of party policy.

1. Dagginess beats donnishness

Labor’s campaign review nominates Bill Shorten’s unpopularity as one of the three principal causes of the loss. Perhaps deliberately, it fails to probe the leader’s lack of popularity with any precision. It simply notes that heading into election day, Labor’s polling showed that Shorten had a net favourability rating of minus 20 while Scott Morrison’s was minus 4.

Shorten campaigned well by most measures, but while the short grabs of the Labor leader on the TV news focused on snippets of policy, full of facts and figures, Morrison was generally shown interacting with people and doing things. While Shorten’s performances were generally competent and well informed, Morrison projected a persona of friendliness, freshness and trustworthiness.

Beyond any particular policies, some voters make their decision on the basis of whom they trust more — and that is partly determined by which leader is most likely to be on their wavelength. To the extent that TV images influenced votes, Morrison probably came out ahead.

One group that Labor’s review identifies as swinging against Labor were Christians, who might have been alienated by the party’s campaigning for marriage equality, for instance. Probably more importantly, Morrison’s overt religiosity may have won him some votes among conservative Christians. Morrison’s major public expression of religion during the campaign — as a devout Christian in church on Easter Sunday, praying arms aloft — was politically astute. He could not be charged with exploiting religion for political purposes, but the imagery would have been sufficient to register with strongly religious voters.

2. Effective opposition is more important than projecting a positive alternative

It is often said that oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them. But an opposition needs to help a government lose, to reinforce in the minds of potentially swinging voters what a disaster it has been.

This campaign ran the other way around, with the overwhelming focus on Labor’s policies. It went into the election with more precise policy proposals than most oppositions present, but this admirable approach didn’t help its cause. Because of the near-universal belief that Labor would win, the media showed more interest in what the next government might do than in what the outgoing government had or had not done.

Labor’s review concluded that “the almost daily announcements of new spending policies left little room for campaigning against the Coalition” and “Labor failed to campaign sufficiently and consistently on reasons to vote against the Coalition.”

Labor campaigned hard on issues of inequality, but interestingly its main theme centred on the “big end of town.” This seemed to work well while Mr Harbourside Mansion, Malcolm Turnbull, was leader, while the government was refusing, as it did on twenty-six occasions, to hold a royal commission into banking, and while Turnbull and his colleagues were trying and failing to give a tax cut to big corporations. But, as the review notes, Labor’s focus should have changed after the more suburban Morrison took the leadership.

It is notable that one group the review identifies as swinging against Labor were economically insecure, low-income voters. Labor didn’t pursue issues pertinent to these groups vigorously enough. It barely mentioned the cruel incompetence of the Robodebt fiasco during the campaign, for instance.

Labor could have put issues like these at the forefront of its campaign without necessarily giving detailed policy prescriptions. It could have taken a leaf out of Tony Abbott’s 2013 campaign playbook. Wanting to highlight the evil of unions, but knowing the public was wary of anything resembling John Howard’s infamous WorkChoices, he suggested a royal commission, which gave Labor no real target during the campaign and then kept the Labor opposition on the defensive for months. Labor could have called for such an inquiry into several issues in 2019, notably the exploitation of precarious and underpaid workers.

The Coalition had accumulated many liabilities and failures, but these barely figured in the campaign. Even the overthrow of Turnbull and his replacement by Morrison seems eventually to have worked out as a plus for the Liberals. The new leader seemed a breath of renewal, eight months into the job, rather than the head of a stale and divided government of six years. Labor rarely concentrated on the bitter disunity within the government or the exodus of talent from its ranks.

Which brings us to the third and fourth reasons, which are closely linked.

3. A strong central narrative is more important than mastery of detail

4. Fear trumps hope

The Coalition had a simple positive message — the economy was strong, as evidenced by a promised return to budget surplus — and a simple negative message about what it called Labor’s economy-wrecking policies. The theme of its advertising was relentless: “Labor can’t manage money so they are coming after yours”; Bill Shorten was “the Bill Australia can’t afford.” The negative outweighed the positive. The promises were limited: good economic management, tax cuts and some local pork-barrelling.

In stark contrast, Labor had “more than 250 costed policies,” a theme the review return to several times. For example:

The sheer size, complexity and frequency of Labor’s policy announcements had the effect of crowding each other out in media coverage and made it difficult for local campaigns to communicate them to their voters.

Labor’s constant flow of new spending announcements during the campaign became counterproductive as they competed against each other and added to perceptions of a risky program.

Labor’s crowded agenda had two adverse consequences for campaigning. First, its elements didn’t cohere into a strong single theme — or, as the review puts it, “Labor did not craft a simple narrative for winning the election.” Second, it was the total size of the package rather than the virtues of individual policies that dominated: “The almost daily campaign announcements of new, multi-billion-dollar policy initiatives raised anxieties among economically insecure, low-income voters that Labor’s expensive policy agenda would crash the economy and risk their jobs.”

Reporting on Shorten’s campaign launch, for example, focused on the total price tag rather than the content and benefits of individual policies. Importantly, the review finds no evidence that the two most controversial policies — the crackdown on negative gearing and the withdrawal of franking credit refunds — were significant vote changers in their own right. But the seeming ambition of Labor’s policies, especially when wedded with the widespread disillusion with all politics, “fuelled anxieties among insecure, low-income couples in outer-suburban and regional Australia that Labor would crash the economy and risk their jobs.”

No party can be elected if the public lacks confidence in its economic management. The conventional wisdom, probably well founded, is that a majority of voters nearly always think that the Coalition is the better manager. But that doesn’t mean the issue can simply be avoided. Labor seemingly made little effort to rebut the government’s central charges of economic incompetence and greatly increased taxes. In fact, tax as a percentage of GDP would probably have been little different under Bill Shorten than it was under the hallowed John Howard. •

The post Why campaigning mattered appeared first on Inside Story.

Craig Emerson and Jay Weatherill’s review seeks to dispose of the argument that Labor’s policies on franking credits and negative gearing played a decisive role, citing the swing to the party in more affluent seats. This may well become the accepted wisdom, although it continues to be challenged by Labor’s triumphalist opponents. On the best interpretation for Labor, though, it is surely ironical that the policy seems to have cost it more votes among those who’d never heard of franking credits than among those likely to be most disadvantaged by the proposal.

The more general point made in the review — that the policies were vulnerable to misrepresentation and reinforced perennial concerns about Labor’s economic management skills — seems sound. Remarkably, it seems that none of the party’s strategists anticipated such a danger, naively assuming that they could control the direction of the ensuing debate.

As the review stresses, these revenue measures were designed, above all, to avoid any risk of a budget deficit. If the “all surpluses good; all deficits bad” theme is now settled bipartisan policy, and if revenue-raising measures are inevitably vulnerable to scare campaigns (perhaps more so in the age of social media), then what costly policy proposals can Labor afford to take into an election campaign? “Not many” seems to be the obvious answer.

Not surprisingly, the review pays considerable attention to Labor’s poor performance in Queensland, although its argument that this is a post–Kevin Rudd phenomenon is unhelpfully ahistorical. In the twenty-nine elections since the second world war, Labor has secured a majority of the two-party-preferred vote in that state just three times. Western Australia isn’t much better (five two-party majorities since the war, three of these down to favourite son Bob Hawke), although fewer seats are at stake. While it was understandable that the review would focus on the role played by Adani’s coalmine, federal Labor’s problems in the state are long-term: voters find a reason to reject the party at virtually every election. The puzzle is that Queensland and Western Australia both have Labor state governments, yet large numbers of voters won’t have a bar of the federal version. Perhaps a separate inquiry is needed?

Curiously, the review describes coalminers as “low-income” workers, though this is not generally the case. For them, as I argued just after the election, a conservative vote can be consistent with economic self-interest, especially when the traditional workers’ party seems ambivalent about defending their jobs. These lost votes may not be easily recovered.

For some, the most confronting sections of the review are likely to be those criticising the party for having “been increasingly mobilised to address the grievances of a vast and disparate constituency.” It goes on:

Working people suffering economic dislocation caused by technological change will lose faith in Labor if they do not believe the Party is responding to their needs, instead being preoccupied with issues not concerning them or which are actively against their interests.

The risk, says the review, is that Labor will become “a grievance-based organisation.” It will be fascinating to see how this virtual declaration of war on “identity politics” plays out, and especially whether it is seen as a criticism not merely of style and emphasis, but also of content.

Emerson and Weatherill conclude that “Labor reached voters engaged in the political process while the Coalition reached disengaged voters.” While there is an element of the bleeding obvious in this observation (that’s how elections are won in a system of compulsory voting), its value may lie in reminding party activists that the most important voters are generally not interested in politics and will usually only pay attention (if at all) when the law obliges them to head for the polling booth. They were unlikely to be engaged by the thought of studying Labor’s 250-plus costed election policy proposals; they are certainly not reading the Emerson–Weatherill review; and they aren’t currently interested in how Anthony Albanese is performing as opposition leader.

The review also concedes that the Coalition overtook Labor in social media effectiveness in the 2019 election. While the technical aspects of this are best left to experts (ranks which definitely exclude this writer), it can often seem the case that social media platforms facilitate easy misrepresentation of proposals for change. While Labor ran an effective “Mediscare” campaign in 2016, that was surely matched by its opponents’ allegations in 2019 that a Shorten government would introduce “death taxes.” Perhaps it was ever thus even with traditional media, but those resisting change seem to be working the new technology better than the proponents.

Finally, while Bill Shorten comes in for solid criticism, it may be that the person most threatened by this review will be his successor Anthony Albanese. The authors seem to believe that an opposition leader needs to be highly competitive in the approval/preferred PM polling to have any chance of taking government, and that even a solid two-party-preferred lead could be vulnerable to a focus on the leader’s unpopularity in the heat of a campaign.

Left untackled is the challenge of identifying the point at which an opposition leader is irredeemably unelectable. But it’s true that if Albanese fails to achieve a competitive polling position soon enough for his critics, Labor’s current leadership rules — requiring sixty per cent of caucus votes to precipitate a challenge — may not protect him. The rule is unlikely to survive if it is viewed as an impediment to electoral success.

The review has been praised for its lack of self-pity, and while that is a clear positive, there must be many Labor supporters frustrated by the electoral double standard that seems to apply in the areas of leadership and party unity. In 2013, Labor was punished for the (non-policy-based) Rudd–Gillard divisions yet the Liberals’ disunity (much of it over policy) attracted no sanction in 2019. Liberal leaders as colourless as John Howard or as off-centre as Tony Abbott can win office, yet only dynamic Labor personalities like Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke and (sorry, haters) Rudd can get the party into government from opposition.

The likely answer is that the economy trumps everything, and until federal Labor can put voters’ minds at rest over its credentials on that front it may continue to struggle in the heat of an election campaign. Shadow treasurer Jim Chalmers will enhance both his party’s and his own prospects if he can make a positive impact. He would do well to avoid the hubris of his predecessor Chris Bowen, whose channelling of Marie Antoinette (“let them vote for someone else”) possibly offered the earliest clue as to how the 2019 election would play out. •

The post Does the economy trump all else? appeared first on Inside Story.

I strongly suspect that Adrian Pabst’s Story of Our Country started life as a banking of the win, with the aim of influencing an incoming Shorten government, but ended up as an attempt to explain what Labor did wrong and what it needs to do right if it’s to win again. In his assessment of the reasons for Labor’s defeat, Pabst — somewhat like the party’s formal review — points to the lack of “an overarching narrative capable of winning back its working-class base while also convincing the middle class.” Labor, he believes, did well in drawing attention to low wages but did too little to deal with the anxieties and aspirations of voters in the suburbs and regions, the party’s “traditional base” (a point to which I’ll return).

Researched before the election and published after it, the book is a strange beast in a number of ways, even leaving aside the cover endorsement from that well-known Labor stalwart Gerard Henderson (alongside shadow treasurer Jim Chalmers and former finance minister Lindsay Tanner). Pabst is a British political scientist and he talks much more about class than usual in Australian political commentary — no bad thing at all, although the analysis is sometimes a bit on the intuitive side. He also thinks that the Labor Party has “so far largely escaped the social-democratic decline” seen globally — a questionable judgement, and one that ignores how Australia’s preferential voting systems and public electoral funding regimes prop up the vote of the major parties, and especially Labor.

The book, published by an imprint of the conservative Connor Court, is a product of a visiting fellowship awarded by the PM Glynn Institute, established by Australian Catholic University “to provide the Catholic community with a standing capacity to analyse public policy issues of concern not only to the Catholic Church and its services, but to the wider Australian community as well.” Its director is a former George Pell staffer, Michael Casey, and its principal policy adviser, Damien Freeman, is the author of Abbott’s Right: The Conservative Tradition from Menzies to Abbott.

Still, the institute is clearly interested in what the Labor Party is up to — and a Catholic preoccupation with such matters is far from unprecedented in Australia, to put it mildly, as Pabst himself reminds us in the book’s historical survey. Indeed, one of his purposes is to persuade the Labor Party that it would do well to return to the traditions associated with Catholic social teaching, with its emphasis on the dignity of the human person, the common good and the rights of labour, the tradition epitomised by Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum of 1891. Looking beyond the Catholics, Pabst hopes that “the social justice tradition of the churches” more generally can be reintegrated into Labor’s way of looking at the world.

More broadly, he argues, Labor needs to recover its ethical purpose, its vision of “the good life.” It can do this best by recognising its own roots in the religious beliefs (or, at least, religious sensibilities) of those who made the party’s history, from the 1890s through to… Well, Kevin Rudd, conspicuously Christian, probably best matches the kind of Labor leader that Pabst would like. Labor, he believes, has become too secular, too technocratic, too managerial, too preoccupied with the “progressive” causes dear to the hearts of cosmopolitan elites, which leave others cold.

In other words, the party needs to get back in touch with ideas from its own history that have become submerged by less wholesome tendencies. Pabst believes that there is a Burkean strain in Labor’s history, with its emphasis on tradition and its desire to conserve as well as to reform, or what Pabst calls its “small c conservatism.” Here, and in his emphasis on “family, friends, work, community, and country,” Pabst draws on the Blue Labour ideas associated with Maurice Glasman in Britain and advocated in Australia most conspicuously by Nick Dyrenfurth of the John Curtin Institute. (I first drew attention to Glasman and Blue Labour in Inside Story in 2011.)

A large part of Labor’s problem, says Pabst, is that it has abandoned its “working-class base of industrial blue-collar and white-collar workers living precarious lives.” These people don’t see their interests or values reflected in Labor’s secular, liberal and cosmopolitan leanings, or in its embrace of globalisation and equating of change with progress. They rather yearn for a sense of connectedness to place and to one another, and are disillusioned with a party — indeed, with a political process — that takes too little account of what they truly value.

Pabst arrives at these conclusions from an unusual perspective: as an outsider who is also writing from within Labor tradition and mythology. The title comes from a remark by Paul Keating: that Labor is “part of the big story, which is also the story of our country.” Pabst accepts Labor luminaries’ estimation of their party’s place in Australian history, quoting speechwriter Graham Freudenberg’s view that “more than any other political party in the world, the Australian Labor Party reflects and represents the character of the nation which produced it” and Keating’s view that “we are the people who make Australian history… our party sets the ethos of Australia.”

It’s all very self-flattering, but this is also a party that has governed for much less than a third of the time since Federation. Still, in a bad year in the old days — such as 1955 — it managed almost 45 per cent of the primary vote. This year it mustered just a third. There are complex reasons for this decline that Pabst never really grapples with, beyond suggesting that Labor has abandoned its traditional base and needs to draw on its best traditions to recover it.

Labor’s fundamental problem is that the class on which its power and prestige rested for generations — and which it, in turn, helped to organise — is now barely recognisable. That class’s collective institutions have been broken by structural transformation, social change and state coercion. The manufacturing industry — almost 30 per cent of the economy at the beginning of the 1960s — is a shadow of its former self. Mining is capital- rather than labour-intensive; far from generating the kind of tight-knit communities that once voted Labor without fail, it is dominated by fly-in fly-out workers, often ununionised. Shearers are mainly found on the walls of art galleries rather than in trade unions.

Indeed, unions represent a sliver of the Australian workforce — predominantly public sector workers — and, as a result of their small numbers and uneven coverage, and some of the most blatantly anti-union laws in the Western world, they exercise little power. The Labor Party itself has been complicit in this decline, through an Accord process in the 1980s that tamed the unions. It then did almost nothing to promote union membership.

The Catholic Church, once a pillar of the party, has also been discredited by continuing revelations of child sexual abuse. More generally, trust in institutions — including trust in politics — has collapsed: a massive problem for social democracy, given that its aspirations inevitably depend on people retaining a modicum of faith in government’s ability to make their lives better.

Pabst does discuss some of these matters, although they are not well integrated into an argument that rests largely on a belief in the power of ideas and a faith that there is a “traditional base” out there waiting for Labor to reconnect. It is a largely cognitive approach to politics: so long as the party can “reintegrate exiled traditions,” and formulate good policy that reflects them, Labor can again become its best self.

I do wish that this were so. But politics is shaped by the structures in which it is embedded and the institutions through which it is practised. Demography, markets, the environment, interest groups, media, party politics and electoral systems all condition its potentialities, imposing restraints and roadblocks, and on occasion offering opportunities to reformers who have the ideas, courage and skill to seize them.

The limitations of focusing on ideas at the expense of structures are revealed in Pabst’s treatment of Edmund Burke. Pabst may well be right that we can identify aspects of the Labor Party’s philosophy that have “an implicit Burkean dimension.” But there has also been a rather explicit anti-Burkean aspect to Labor Party thought and practice, expressed in the party’s approach to democracy and probably first theorised by Vere Gordon Childe in How Labour Governs (1923). Parliamentarians were understood as delegates of a movement, and thereby the representatives of a class. For Labor, a member of parliament was not a trustee whose first duty was to his judgement, as Burke told the electors of Bristol. Rather, the member’s primary responsibility was to the labour movement, through the democratic institutions of a party seen as the authentic expression of the working class and the political wing of the union movement.

Labor’s anti-Burkeanism helps to explain some of the key dynamics of the party’s history since its foundation. It also helps to explain the mess in which Labor finds itself today.

When Pabst turns to what Labor policies might look like, these sometimes have a rather frayed appearance. He suggests a return to a family wage, abolished in 1974 in the context of moving from a male-breadwinner system towards equal pay for men and women; and he would allow couples “to share their tax-free allowances,” recalling the policy of “income-splitting,” long popular among conservatives, which has been criticised by feminists for its impact on gender equity and more generally for undermining the revenue base. Like other Blue Labour–influenced advocates, Pabst admires German co-determination and vocationalism. And consistent with Catholic ideas supporting distributism and subsidiarity, he is keen on the use of cooperatives as an intermediate layer between government and state that would spread economic ownership and power, and temper the dominance of big business and the big state.

His proposal to create a vast scheme with the quixotic title, in an Australian labour movement context, of the National Civic Service — effectively a form of conscription for social rather than military purposes — seems far-fetched. One hopes, for instance, that it would not include sending Australia’s youth into anyone’s roof to install pink batts. Any government that tried to impose it would likely find that the ordinary folk who Pabst believes value community and patriotism over “free choice” and “individualism” are rather more complex in their desires than your average proponent of civic virtue will recognise. Pabst wants “less Mill and more Burke” in the modern Labor Party, but Mill arguably better reflects the country’s political culture and its people’s outlook.

Pabst’s book is a passionate restatement of a particular vision for the Labor Party that has been a presence since the 1890s, if not perhaps quite as powerful a presence as he suggests. He has read widely and intelligently, although not always critically, in Australian politics. I spotted few factual errors.

A couple of generations ago, Pabst’s book would have slotted neatly into the Labor Right box and been summarily dismissed by everyone else. Not so today: across the party, there is a recognition that it needs to come to some kind of terms with people of faith, with workers who feel anxious and insecure, and with voters who value well-policed borders over cosmopolitan openness. And it needs to do all of this without losing the necessary support of secular-minded middle-class “progressives.”

Pabst calls for “a paradoxical politics — at once progressive and conservative, romantic and rational, secular and religious, patriotic and internationalist.” But can all of these strands — and the diverse constituencies that go with them — be knitted into a “credible story about national renewal” of the kind Pabst correctly sees as a precondition for Labor success?

The party’s formal review of the 2019 result worries over this problem: “The Labor Party has been increasingly mobilised to address the political grievances of a vast and disparate constituency.” Labor was traditionally “a proud social democratic party with roots in organised labour” but it has greatly broadened its political constituency, reflecting the gender, sexual and ethnic diversity of society. How can Labor balance these newer constituencies with the old, especially as the old feels increasingly anxious about its future? “The dilemma is not easy to resolve,” the review frankly admits. “It cannot be resolved simply by choosing one constituency over another.”

Pabst hasn’t solved the problem either. But his book is measured, thoughtful, generous and civil. In an age of authoritarian populism, the medium is almost as important as the message. •

The post The continuing story of “our” party appeared first on Inside Story.

In a Fabian Society article and accompanying interviews, Shorten explained that the “policy priorities of the Left” had “acquired a prominence that is now a barrier to Labor reconnecting with both its blue-collar base and middle Australia.” What lost Labor the election, he intoned, “was that people didn’t trust us with the economy and we didn’t seem to be talking about some of their values.”

Sound familiar? The union boss also felt that the party under opposition leader Mark Latham had “failed to establish its economic management credentials to voters in the provincial centres and outer suburbs of metropolitan Australia.” It needed to “send a clear message” that “if you have a dream to have an intact marriage, to go to church on Sunday, to have a mortgage, to want to send your kids to a private school, then the Labor Party of the inner city doesn’t look at you disdainfully.”

There was more: “Labor should reject the theory that people want services rather than tax cuts” and “avoid getting caught up in the politics of envy.” In summary, “Labor’s task now is” — wait for it — “to move to the centre.”

In 2019, of course, Shorten is being accused of committing the same crimes as Latham had, and often in the same terms. The ironies abounded back then, too, because Latham himself had launched the same missiles at his party in earlier years, in articles and talks to right-wing think tanks. Labor had drifted away from economic responsibility, he told anyone who would listen, and had been captured by “inner-city elites” and “insiders.”

Latham, who now sits in the NSW parliament for the far-right One Nation party, outlined his excuse for the 2004 election loss to Sean Kelly earlier this year in the Monthly. He had been leader for less than a year, he said, and hadn’t had time to put his personal stamp on the leadership: “The party was split, and I was stuck with [Simon] Crean’s policy framework. The party had been through a terrible period, and I thought Howard might have an election in March ’04… You just had to do the things to hold the show together.”

Shorten, who was leader for five and a half years, and secure in the job, can’t make the same claim. So, had he changed his mind since 2004? Were there institutional forces against which any leader is powerless? Or maybe these too-far-to-the-left, caught-up-with-trendy-issues diagnoses are just the usual lazy, puddle-deep, knee-jerk, muddled post-election ponderings from a political and commentariat class with the collective memory of a goldfish. (For a jarring illustration of this tyranny of the present, juxtapose the Australian’s Paul Kelly before and after the election.)

Shorten was saying nothing original in 2004, and neither was Latham before him; theirs has been a common theme after every federal Labor election loss going back to 1996, and possibly earlier. (An exception was 2016, when a better-than-expected result left little to regret. And yes, 1998 to a degree, when Labor romped home in the national vote but not the seats.)

So, start your engines, here we go again.

Much of the current crop of diagnoses comes, as usual, from conservative commentators — people who have no actual desire for Labor to achieve electoral success — who project their own policy preferences onto the electorate. (This is a surprisingly popular exercise among pundits of all persuasions.)

But a fair bit of the teeth-gnashing comes from inside the labour movement. Nick Dyrenfurth, executive director of the John Curtin Research Centre, is an energetic proponent of the back-to-the-working-class paradigm. As he wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald in October, “Labor must become less progressive, inner-city middle-class in structure, culture and outlook.” Dyrenfurth’s latest book, launched on Thursday, is called Getting the Blues: The Future of Australian Labor. I am yet to read it, but the title surely gives a thematic clue. (“Blue” presumably as in “blue-collar.”) He made similar points earlier this week in this interview with David Speers on Sky News.

A major party that attempted to cater exclusively to “blue-collar” voters would soon find itself a minor one, of course. There aren’t that many around any more. But (despite the catchy title) Dyrenfurth has insisted elsewhere that he means “working class” in a much wider sense.

Deputy Labor leader Richard Marles seems a convert. In a recent speech to Dyrenfurth’s think tank, in which he used the word “aspiration” no fewer than six times, he told his audience the party lost this year’s election because “at our heart we didn’t offer all Australians a root-and-branch growth and productivity agenda.” I believe the last opposition to do that was led by Dr John Hewson, in 1993. The party should hope Marles thought these were nice sentiments, not to be taken too seriously.

Marles recounted an anecdote about meeting a miner who couldn’t vote Labor because of the confused message on Adani. And, of course, he paid obligatory homage to the party in government from 1983 to 1996. “Hawke and Keating were driven by a belief that Labor should always support policies which drive productivity and growth, which reward income-earners and in turn build a society that holds aspiration as not just idealism but as a legitimate pathway open to us all.”

And there’s this: “We won’t win the next election simply relying on a big spending agenda nor running on the policies of the past in glossy brochures promising a solution to everything for everyone.”

But Richard might like to check out Hawke’s 1983 policy speech on the Australian Politics website, which he commenced with the assurance that there would be “no fistful of dollars to be snatched back after the election” before proceeding to outline a shopping list of pledges to virtually everyone. (Some were indeed snatched back after the election, courtesy of a Treasury briefing on the state of the budget. Thanks to tweep @NickDavis82 for this clip from the ABC’s Labor in Power showing Hawke mugging for the cameras at this fiscal outrage.)

This is one fundamental flaw in all the hoary Hawke and Keating schtick: it invariably calls up memories of the party in government (and fuzzy, selective memories at that) and demands that the party of today, in opposition, behave the same way. But most of the Hawke and Keating reforms to “drive productivity and growth” were enacted once they were in office, and even then the policies were rarely taken to an election first. If we really must hark back to that early time, it’s surely the 1983 campaign — not what happened afterwards — that holds the lessons.

And at the time Hawke and Keating’s governments were more progressive than the Coalition on matters such as the environment, the status of women, multiculturalism and gay rights. They too were accused of putting the environment ahead of blue-collar jobs, including by then ACTU president Simon Crean. In fact, they placed the environment at the centre of two campaigns, in 1987 and 1990. But because they won elections, it was seen as smart politics.

Today’s fetishisation of miners, a highly paid group of blue-collar workers who make up a tiny proportion of the workforce, is an exercise in nostalgia. Surely there are millions of lower-paid workers out there deserving of Labor’s attention.

And anyway, how “left-wing” and “progressive” were Labor’s 2019 campaign policies anyway?

Climate change policy is the most obvious candidate, and it’s true the opposition prioritised it more than was tactically wise. The Adani coalmine caused headaches, partly because of the threat from the Greens in inner-city electorates. In the end Labor sat on the fence, which contrasted with the government’s rushed pre-election approval. Critics presumably believe the opposition should have announced that it would let the mine go ahead. Would that have been tenable? It was a fundamentally difficult issue — all parties have them — and probably shifted some votes in Queensland. (Similarly, the 1983 battle over the Franklin Dam was disastrous for Labor in Tasmania, but it got the necessary swings everywhere else.)

Marriage equality? The survey took place two years ago. Shorten might have been wiser to follow Malcolm Turnbull’s example — support Yes but largely sit it out (if for no other reason than that hyper-associating the change with one party lessened its chances of success) — but could it really have been a turn-off for conservative, working-class Australians in 2019? If so, why not in 2016 too, when Labor’s policy was to legislate for marriage equality without a plebiscite, and the swing towards it was higher in low-income urban electorates?

(Those analyses of the 2019 result that focus on the two-party-preferred swings to the government in low-income urban electorates miss the fact that at least some of that shift was correcting for swings the other way in 2016, probably driven partly by “Mediscare.”)

The big policies on housing and franking credits — the ones that featured heavily before the poll, the objects of the Morrison government’s ferocious scare campaign — can’t be characterised as “inner city” or “progressive” by any stretch of the imagination. You could call them left-wing because they were mildly redistributive, but they were also the sort of loophole-closing that Treasury would suggest to any government of either persuasion. Shorten and Chris Bowen’s error lay in taking them to an election first.

Is it puzzling that those policies seem to have terrified exactly the people who would have benefited from them — those on low incomes? Well, that’s voting behaviour for you, more “about the vibe” and emotion than hard reality.

True, the “top end of town” rhetoric was off-putting. Why the leadership team thought it was a good idea will presumably remain one of life’s mysteries. It reeked not of inner-city cafes but an old-fashioned idea of labour versus capital.

Then there’s the unions’ Change the Rules campaign, which has remained largely unmolested in the postmortems. Promising to undo penalty rate cuts — smart or silly? ACTU secretary Sally McManus is quite a firebrand, and while the union bogeyman is not what it once was, it is never totally out of mind. To the extent that this contributed to the result, it can’t be blamed on “progressives” either.

Do “back to basics” advocates really want the party to ignore global warming and pretend the environment doesn’t matter? The answer seems to be no — just don’t go on about it so much. Anthony Albanese’s speech in Perth this week — pro-coal and recasting climate change action as a matter of new, well-paid jobs — has been lauded by some of them as a step in the right direction. Given that climate change has never been the vote-decider some analysts are convinced it is, Albo was probably wise.

Critics certainly have a point about the shrinking gene pool of Labor MPs, most evident in the over-representation of university degree holders. The Coalition is similarly afflicted, although it does seem able to preselect more “knockabout” characters, at least in marginal seats. A more varied Labor Party, containing different, colourful personas would be more appealing, so Dyrenfurth’s idea of quotas for non–degree holders is… well, interesting and worth considering.

But do people really vote for a person or party because they feel they can relate on a personal level? Do aspiring prime ministers and parties need to show they are just like voters? Or is this leadership business more complicated? Is it about making voters feel secure and looked after and, at times, making decisions that they don’t agree with at the time, like telling them to eat their greens? The electoral disaster of Julia Gillard’s “shucks I’m just the girl next door, don’t use big words, love the footy, love a barbie, not much interested in the outside world,” which so collapsed her authority in 2010, suggests that it is.

And is the get-rid-of-progressives crowd mostly concerned with policy or presentation? It’s not totally clear, but it seems mostly the latter — speaking the language of the workers, showing the party shares their “values.” By necessity they pay lip service to the greats — Keating, Hawke and Gough Whitlam — but they seem to be dreaming of a return to a time before Whitlam, a time when Labor rarely won elections.

Yes, Labor has tensions between “socially conservative” and “progressive” supporters, but the Coalition has them too — between urban economic dries, for example, and those of an interventionist bent. When a party is in opposition and lagging in the polls, its flaws are obvious for all to see. Both major parties’ primary votes have declined over the decades; chiselling down Labor’s appeal further is hardly going to help.

This brings us to a particular Dyrenfurth preoccupation, his party’s low primary vote. That, too, is a problem for the Coalition, although its vote remains higher than Labor’s, and for major parties around the democratic world. If primary votes really are the ultimate measure, Labor should be prouder of its performance in 1975, when Gough Whitlam’s government was diabolically demolished, than of Hawke’s 1990 win. And on primary votes, the Coalition’s 1983 landslide loss was better than either of its two most recent victories.

But we have preferential voting in this country, and it’s two-party-preferred support that decides elections. Much of the Labor vote has gone to the Greens, and the bulk of that comes back in preferences. If Labor really did become indistinguishable from the Coalition on issues like refugees and climate change those preferences could dry up. Fewer on the left would vote for them. Others in the middle might decide that if Labor is telling them social conservativism is the main game they might as well go for the real thing — the Coalition.

Dyrenfurth writes that “Labor supporters — especially those branding themselves ‘progressive’ — have entered a fantasy world of delusion and denial,” citing reactions to “three recent events.” The reactions he cites seem to come either from social media — quite possibly from people he, you and I have never heard of, many of whom are anonymous or Greens supporters anyway — and from climate action demonstrations. Protests are a symptom of Labor’s estrangement from the middle ground? And angry or rude left-wingers on Twitter can be conflated with “the left,” which can be conflated with “Labor”?

Similarly Victorian Labor MP Clare O’Neil, in a preview of a speech to, yes, the John Curtin Research Centre, describes how people have told her “after the election” (although not, mysteriously, before, or maybe she wasn’t listening) that they “felt that progressives were talking down to them.” It’s not clear whether she means “progressives” in the Labor Party or in the community, but if the latter she’s also setting herself and her party a monumental task to change the behaviour of hundreds of thousands of opinionated Australians.

And shadow treasurer Jim Chalmers, launching Dyrenfurth’s book on Thursday night with a speech called “Labor and the Suburbs,” accurately describes Scott Morrison’s “quiet Australians” epithet as a “slick marketing term” — and then employs it straight a further four times. Now this is a serious problem with the post-Keating party: a tendency to internalise its opponents’ preferred narratives. Chalmers also talks of Labor “shaping the middle ground,” as if that’s something a party can do from opposition.

It’s all worryingly reminiscent of that earlier, third term in opposition, when Labor so energetically inhaled the opinion-page view of “why we lost” — it was all about “values,” “aspirational voters” and the “suburbs” — that it ended up losing its collective mind. Next thing we knew, Mr Cut-through Muscle-up Suburban Man, Mark Latham, was leader.

Here’s what I reckon. Our major parties have long ago lost their raisons d’être and continue to exist thanks to institutional inertia. One day the system will fall apart, but in the meantime the old cliché is true: governments lose office, oppositions don’t really win them. Don’t overthink it. An opposition succeeds when enough people tire of the government and don’t find the alternative too risky. Creating an appealing alternative helps, but it’s not mandatory.

Getting elected is one task, governing is another. Don’t confuse the two; one step at a time.

All Labor leaders, back at least to Bill Hayden in the late 1970s, have sat in the acceptable centre ground. Shorten’s presentation was overly “left-wing” in tone, but his policy suite wasn’t radical. It was just too substantial and important to take to the ballot box.

As I’ve suggested before, Labor’s biggest mistake in 2019 was taking big economic policies to the election. If it hadn’t, it would probably be in office now and there’d be little need for soul-searching. But the big target was exacerbated by a longstanding party tic: a fear of the very mention of economics, an unwillingness to defend the party’s record when it was last in government. Shorten, like Labor leaders before him, instinctively changed the topic to health and education, as if this would induce voters to trundle off to the ballot box in a feel-good daze.

Niggling fears that the opposition would make a mess of the economy can’t be deflected; they need to be faced head on. Labor has been terrified of talking economics at least since the global financial crisis, and Shorten’s evasive persona accentuated that negative.

Marles’s speech also contained some sensible bits, like this: “[W]inning a governing majority for Labor won’t be achieved by tacking one way or another depending on the political breeze or through insincere acts of triangulation, or assembling isolated blocs of voters with a tailored message for each one.”

Fair enough. Aim squarely at that multifaceted demographic known as “Australians.” If people are ready to get rid of the government, don’t stand in their way, don’t be difficult to vote for. Don’t needlessly annoy voters. And leave the big, complicated policy announcements for when you’re in government. •

The post Labor’s aspirational blues appeared first on Inside Story.

“There is a cult of Penny Wong,” Margaret Simons writes in Penny Wong: Passion and Principle, and in media appearances following the AIIA address Wong displayed with renewed vigour the qualities that have earned her such an ardent following. She combines natural authority with acerbic wit and moments of winning charm. As shadow foreign minister, she displays a level of knowledge and sophistication that puts Scott Morrison to shame. Her rhetorical impact is second to none in the current parliament.

Someone of Wong’s political stature will inevitably attract biographers, and the most likely readership is among those already won over by the brio of her public performances. When the writer stepping up for the task is one of the most discerning, trustworthy and knowledgeable journalists in Australia, it looks like a winning ticket. The risk, if any, might be that the book would turn into an exercise in homage, but Wong herself made sure that didn’t happen.

As Simons’s bald opening statement puts it, “Penny Wong did not want this book to be written.” The writer was faced with something more than non-cooperation: she was stonewalled and subjected to chilling censoriousness. Although she shows no sign of having taken personal offence at this — treating it as a professional challenge, in fact — I imagine readers will be offended on her behalf. Surely a political figure of Wong’s importance must expect a biography as an inevitable part of his or her public exposure? Surely she must have been aware that, if it was inevitable, she was lucky it was to be written by a journalist with a first-rate track record, who would be scrupulous in observing the embargoes on speaking to family or digging too far into sensitive personal matters?

Wong did eventually agree to some interviews — six, in all — which took place in sterile meeting rooms. She was far too astute to afford her renegade biographer “the gift” of access to any space that might reflect her personality, as Simons comments, and unwelcome questions were greeted with “the Wong stare and what felt like a drop in the temperature of the room.”

Simons skilfully compensates for the lack of access to those in Wong’s inner circle. She has extensively researched Wong’s family history and, drawing on her own experience of growing up in Adelaide, provides a vivid sense of that social and political milieu. She is also well informed about all the political contexts relevant to Wong’s career, and knows how to do the investigative work to get the necessary background.

There’s certainly a story to tell. Wong spent her early childhood years in the Malaysian state of Sabah, on the island of Borneo, moving to Adelaide at the age of eight when her parents’ marriage broke up. Her father’s Chinese ancestry meant that she was all-too-easily identified as a foreigner in her new primary school, and bullied accordingly, yet her mother’s family, the Chapmans, were “old Adelaide,” with a history going back to the founding years of the city in the 1830s.

It’s prime material for Who Do You Think You Are? and, woven together with the story of the Malaysian side of the family, makes for a complex portrait of Wong’s cultural heritage. For all Simons’s meticulous research, though, the account lacks vibrancy, because the personality at the centre of it is missing. There are few engaging anecdotes or tales of childhood adventures, no confessions of teenage angst.

The book provides an authoritative account of the South Australian context in which Wong started on her future path, first through student politics, where she began to develop her “ferocious” capacity for attack and counterattack, then through the factional system of state politics. Her implacable opposition to the Hawke–Keating graduate tax (later to be introduced as HECS) marked her out as a new talent on the left of the party. She became a protégé of Labor senator Nick Bolkus and an ally of a young Labor activist, Jay Weatherill, fighting on behalf of unions and gaining some notoriety for her involvement in CFMEU demonstrations against anti-logging legislation.

Campaigning on fraught issues that she would later see differently contributed to her enduring dislike of “binary thinking.” One of her key attributes as a mature politician is her resistance to the trap of adopting for-it-or-against-it positions on complex and evolving issues. She also refuses to be retrospectively one-sided about the devastating internecine wars of the Rudd–Gillard years.

Those wars took their toll on her, limiting her opportunities to make real headway in a massive portfolio as minister for climate change and water. The central chapters of the book are titled “Penny Wong Fails to Save the World” parts one and two. Still in her forties, she brought exceptional levels of mental preparation and ethical maturity to the impasses she faced. Her attempts to negotiate parliamentary support for the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme were confounded by tribal conflicts and vested interests, leading to defeat in the Senate in 2009. Then came the rollercoaster experience of the Copenhagen Summit, where she and Kevin Rudd collaborated on a marathon effort to broker agreement on a new international accord.

The pair worked through the night, and the next night, snatching brief interludes of sleep on the surrounding furniture. Barack Obama joined them, literally rolling his sleeves up. This was forensic legislative work, all about steering through make-or-break factors with deftly formulated clauses. Rudd was “wonderful… extraordinary, outstanding,” Wong attests. (At this point, her conversations with Simons were evidently running more smoothly.) Amid the Rudd-bashing trend that has taken hold since then, it’s an important reminder of how cultures of political judgement can steer wide of the mark.

However often she fails to save the world, Wong responds well to reality-testing, and there was no more stringent test than her party’s 2019 election defeat. Simons used steely persistence to secure a final interview with her subject in July 2019 in the belief that it was vital to get some insights into how she was reorienting herself after the debacle.

The determination paid off. The concluding chapters in the book are the strongest, as Simons focuses on the qualities of an outstanding political intelligence at a time when such qualities seem to be perversely excluded from the opportunities of government. Perhaps mellowed by what she has been through, Wong lets her guard down to describe how sweetly her children responded to the loss, making her a coffee and giving her their last gingerbread man.

Just the day before this final meeting, Wong had been interviewed by Fran Kelly on Radio National Breakfast. Speaking as shadow foreign affairs minister, she talked through a range of critical international situations — the significance of Trump’s stepping over the North Korean border, the US–China trade war, escalating tensions between the United States and Iran — navigating around gotcha questions with authority and finesse. “Here were hints of the kind of foreign minister she would have been,” Simons comments. More than a hint of this was also evident in her recent address to the AIIA; if fate has thwarted her, all of us are the losers.

The contemporary political biography is very different from the traditional biography, which is a form of history told posthumously through a major public figure. Publishers are now looking for something more like an extended profile — a blend of gossip, personal story and parliamentary intrigue. But if there is any serious value in a biography such as this, it is surely in the insights it gives into those who hold political power, or aspire to. What kind of people are they? What really matters to them? What (if any) are their principles? Are they mere opportunists, or do they have a genuine vision for the national future and the public good? No politician should shy away from a writer, like Simons, who focuses on such questions. •

A new, expanded edition of Penny Wong: Passion and Principle was published by Black Inc. in July 2023

Penny Wong: Passion and Principle
By Margaret Simons | Black Inc. | $34.99 | 368 pages

The post Penny Wong, unauthorised appeared first on Inside Story.

In 1976 he had loyally taken the political hit — or at least much of its impact — following prime minister Gough Whitlam’s gross miscalculation in consenting to the pursuit of party funding from Iraq. After resigning as party secretary in 1981, he set up as a “government relations consultant” — or lobbyist — and his next goal was to use his old party contacts to make serious money. Although in this respect a man completely in tune with the times, Combe was sadly hampered by one disabling legacy from the past: he could not let go of 1975.

He remained committed to the theory that the Central Intelligence Agency had played a major role in the demise of the Whitlam government, and carried with him an open hostility to the United States on that score. It was an attitude common enough among the Labor left but increasingly played down by the new pragmatists who had taken control of the party. It was an attitude that would cost Combe his career and reputation.

Combe was not yet forty when he fatefully accepted an invitation to dine with a young Russian diplomat named Valery Ivanov on election eve. One business on whose behalf Combe had been working was Commercial Bureau, which had a unique status as the only Australian trading house accredited in the Soviet Union. The company was run by a mysterious businessman named Laurie Matheson; he seemed very rich, which impressed Combe, had a background in naval intelligence, and in due course it would become all too clear that he was also an informer for the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, if not something more sinister.

Matheson’s main business problem was that his former managing director had left to establish a rival organisation that was providing Commercial Bureau with unwelcome competition. In particular, he was having difficulty in New South Wales, and needed to gain a hearing with the Labor government there. Perhaps Combe might help him? Combe, as a member of the Australia–USSR Friendship Society, was about to travel with his wife to the Soviet Union. He undertook to work on Matheson’s behalf while he was in Moscow.

The first secretary in Canberra’s Soviet embassy responsible for liaison with the Friendship Society was Ivanov, who was only thirty-three when he arrived in Australia in 1981. His youth was one factor that aroused ASIO’s suspicion that he might be an intelligence officer; Soviet diplomats of his seniority would normally be at least in their late thirties. The interest in him grew and, with it, the interest in his connection to David Combe. It would later come to light that Ivanov had organised Combe’s invitation to Moscow. By the time Combe arrived back in Canberra from Moscow late in 1982, ASIO was convinced that Ivanov was a member of the KGB.

Under surveillance: an undated ASIO photo of David Combe (centre). ASIO

After his return, Combe provided Matheson with a report, based on his consultations with officials in Moscow, on how he could develop his company’s trade with the Soviet Union. Combe pointed out that political tensions between Australia and the Soviet Union were a barrier to trade and recommended that Commercial Bureau might try to ease these tensions by participating in the Australia–USSR Friendship Society. He also suggested an upgrade of relations between the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Australian Labor Party, to be engineered by none other than David Combe, government relations consultant. Combe billed Matheson for $2500; ASIO soon had copies of both the report and the bill.

As ASIO built its case against Ivanov, it considered approaching Combe to warn him of his predicament; perhaps he could be persuaded to report on his new friend, thereby helping ASIO make its case? That approach was never made, and to this extent the self-serving claims later made by the ASIO director-general, Harvey Barnett, that he had saved Combe “from himself” or from the clutches of the KGB, should not be taken too seriously. In the context of the expulsion of KGB spies from other Western countries during this period, as well as local criticism from both right and left concerning ASIO’s capacity, the organisation needed to catch a spy of its own.

On the evening of 4 March 1983, the night before the election that would bring Bob Hawke and his Labor colleagues to power, Combe arrived at the Canberra home of Ivanov, his wife Vera, and their seven-year-old daughter Irina. Combe had already had plenty to drink; by his own account, he “probably would not have run the gauntlet of a random breath-testing unit” if required to do so on the way to the house. By the time he left — after many hours of food, conversation, vodka, beer, red wine, white wine and liqueur — he was “pretty well gone.” Whether Combe had revealed himself on that evening to be a threat to national security would later be debated passionately. That he was a menace to traffic safety is beyond question.

The conversation during the evening was often rambling and, in Combe’s case, increasingly slurred. He did most of the talking and had great hopes for the future — the country’s and his own — under the Labor government that now seemed an inevitability. “I was going to put in my list of requests on… about Thursday or Friday,” he told Ivanov. “I thought I’d ask to be chairman of Qantas for first choice, and then ambassador to Moscow, something like that you know.”

“Being ambassador to Moscow, David, you’ll keep your hand on the pulse,” replied the homesick diplomat wistfully. After a couple of years of money-making as a lobbyist, Combe explained, “then I’ll say, right, ‘I’m entitled to something, I want my job for the boys, ambassadorship, Moscow will suit me very much.’” Ivanov was confused; who were “the boys”? Combe gave an impromptu lesson in Australian English, explaining that he meant patronage. Combe told Ivanov that he — Combe — was one of “the boys,” and payday had now arrived:

I’m putting myself in a situation where, I’ll level with you because you’re a friend, Valery, I’m going to make the next two years, they’re going to be the two most economically fruitful years of my life. I’ve worked a long while for the Labor movement.… I’ve got nothing for it; in financial terms the next two years with a federal government and four state governments, I’m in enormous demand, I mean I’m in a situation where I can say to Esso, you know, IBM, and all these companies, well, you know, I’ll listen to your proposition and I’ll make a decision in due course whether I’m going to work for you… [I]n the next few weeks they’re the decisions I have to make. Whom do I work for and on what basis, and I’m going to charge very big money… [T]he buggers are going to be paying.

Combe went on to discuss with Ivanov the possibility of working for the Soviet Union to find opportunities for trade in Australia. But he was also representing a particular company with interests in the Soviet trade, Commercial Bureau, and he said that Ivanov would need to decide whether Combe could work for both. Combe eventually thanked his hosts and wandered out into the night. The whole conversation had been recorded by ASIO, which had a listening device installed in the ceiling of the Ivanov home.

Harvey Barnett, a career spy and now the director-general of ASIO, had every reason to wish to start off on a sound footing with Hawke and the new government. A Labor government had established ASIO in the late 1940s, but Labor’s relations with the security agencies had often been fraught in the years since.

David Combe and Valery Ivanov presented Barnett with a useful opportunity, and he picked his mark exceedingly well when he sidestepped his own minister, attorney-general Gareth Evans, and went straight to Hawke. Combe was obviously a hostile witness, but it is hard to disagree with his later assessment that, like the good spy he was, Barnett had “studied his target, assessed his strengths and weaknesses, selected which strings to play upon and which drums to beat.”

Barnett would have known that Hawke, despite the support he had received from the left in his bid to become ACTU president in 1969, had strongly pro-American and equally vigorous anti-communist, and especially anti-Soviet, opinions. As a union leader, he had enjoyed friendly — critics on the left thought rather too friendly — relations with US officialdom in Australia. And in 1979 the Soviet authorities had humiliated Hawke in connection with his fruitless effort to negotiate the passage of Jewish “refuseniks” from the country. Hawke felt double-crossed and claims to have contemplated suicide; he was clearly someone who would be receptive to a strongly anti-Soviet message from the director-general of ASIO.

At a meeting late in the afternoon of 20 April, Barnett told Hawke that ASIO had not only identified a KGB agent but had also uncovered an effort, by that same agent, to turn a former national secretary of the Labor Party into an agent of influence. Central to the case was that ASIO had recorded Ivanov suggesting to Combe that the relationship between them should become clandestine. Barnett also told Hawke about Combe’s “jobs for the boys” boasting and his offer to work for the Soviet Union in commercial matters. Combe, Barnett reported, had expressed bitterly anti-American views, was convinced of the CIA’s role in the dismissal of the Whitlam government and had shown sympathy with the goals of the Soviet Union.

The director-general appears to have been in no great hurry to let the government know what his spies had found, and many weeks had passed since the fateful 4 March dinner. Yet on hearing Barnett’s story, Hawke determined that the government needed to move quickly. He and Barnett discussed three possibilities: Combe could be called in for a talk — or, to put it in Hawke’s later words to the royal commission on the affair, “I could call Mr Combe in and carpet him.” Hawke and Barnett saw several problems with this option: Combe, for instance, might talk to Ivanov; or once the news got out, the government might be seen to have compromised Australian security by giving special treatment to one of its own.

A second possibility was that Ivanov could be quietly expelled, and that was quickly dismissed as well. Instead, a public expulsion would occur, an option that Barnett plainly admitted would suit ASIO in view of the favourable publicity it would inevitably generate.

Hawke saw benefits for his government beyond sending out the right message about its commitment to national security: he had just returned from his government’s economic summit with business and the unions, an occasion intended to underline the government’s willingness to deal openly and fairly with anyone committed to solving the nation’s problems. The perception that a former senior party official was working hard behind the scenes, exploiting his connections on behalf of favoured clients, would have inconveniently undermined this central message. Hawke clearly recognised the danger of having Combe on the loose, selling access to the government, or even being seen as capable of doing so.

Cabinet’s national and international security subcommittee was quickly convened that evening, with all but two members present. Barnett briefed members, and made the case against Combe in particular seem damning. Hawke gave his full support to that version of events, and ministers were not permitted to see the transcript of the crucial 4 March dinner. Bill Hayden, now foreign minister, told the royal commission that “we left concluding that something very nasty and sinister and improper had been concluded or was about to be concluded between Combe and Ivanov.” As they left the room, Hayden said to another minister, Mick Young, that he would never have thought Combe capable of spying against his own country. “I was quite distressed,” Hayden recalled, and he thought Young, who as a fellow South Australian was even closer to Combe, “was equally upset.”

But as Hayden later told the royal commission, once ASIO officials started reading selections from the transcripts to ministers the following day, “the whole thing started to fall apart very quickly… the very sinister connotations which had been put to us did not stand up.” He could see nothing in the 4 March conversation other than a lobbyist doing his job or, at worst, a greedy man seeking to enrich himself through a commercial arrangement. Ministers did not like what they saw; but Combe’s actions, so far as they could see, made him neither traitor nor potential traitor.

The security subcommittee, however, decided that Ivanov should be expelled and Combe placed under surveillance. The former Labor national secretary’s phones were tapped. On 22 April Hayden called in the Soviet ambassador and told him Ivanov had a week to leave the country; four days later, a cabinet meeting in Adelaide decided to cut off Combe’s access to ministers in his capacity as a lobbyist. The government had destroyed Combe’s livelihood; the prime minister even went to the trouble of calling two men with whom Combe was about to go into business to warn them off doing so.

With so many messages being sent here and there, Canberra was awash with rumours. On 8 May the Sunday Telegraph carried the journalist Laurie Oakes’s claim that “a member of the prime minister’s own party” who knew Ivanov had, as a result of a recent government decision, been frozen out of contact with ministers. Paul Kelly revealed in the Sydney Morning Herald on 10 May that ASIO had been watching the activities of a “senior Labor man” who was “one of the most important and influential figures in the party over the past two decades.” The security service had told the government he was “a potential security risk”; the Labor man was “determined to clear his name” and intended presenting Hawke with a document setting out his case.

It is a measure of the suspicion ASIO still aroused within the Labor Party that at the caucus meeting held that morning, Tom Uren, a left-wing government minister who had also been a member of the Whitlam government, asked Hawke whether he — Uren — was the figure being referred to in Kelly’s story.

The opposition was also asking questions in parliament that afternoon: three in the space of a few minutes. It was the third question, posed by National Party heavyweight Ian Sinclair, that let the cat out of the bag; he asked whether members of the government had been instructed to dissociate themselves from David Combe, naming him for the first time. That afternoon, in a sensational front-page story headed “Russian Spy: Labor Official Named,” Sydney’s Daily Mirror claimed that a senior Labor official had “been named a Soviet spy by Australia’s security forces.” No one could now fail to associate the gathering rumours with Combe.

When members of the government saw this article, they were unsure whether to laugh or cry. It was an outrageous libel and, at a time when cold war conflict was still central to international affairs, a deeply damaging accusation. Combe was effectively being called a traitor. Yet the article ironically offered a way out for everyone, since if Combe decided to sue he would surely be the recipient of a massive windfall.

The following day, the government issued a ministerial statement declaring that “Combe’s relationship with Ivanov had developed to the point that it gave rise to serious security concern” of a degree that made it inappropriate for the government to deal with him in his capacity as lobbyist. Combe, Hawke reported, “understands and accepts” this decision. (Conversations had been going on behind the scenes with Combe as the government sought to contain the damage.) Combe, Hawke hastened to add, had committed no criminal offence, nor was there any foundation for the allegation that he was “in any sense a Soviet spy.”

Combe could take little consolation from this statement, except that it potentially strengthened his case for a libel suit against the Mirror. But he was out of business, he and his family were besieged by the media, and he would soon be widely portrayed “as some sort of buffoon.” The story of the family’s not inconsiderable suffering is related in an account by Combe’s wife, Meena Blesing, who reported that her husband “was psychologically destroyed and could not face the ruin of his life. The family disintegrated.”

Combe’s sons suffered schoolyard taunts about their father the communist spy, and the media laid siege to their Canberra home. The Combes felt shunned and even betrayed by old friends, while the government’s decision to call a royal commission under Justice Robert Hope, who had inquired into the intelligence services on the initiative of the Whitlam government in the mid 1970s, only prolonged the family’s agony. It was an exercise designed to vindicate the government’s actions in the affair, which it did, ably assisted by a three-day appearance in the witness box by the prime minister himself. Combe, meanwhile, used his many contacts in the party and the media to arouse sympathy for his plight and attract a measure of support.

Eventually there was a rehabilitation of sorts. The government feared the book that Combe was writing about his treatment. The Labor left, increasingly angry over a range of government policies, was also threatening to make an issue of the affair — if necessary, on the floor of the national conference in 1984. Combe himself appeared regularly in the media and at public events to give his side of the story and attack the government.

So the party effectively brought Combe back into the fold. Hawke even spoke at the conference, reiterating that he had acted in defence of the national interest rather than out of any animus, and emphasising that there was now “no blackball against David Combe.” In 1985 Combe would be sent to western Canada as trade commissioner; another government overseas appointment followed in the early 1990s. He would eventually make a successful career in the private sector, as an executive in the wine industry.

Combe had behaved unwisely in many ways, but his desire to build a lucrative career for himself after many years of loyal party service was understandable. His mistake was to boast about it in a manner that rubbed the noses of senior members of the government — indeed, even the nose of the prime minister himself — in the money he was making or about to make on the back of his party connections. Yet in this respect Combe exemplified the spirit of the era that was opening up. There was money to be made, and he wanted to be in on the act. His weakness was that he also remained preoccupied with fighting the battles of the 1960s and 1970s — especially those of 1975 — and underestimated the continuing power of the cold war to generate fear and loathing.

Barnett and ASIO, for their part, held a fanciful and self-serving view of the influence Combe was likely to be able to wield under a Labor government. It is true that Combe was well connected and certainly well placed to work as a lobbyist, but Barnett’s later suggestions concerning his likely clout were comically far-fetched. The case apparently showed the KGB’s ability and taste for targeting “the top echelon of Australian opinion-formers” and its desire for “some degree of rapprochement” between the Labor Party and the Soviet Communist Party — all, according to Barnett, with the aim of “neutering” social democratic parties so that, “when any crunch came,” they would be “quiescent in the face of Soviet power.”

Combe, claimed Barnett, “was within a hair’s breadth of entering the grand gallery of KGB spies, along with Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Fuchs, Blunt… I like to think I saved him from such a fate.” Kim Philby had been a senior MI6 officer while spying for Moscow, yet it is notable that not even the royal commission was able to identify what kind of material a lobbyist such as Combe, even if he had been inclined to do so, would have been able to pass on to the Russians.

The reputation of the intelligence agencies suffered further damage when in late November 1983, ASIS — Australia’s overseas intelligence service — conducted a training exercise that went embarrassingly wrong at the Sheraton Hotel in Melbourne. The operation involved a role-play in which a hostage being held in a room by foreign intelligence agents would be rescued by ASIS. Unfortunately, ASIS informed neither the police nor hotel staff beforehand. Not only were the premises damaged when officers used a sledgehammer to break down a door, but the masked rescuers threatened hotel staff with the weapons they carried.

The only aspect of the ASIS operation that revealed a modicum of either common sense or judgement was that the trainees were not presented with live ammunition, although traumatised hotel staff were not to know that when automatic pistols and submachine guns were pointed at them. The busy royal commissioner, about to report on Combe and Ivanov, now had another incident to investigate. •

This is an edited extract from Frank Bongiorno’s The Eighties: The Decade that Transformed Australia, published by Black Inc.

The post An indiscreet dinner with a Soviet spy appeared first on Inside Story.

“Only two factions matter,” he declared, “the smart people and the dills.”

The former prime minister was oh so right, but not in the way he intended, for he was enthusiastically supporting Latham (and presumably didn’t number himself among the dills).

Keating’s remark was like most of the advice he’s offered to the party since leaving politics: more sizzle than sausage, and unhelpful as well. He was a hugely substantial figure in his time, and an eloquent salesman, but the way he characterises his political career, and the lessons he draws from it, tend to be shaped by the requirements of his ego. His recurrent theme, for over two decades now, is that Labor post-1996 has forgotten the lessons he (okay, Bob Hawke too) taught it about building a new constituency and bringing the voters along, that it’s no longer the party of reform — well, you know it by heart.

Missing from Keating’s recollections is the central role of ferocious negativity, of which he was a most effective exponent: those utterly cynical demolitions of opposition policies, many of which he had either advocated in the past or would argue for later.

He has even implicitly scolded Beazley for opposing the Howard government’s GST in 1998, which should go in the dictionary under “chutzpah.” And he never quite gets around to explaining where the huge 1996 defeat fits on the canvas.

Having helped elevate Latham to the top, he reportedly urged the new leader to take an unfunded personal tax cut to the 2004 election. John Howard and Peter Costello wouldn’t know how to respond, he reckoned.

I suspect they might have known exactly how to react. They would have latched onto it with glee. Imagine the fun Costello would have had in parliament. That script writes itself.

But the real problem with that tiresome “be like Hawke and Keating” mantra we’ve all suffered for almost two decades (when did it start, in 2001–02?) is that those two men did what they did in government, not in opposition. Keating hasn’t been part of an opposition leadership team since 1983, when he was a nervous, inexperienced, stop-gap shadow treasurer who mostly left the economic talk to his more knowledgeable boss. Winning from opposition is not something he’s very familiar with.

And much of the memory of that time is shrouded in myth. The political class tends to forget that none of those reforms that commentators still celebrate — floating the dollar, deregulation, tariff reductions, privatisation, etc., etc. — was taken to an election first. Even once it was behind the armoury of government, Labor wasn’t incautious enough to do that.

On 2 December 2003 the dills outnumbered the smart people, just, by forty-seven to forty-five. Sixteen years later, six Latham supporters remain in parliament, four of them — Penny Wong, Joel Fitzgibbon, Catherine King and Brendan O’Connor — on the frontbench. The other two, Maria Vamvakinou and Kim Carr, sit at the back. (Carr was a mover and shaker — on the winning side — of both the 2003 and 2006 contests, but his status as a factional heavy has lapsed.)

And the surviving smart ones? There are just three, all frontbenchers: Anthony Albanese, Tanya Plibersek and Anthony Byrne.

Albanese is now opposition leader, and his record in the 2003 and subsequent leadership stoushes suggests he is smart in that regard, and not susceptible to Latham–Gillard fantasies of muscling up, fighting on values, and recapturing battlers’ hearts and souls. He possibly understands that in a two-party system (albeit an eroding one) softly committed voters choose at least as much on the basis of whom they don’t want to win as whom they do. If the government is on the nose, there are times when the opposition should stand back and let the votes flow to it. Fighting too hard can sometimes muddy the waters.

Does Albanese have what it takes to win the next federal election? The answer is, yes, of course, but…

Here’s a secret: election outcomes are mostly about luck and timing, about being in the right place at the right time. After the victory, let the storytellers construct their narratives and tell their tall tales about how only that leader could have done it.

Scott Morrison ran a good campaign this year, no doubt about it (this is not being smart after the fact; see, for example, this election morning article). Aimed squarely at the middle, it was light on ideology and free of the puerility that he from time to time lets slip. He emphasised the theme that Howard spoke out loud fifteen years ago, but which is usually an unenunciated major driver of federal election results: whom do you trust to run the economy?

Labor, by contrast, seemed fixated on its base, or a part of it, as if victory is achieved by enthusing the true believers so greatly that the passion spills over into a national majority. With all those hits at the “top end of town,” Shorten sounded a lot more “left wing” than was sensible. But most of all the government was unbelievably lucky to face an opposition taking great big policies to the ballot box.

Bill Shorten wasn’t greatly liked by voters, but that didn’t have to matter much. More importantly, he wasn’t trusted. His presentation seemed rehearsed and inarticulate. What was he hiding?

Individually, those characteristics weren’t enough to demolish Labor. It was the ambitious policy agenda combined with Shorten’s persona that created a perfect storm. The two key plans themselves, on negative gearing and franking credits, were fine — overdue reforms in the mould of the sainted Hawke and Keating — but taking them to the ballot box first, and from opposition, was sheer madness.

(Could it really be true that, in private, Keating encouraged Shorten and Chris Bowen along this path? Could he not imagine how he himself would have relished the opportunity to avail himself of such material when he was in government?)

What does it all mean for Labor and its new leader? The expert consensus seems to be that there’s about a fifty–fifty chance of a recession before the next election. Either way, this will be a nine-year-old government by then, not overly blessed with vigour or imagination, never greatly loved, facing a Senate that might be more cooperative than its recent predecessors but is still hard going.

As long as Labor doesn’t do too much dumb stuff, it should be odds-on to take office in 2022. Albanese’s biggest challenge is remaining leader until then. Morrison’s miracle win has elevated him to political maestro status. He can’t be beaten, they’ll say, no matter how bad things get; he’s a fighter, best with his back against the wall, he always comes back. And the spectacular 2019 opinion poll fail will see any Labor leads adjusted down.

Shorten lasted two terms thanks to Kevin Rudd’s 2013 leadership rules. Given how that ended, and how the prime ministerial turnstile proved no barrier to the Coalition’s re-election, many in caucus will conclude that stability at the top is overrated. And Kevin’s rules can be overturned by a party-room vote (or, more likely, the threat of one, with the incumbent being prevailed on to stand down and allow another to run uncontested).

They might even, as in the summer of 2003, decide that the situation is so hopeless, their everyman opponent so clever, that it wouldn’t hurt to try something really stupid.

Albanese, while not without presentational problems, is infinitely more articulate than Shorten, and seems smarter than most of his colleagues when it comes to the dynamics of elections. He’ll no doubt let through to the keeper, with good humour, the occasional strategic advice from a former prime minister.

But he’s in for the fight of his life to still be leader in 2022. •

The post Ghosts of governments past appeared first on Inside Story.

To be precise, Justice Peter Riordan of the Victorian Supreme Court agreed with the party’s defence team that the constitution of a political party is not enforceable by a court. Unless a party’s constitution declares that it is contractually binding — something they rarely do — it has no more status than the rules of an informal social club drawn up over a few wines and pinned on a noticeboard.

In making this ruling, the judge bypassed more than twenty-five years of precedent set by other courts in Australia. Those courts have held that political parties are not mere “voluntary associations” flying beneath the radar of the ordinary laws of the land.

Setka may appeal. Aware of this, the judge went on to look at the substance of his claims “in case I am wrong” and party rules are enforceable. On the substance, Setka won easily. The national executive is not a dictatorship and can only expel members for a limited set of offences under the party’s state rules.

So Setka has plenty of incentive to appeal, and could yet win his battle to remain a member. But if the bulk of the Labor membership and leadership disavow him, he’ll still be a pariah in the party.

He claims his position as head secretary of the Victoria–Tasmania branch of the Construction Forestry Maritime Mining and Energy Union depends on remaining a Labor Party member. But for the most part, this is a case about face and symbolic power — about opposition leader Albanese versus a controversial union leader.

Regardless of what happens on appeal, either side could then approach the High Court for its view. The court is likely to take the case. Not because the public is interested in the Albanese-versus-Setka show, but because it is in the public interest to resolve how the law conceives of political parties.

The nature of parties and the freedom of association they should enjoy have long been the subject of debate, here and abroad. The nineteenth-century view was that parties were mere factions of ideologically or personally compatible MPs and wannabe MPs. Even as their membership bases grew in the first half of the twentieth century, parties within the Westminster tradition remained (in most instances) unincorporated associations.

In the famous decision of Cameron v Hogan in 1934, the High Court held that party rules were not generally enforceable by the courts. This case also involved Labor, but it was not a mere locking of horns over whether one prominent figure was sullying the party’s reputation. It concerned Ned Hogan, Labor leader and former premier of Victoria, who had been summarily expelled by the party’s executive over his support for the austere, Depression-era Premiers’ Plan. According to the court, the judicial system could only intervene in party affairs to resolve disputes about ownership of property.

That decision was widely criticised in ensuing decades. (Recent critiques appear in works by political scientists like Anika Gauja and lawyers like me.) If even the most senior member of a party could be expelled, potentially in flagrant breach of the party’s own rules, what hope is there that the rule of law will prevail over brute force within these organisations?

In any event, parties are not organised to amass property but to channel or sway political opinion and win elections. They are central to our system of electoral politics and government. Besides these profoundly public functions, parties are also publicly funded. Since the 1980s, they invariably register with the Australian Electoral Commission to receive close to $2.80 for every first-preference vote garnered at national elections. In Victoria, the state division Setka is fighting, they also receive up to $6 per vote plus annual funding to cover administrative costs.

To cynics, such funding shows that parties — who, via their MPs, make the very statute law governing parties — are caught in a circular and self-serving trap. From this position “above” the law, they have been adept at avoiding imposing on themselves the kind of internal democracy they have imposed on, say, trade unions. But cynicism can be taken too far. We have a competitive party system and a critical media, so there is some political accountability for legislation dealing with parties.

Champions of freedom of association caution against undue legal interference with parties’ internal rules or processes. Given they benefit from public funding, the quid pro quo should be that parties are subject to a high level of financial transparency and probity, not a one-size-fits-all set of internal rules.

But Setka’s case, like Cameron v Hogan, doesn’t involve the law meddling with parties’ internal rules. In these disputes, members aren’t asking the courts to treat parties like public bodies that must be run according to a Rolls Royce standard of internal democracy and fair process. A party like the original Palmer United Party can still have a constitution that centralises and entrenches power in its founder and his family. If you don’t like it, join a party with greater internal democracy. In our competitive landscape, you have no fewer than fifty-three different parties to choose from at the national level alone.

Instead, the question here is simply whether members can ask the courts to resolve a dispute about the meaning and application of the party’s own, self-chosen rules. If those rules have not been abided by, why not? The remedies don’t involve monetary compensation. Instead, a court can declare the legal position to guide the party, or give an injunction to do justice between the party and the members concerned, at its discretion and depending on the time pressures and mutual behaviour involved.

In a watershed case in 1993, a Queensland Supreme Court judge decided just that. Party rules were to be enforceable in court and the approach in Cameron v Hogan was to be avoided. (This case concerned the Liberal Party breaching its own rules for vetting candidates for preselection.) Statutory developments like registration and public funding, he said, brought parties within the legal radar. They could no longer be treated as informal social clubs.

In a series of cases since then, Supreme Courts in various states have accepted and refined this approach. Party rules that are vague or deal with ideology, public policy or minor matters are not enforceable. Non-members cannot sue to enforce the rules, allowing parties to robustly repel hostile takeovers. When parties have internal dispute-resolution processes, members should exhaust them first, unless the matter is urgent.

By and large, parties came to accept this degree of judicial oversight. After all, it’s hardly bad practice for parties to abide by their own rules. Today’s dominant faction may be tomorrow’s dissidents. And declining social trust in parties is unlikely to repair if we retreat to a world where parties are not bound by their own rules.

Of course parties don’t like dirty linen being washed in open court, or having maverick members waste resources on speculative litigation. But sometimes internal disputes need to be definitively resolved, as a case this year over the Greens’ NSW Senate ticket demonstrated. Sometimes the party leadership doesn’t even have a dog in the fight and is happy for an independent court to resolve it. And often the party’s powerbrokers have friendly lawyers who will argue their case at mates rates. Not every member is so lucky.

This level of acceptance of court oversight has, until now, been reflected in how parties have responded to litigation. But the spectre of Setka, apparently, has triggered the Labor Party to use the nuclear option, to blast the law back to 1934. The party may be ashamed of Setka, but it will be a real shame for the law if this decision catches on. •

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More than fifty years later, the Dunstan legend lives on. In 2014, the famous photograph adorned the cover of Dino Hodge’s Don Dunstan: Intimacy and Liberty, and in 2017 the sacred garment was put on display in Adelaide’s Centre of Democracy, having achieved “treasured object” status. Now, in this celebratory new biography of South Australia’s “trendy” premier, Angela Woollacott has gone some way towards explaining how this pair of shorts became the material expression of democratic reform in Australia’s “wowser state.”

As a prototypical modern politician, Dunstan possessed a remarkable talent for public drama. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the personal charm and media literacy of this chardonnay-sipping, theatre-loving, cookbook-writing premier helped Labor broaden its electoral base to include both the progressive middle classes and the “concerned intellectuals” it now takes for granted. At the moment when the personal became political, writes Woollacott, he “embodied modernity,” projecting a new image of the Labor Party that was unapologetically urbane, cosmopolitan and liberal.

In both his public and private life, Dunstan was every bit the modern man. He wore jewellery and safari suits, read poetry, played piano, gave interviews to Cleo and Playboy, grew vegetables and cultivated a passionate interest in food, wine, theatre, design, literature and the arts. In his post-political life he learned Italian, hosted a cooking show and opened a restaurant. He was a bona fide culture hero, an avatar for the era’s much-mythologised atmosphere of political optimism, personal freedom and sexual permissiveness.

Though a media darling, Woollacott contends, Dunstan rarely sacrificed substance for style. He was, rather, a committed democratic socialist and a “careful and far-sighted political strategist.” In two stints as premier he leveraged his personal popularity to push through an ambitious progressive agenda in a state that Patrick White once described as “starchy and reactionary.” Between 1967 and 1978 he decriminalised homosexuality and abortion, legislated for equal opportunity and anti-discrimination, abolished capital punishment, loosened censorship laws, funded the arts, pushed through Indigenous land rights claims and helped remove White Australia from the Labor platform.

Such democratic fervour does not spring up overnight, of course, and Woollacott devotes her early chapters to a largely circumstantial search for its elusive origins. Though he was of South Australian stock, Dunstan spent a substantial chunk of his formative years in the Fiji of the 1920s and 30s, where his father was employed as a store manager in the sugar town of Navua. Like all the other well-to-do white families on the island, the Dunstans employed Fijian servants and enforced Fiji’s strict social and racial hierarchies. It was in this colonial crucible, we are repeatedly reminded, that young Don acquired his social conscience.

Dunstan’s childhood was otherwise unremarkable. After contracting a nasty infection, he was sent back to South Australia to live with relatives in Murray Bridge. He was a bright boy, but was something of a social outcast, effeminate, emotional and — fatally — uninterested in sport. He eventually found his feet at St Peter’s College, an exclusive Anglican boys school in Adelaide, where he developed a love of acting and the theatre and excelled in the classics and Ancient Greek.

At the University of Adelaide, he enrolled in an arts/law degree and enthusiastically involved himself in both student politics and the Anglican Church. After graduation and marriage, he struggled to find work in Adelaide as a lawyer, eventually moving back to Fiji with his first wife Gretel to be near his recently widowed father. In Fiji he proved his radical legal credentials, representing Indians and Fijians so successfully that he was soon politely asked to return to Adelaide by the island’s white establishment.

As a young Labor reformer in the 1950s and 60s, Dunstan made his name as a champion of Indigenous and minority rights. Elected to the South Australian lower house at the age of twenty-six, he served as president of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines, starred in a racially charged debate about capital punishment, advocated for independence movements in Cyprus and New Guinea and promoted greater Australian involvement in the Asia-Pacific.

As attorney-general and later as premier, Dunstan set about unravelling one of the nation’s most heavily gerrymandered electoral systems, where for decades more than two-thirds of lower house seats had been going to only a third of (mostly rural) voters. Overturning such legal chicanery was the political achievement on which all the other Dunstan reforms were built.

His great political skill, notes Woollacott, was to turn dry debates about electoral methods into “high drama and public theatre,” seizing on the gerrymander’s more egregious outcomes to build political support for change. Under Dunstan, South Australia became “the most democratic state in Australia,” by 1975 boasting full adult suffrage, proportional representation and compulsory voting.

In this respect, Dunstan was a political radical with a deep regard for the rules. His former university master, noticing young Don’s lawyerly instincts, described him as a “utopian socialist working along constitutional lines.” His instinct was always for reform rather than revolution. At a young age he even made a political hero out of Edmund Burke: “It is not what a lawyer tells me to do, but what humanity, reason and justice tell me I ought to do,” reads the monument to Dunstan in his former electorate of Norwood.

Such radicalism has respectable limits. In this new golden age of street protest, for instance, Dunstan often made national news by attending demonstrations against the Vietnam war and South African apartheid. Yet in 1970 he made headlines for the opposite reason when he ordered police to stop protesters occupying a major Adelaide intersection, which led to a large and violent melee. Dunstan, the “refugee from the Establishment,” was caught between two worlds. The line between protest and anarchy, he told an interviewer in the wake of the controversy, was at “breaches of law and order.”

This penchant for the dramatic made Dunstan a state premier with a national profile. But, as he was constantly reminded, “Adelaide is not Canberra.” Federal Labor senator Jim McClelland dismissed him as a mere “provincial premier,” and Gough Whitlam allegedly told him to stop wasting his time in a “pissant state.” From the late 1960s, it became a media cliché to speculate about whether Don Dunstan would “go federal.” Clyde Cameron, the federal member for Hindmarsh, even claimed to have offered him his seat in 1975, but by then — with the Whitlam government on the slide — the opportunity had passed.

Dunstan thought Whitlam a man of “extraordinary contradictions” whose “failure to establish consensus” led to his political undoing. What is missing from this biography of Dunstan, however, is a sense of his own contradictions, the possession of which seems necessary to life in politics. He appears instead as something of a political saint and a Labor legend, always on the side of the just and the good. He is curiously static and unchanging, a cipher for the political causes he pursued, clear-eyed and methodical — which he no doubt was, but surely there is more to the story.

Much has been made, for example, of the connections between Dunstan’s private life and public politics. He was famously, though never publicly, bisexual, and as a politician he was a warrior for sexual liberty, civil rights and anti-discrimination. But he also had a rather ethically dubious habit of pursuing sexual relationships with members of his own staff, a complex issue — perhaps even a contradiction — that could have been treated with a little more scepticism.

Contradictions take the shine off political legends, and there is no doubt that the legend of Don Dunstan is one worth having. His was a civilised socialism, as committed to food, design and the arts as it was to democracy, equality and social justice. He envisioned an Australia that was diverse and equitable, cosmopolitan and multiracial, “richer, more interesting, responsible, sophisticated — and flavourful.” All, writes Woollacott, were “vital to a life well lived.” In the 1980s, Australian conservatives got plenty of mileage out of the epithet “chardonnay socialist.” Dunstan, though, would have worn it like he wore his pink shorts: with pride. •

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Freudenberg did much to change that hopeless reality. An early middle-class convert to the party of the working class, he played a critical role in the transformational electoral successes of Gough Whitlam, Neville Wran and Bob Hawke. As one of the nation’s first political staffers, and surely the longest-serving, he was a gifted and learned wordsmith, enabling Labor’s leaders to articulate the case for policy change and political reform. As an author and Labor historian, he documented the party’s epic transformation in his 1977 record of Gough Whitlam’s leadership of the party, A Certain Grandeur.

In the backrooms of Labor’s campaigns Graham was an ever-reassuring figure, trusted, thoughtful and indefatigable, swathed like a not-so-dormant volcano in a permanent cloud of tobacco smoke, the upper slopes of his rumpled three-piece pinstripe lightly dusted with ash.

What made him such an effective speechwriter? The first part of the answer is that he cared, passionately, for the Labor cause and believed that Labor’s best opportunity to take government was to argue its cause. He operated on the assumption that Labor’s leaders could and eventually would win that argument — and it would not be done with a glib soundbite for the cameras but with extended and repeated argument, set out in speeches, which needed time, persistence, reasoning and courage. Labor’s best forum, he believed, was parliament; but the argument had to be won everywhere — in the party, in the unions, in the community. Ultimately, he trusted the men and women of Australia, respected their intelligence, and expected that they would reward Labor once it had presented its case and won the argument.

Behind the passion there was, of course, a lot of technique. Freudenberg’s lifelong reading of Shakespeare and the political speeches of Edmund Burke, Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Disraeli and Winston Churchill provided deep wells of inspiration and technical knowledge of the craft. Ruth Cullen’s retrospective documentary about Freudenberg, The Scribe, illustrates this so well, with her subject insisting that plagiarising the greats was an essential, even admirable, aspect of the craft. He even plagiarised himself. In Cullen’s documentary, he asserts that he only ever really wrote one speech — “Vote Labor” — but did it hundreds of times over.

Inspired by those examples, he wrote many excellent speeches, including Hawke’s at Lone Pine for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Anzac Day landing, Whitlam’s 1972 policy speech, and Whitlam’s gutsy diatribe — “certainly, the impotent are pure” — at the Victorian Labor state conference in June 1967. But perhaps his greatest — the one that made the most powerful case, in the most difficult political circumstances, with the greatest historical impact; the one that best showcased his skills — was the “drumbeat” speech delivered by Calwell in the House of Representatives on 4 May 1965.

Freudenberg had joined Calwell’s staff as press secretary in 1960, aged twenty-six, and had recently set out Calwell’s entire manifesto by ghostwriting the book Labor’s Role in Modern Society. Now, in this remarkable speech, Calwell declared Labor’s opposition to the Menzies government’s decision to commit the first battalion of the Australian army to fight in South Vietnam. It must have been hard to elevate Calwell — voice like an iron rasp, face like a granite slab with glasses — to the level of statesman, but this did it:

[W]e oppose this decision firmly and completely.

We do not think it is a wise decision. We do not think it is a timely decision. We do not think it is a right decision.

We do not think it will help the fight against communism. On the contrary, we believe it will harm that fight in the long term.

We do not believe it will promote the welfare of the people of Vietnam. On the contrary, we believe it will prolong and deepen the suffering of that unhappy people so that Australia’s very name may become a term of reproach among them.

We do not believe that it represents a wise or even intelligent response to the challenge of Chinese power. On the contrary, we believe it mistakes entirely the nature of that power, and that it materially assists China in her subversive aims. Indeed, we cannot conceive a decision by this government more likely to promote the long-term interests of China in Asia and the Pacific.

We of the Labor Party do not believe that this decision serves, or is consistent with, the immediate strategic interests of Australia. On the contrary, we believe that, by sending one quarter of our pitifully small effective military strength to distant Vietnam, this government dangerously denudes Australia and its immediate strategic environs of effective defence power.

Thus, for all these and other reasons, we believe we have no choice but to oppose this decision in the name of Australia and of Australia’s security.

These are words to be spoken out loud, listened to, heeded and quoted. Here is a perfect integration of policy substance and rhetorical form. Each assertion (“We do not…”) is perfectly balanced against another (“On the contrary…”), building Labor’s platform block by block as it demolishes the Coalition’s defensive wall, and appropriating for Labor the Coalition’s position as the true representative of Australia’s national interest and national security. There is no jargon or pretend technicality, yet the vocabulary is rich and every sentence is complete and grammatically strong. The tricolon of the first paragraph (“wise… timely… right”) could be straight out of Cicero.

This is a “high” style of speechwriting — formal, balanced, steady, cumulative, moral. Let’s plagiarise Freudenberg’s title of his history of Whitlam’s leadership and say it has “a certain grandeur.” Its restraint grants great power to those moments when emotions are expressed: thus the impact when we are invited to experience the “suffering of that unhappy people” and to feel the shame that “Australia’s very name may become a term of reproach among them.”

Calwell spoke of the risk of America’s humiliation in Vietnam and the likelihood of Australian conscripts being sent to supplement the regular troops. Both claims were prophetic (as Freudenberg himself claimed in his entry on Calwell in the Australian Dictionary of Biography).

The peroration of Calwell’s speech came with devastating effect when he spoke — “through you, Mr Speaker” — to his Labor colleagues in parliament and that “vast band of Labor men and women outside.” Again, the balance, the rich vocabulary and the forceful argument are notable:

The course we have agreed to take today is fraught with difficulty.

I cannot promise you that easy popularity can be bought in times like these; nor are we looking for it. We are doing our duty as we see it.

When the drums beat and the trumpets sound, the voice of reason and right can be heard in the land only with difficulty. But if we are to have the courage of our convictions, then we must do our best to make that voice heard.

I offer you the probability that you will be traduced, that your motives will be misrepresented, that your patriotism will be impugned, that your courage will be called into question.

But I also offer you the sure and certain knowledge that we will be vindicated; that generations to come will record with gratitude that when a reckless government wilfully endangered the security of this nation, the voice of the Australian Labor Party was heard, strong and clear, on the side of sanity and in the cause of humanity, and in the interests of Australia’s security.

This warning and prediction, too, were fulfilled. The drums did beat, Labor’s motives were misrepresented and its patriotism impugned, and its anti-Vietnam position contributed mightily to its landslide defeat the following year. That was the price Labor had to pay for its principle. But vindication did come, albeit after seven years, when Whitlam won power in 1972 and a generation of young voters identified Labor as the party of sanity and humanity.

When Graham Freudenberg was finally honoured by the NSW branch of the Labor Party at a fundraising testimonial in June 2017, the drumbeat speech was front and centre of attention. In a moment for the ages, Bob Hawke paid moving tribute by quoting those words from the Calwell speech. Astonishingly, they sounded as fresh in Hawke’s voice as they had in Calwell’s — and there lies a final insight into Freudenberg’s success as a speechwriter.

I worked alongside Graham when I was writing speeches for Bob Hawke in the 1980s and early 1990s. We shared a broom closet in the old Parliament House, though fortunately Freudy spent a lot of time in Sydney, writing for Wran, and anyway was a night owl, so our hours did not overlap much. We divided the workload, with Freudy taking responsibility for Hawke’s more formal speeches while I churned out the daily grind.

I had written precisely no speeches for anyone before I joined the prime minister as a speechwriter, yet with great self-confidence I dared to edit Freudy’s words, sharpen his arguments and generally lift his tempo. So perhaps some creative tensions were inevitable in the early days. I was a young bull and he was the old bull — though both of us were expert in the production of bullshit (as we joked later; he used a euphemism).

I saw it as my job to write the speeches Hawke himself would have written had he the time and opportunity to do it. I tried to make my words sound as much like Bob Hawke as possible, employing his vocabulary and his arguments and structuring it all so the speech moved along to achieve what he wanted for a specific audience. I particularised. Freudy generalised. In addition to all the work to suit the leader and the occasion, he had an added ability to elevate his words to a higher plane of thematic generalisation, of historical sweep, of moral strength.

This is why he was a great speechwriter, the best. And this is why Hawke in 2017 was able, without irony and with grave respect, to quote Freudenberg’s text for Calwell in 1965. Those voices are silent now, though, worryingly, the drum still beats. •

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But perhaps the most interesting hire so far is the new leader’s chief of staff, Tim Gartrell, once Mr Kevin07 but largely out of Labor’s orbit in recent years. Way back, Gartrell was a young party apparatchik from the NSW left who worked for unions, was a staffer for junior Keating government ministers, and even managed Albanese’s first campaign in 1996. By the early 2000s he had reached the commanding heights of the Labor machine, first as assistant national secretary and then as national secretary and campaign director for the federal elections of 2004 — Mark Latham’s failed bid — and 2007, the triumphant Kevin07 election.

Fresh from that victory, he retired as national secretary in 2008 and ended what had been a lifetime as a Labor professional. For the past eleven years he has been freelancing in the private and non-profit sector: for Andrew Forrest’s Aboriginal employment company, Generation One; for Recognise, the organisation working for constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians; and, most recently, for the official Yes campaign in the marriage-equality survey.

Gartrell returned to the party fold in 2017 in a somewhat ceremonial capacity, taking the position of vice-president of the NSW branch. Apart from that, he hasn’t been a Labor machine man for a solid decade now. Bringing him back after all this time suggests that Albanese sees something special in him — and not just his lack of ties to the Shorten era. What might that be? What is so distinctive about Gartrell as a campaigner? What does his selection tell us about the kind of leader Albanese wants to be?

Perhaps the most obvious thing about the new chief of staff is his rhetorical style. Whether he’s at the helm of the Labor machine or outside it, Gartrell’s campaigns tend to be optimistic and non-threatening in tone. As he told the Sunday Mail in 2000, he is not a “kick-the-door-down type of guy.” When Mark Latham looked for people to blame for Labor’s 2004 loss (not himself of course — he had “won the campaign,” he told his diary), he singled out Gartrell as the man who blew it, suggesting he went soft on TV attack ads and failed to warn him about the Coalition’s devastating interest rates scare campaign. Essentially he felt Gartrell was too nice — that he failed to attack and failed to anticipate enemy attacks.

While Gartrell denies he failed Latham strategically, it’s widely accepted he kept the gloves firmly on in 2004, and they stayed on in 2007. Though it went a little more negative that year, targeting Peter Costello and WorkChoices, Rudd’s campaign was, like Latham’s, overwhelmingly hopeful — focused on the future, on “new leadership.” It was the same at Recognise and for marriage equality, and even for his own campaign for the NSW Labor vice-presidency. The messaging was about warm fuzzy feelings, about love and dignity and hope — the sunlit uplands — rather than searing injustice, rights violated or threats to be tackled.

If Liberal strategist Sir Lynton Crosby is the grand master of the dark arts, the Voldemort of Australian campaigning, then Gartrell is the Harry Potter — positive and earnest, perhaps to the point of naivety. If he is true to form and he has any impact on his new boss, we will hear less “politics of envy” from Anthony Albanese and more of the “brighter days lie ahead” talk.

Then there is what we might call the man’s campaign philosophy, a more complicated legacy to assess. It seems pretty clear from the flavour of his campaigns, and from his public observations about them, that he believes electoral politics boils down to having an effective salesperson as leader. When he was asked about the difference between the failure in 2004 and the smashing success in 2007, he told the Courier Mail simply that Kevin Rudd was not Mark Latham. The campaign strategy, the tactics, the rhetoric, the staff — most of that reportedly went unchanged. What mattered was having the right leader, one who could cut through, who could perform for the media, who could tickle the polls, who felt fresh.

Of course, leaders have been increasingly important in Australian political campaigns for the past fifty years, but in the 2000s, and especially in NSW Labor, the obsession reached fever pitch. Leaders were seen not just as important but as totally dominant factors in electioneering. Every aspect of their performance came under intense scrutiny. To win, they had to perform perfectly. If they grew unpopular, or stumbled in the media or in the polls, they simply could not be tolerated; their stumbles could take the whole party down with them.

This attitude would later come to be portrayed as the New South Wales disease, for it was the young NSW machine men — Mark Arbib, Karl Bitar and, yes, Tim Gartrell — who seemed to bring this obsessive leadership focus into vogue for Labor. Paul Keating would refer to Gartrell, along with several other senior campaigners of the era, as “conservative tea-leaf-reading, focus group–driven polling types” who were “frightened of their own shadow and won’t get out of bed in the morning unless they’ve had a focus group report to tell them which side of bed to get out.”

Certainly, they polled and polled again on the popularity of their leaders, disposing of them with great frequency. During Gartrell’s nine years in the upper ranks of Labor HQ, the party dumped Kim Beazley for Simon Crean, Crean for Latham, Latham for Beazley, and Beazley for Rudd.

Again and again, Labor officials were intimately involved in changes that had traditionally been the preserve of MPs. Gartrell appears to have been one of the men giving leaders that tap on the shoulder, showing them the terminal polling, suggesting they may want to make way for a more popular candidate. In 2006, Gartrell’s polling-influenced doubts about Beazley’s leadership found their way into the media in November and kicked off the push that saw Kevin Rudd roll Beazley by Christmas.

At the time Gartrell backed Beazley publicly, but he later told the Sydney Morning Herald that he had been convinced as early as July 2006 that ol’ Bomber couldn’t win the next election. Behind the scenes, Labor HQ was running polls to test Rudd’s popularity. Some of that polling found its way into the media — and, again, Gartrell was forced to deny that the national office had leaked it.

By election night in November 2007, that focus on getting the right leader, no matter the cost, looked to have paid off. Kevin Rudd was admonishing the party to enjoy a quick Iced VoVo and prepare to govern the following morning. It was the first time Labor had won power from opposition since 1983, and a humiliating loss for prime minister John Howard, supposedly the great political master, who was also ousted from his own seat. Tim Gartrell could retire from the Labor Party machine on a high.

He was no longer around, then, when the whole thing fell apart — when Labor discovered it was not beyond ousting sitting prime ministers, just as it had dispensed with opposition leaders. Perhaps the earliest warning sign should have been the removal of NSW premier Morris Iemma in 2008, and then, just over a year later, of his successor Nathan Rees, using methods honed by Labor in opposition at the federal level. It was tough confirmation that holding the responsibilities of office did nothing to inoculate the party against the ravages of the NSW disease.

But the warning was not picked up, and the coup culture consumed the Rudd government and the Gillard government, then spread across to the Coalition, felling prime ministers Abbott and Turnbull. For the decade since Kevin Rudd took office in 2007, no prime minister has served out a term. As Malcolm Turnbull said upon his own ousting, it is a kind of madness.

If Tim Gartrell was one of the brilliant architects of the Rudd victory in 2007, then surely he must also take some of the responsibility for the madness that came afterward. Either he opposed the polling mania, the cult of the leader, and the coups and was utterly ineffective in his efforts, or he condoned them. And presumably, the opposition leader hasn’t hired Gartrell because he thinks him ineffective.

Which suggests that Albanese has sought out Gartrell because he thinks he can help him become a marketable, likeable, election-winning leader just like Kevin Rudd once was. It follows that he shares Gartrell’s view that elections are about having a likeable, responsive leader — and that Bill Shorten simply failed to tap into the public mood. With a better, more marketable leader, Labor can win.

If that is indeed his thinking, Albanese is ignoring the dark side of the Kevin07 legacy. That kind of campaign ate away at the public’s trust in the system and eviscerated political capital for every leader to come after it. Bill Shorten was not unlikeable because he was insufficiently responsive to the public mood — he was unlikeable because he appeared to be trying too hard to please us. People didn’t believe his promises, whether they agreed with them or not. That distrust partly sprang from Shorten’s role in the Rudd–Gillard–Rudd saga, but it also came from the more general stink wafting off major-party politicians.

To make inroads there, Anthony Albanese needs to work hard at appearing transparent and authentic. Flip-flopping, hesitating, being a focus group windsock, telling people only what they want to hear — maybe, this week or that, it will give Labor a bump in the polls, but it will undermine his own leadership in the medium term, just as it has done for all leaders of late.

The real task is to change minds, to engage in some hard persuasion. That might poll terribly at first — it would mean ignoring that feedback and pressing on, at least for a while. For someone like Tim Gartrell that means throwing out the playbook that made him a success last time he was at the top of the Labor machine. Maybe he can do that, but it would mean learning a whole new way to do things, and with brutal scrutiny and a tight timeline all bearing down on him. Perhaps it is a good thing the man is an optimist. •

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The three-month leadership contest has been a gift to premier Gladys Berejiklian. Under an unimpressive stop-gap leader — and one who isn’t even in the lower house — Labor MPs have had to watch, disheartened, as an invigorated Coalition government has seized the initiative and consolidated its position.

Former Labor leader Michael Daley was unceremoniously dumped after the party narrowly lost the March state election, with even some of his strongest supporters quick to turn him into the scapegoat. To add to his humiliation, he was put into cold storage at the insistence of the then federal opposition leader Bill Shorten, who didn’t want a leadership competition running in the largest state during the federal election campaign. Deputy leader Penny Sharpe became acting leader until a replacement for Daley was found.

Jodi McKay and Chris Minns emerged from early jockeying as the two candidates. Under the new rules, the membership and the parliamentary party vote in separate ballots, each worth 50 per cent. The fact that both candidates were from the right didn’t stop the contest from becoming an intense, public struggle of the kind associated with US primaries. A bitter element entered the campaign when leaks to the media alleged that Minns had accepted inappropriate donations.

McKay, a former journalist, was elected MP for Newcastle in 2007 and served as a junior minister from 2008. She gained media attention when it was revealed that developer and coal magnate Nathan Tinkler, keen to build a coal loader in her electorate, tried to buy her support with a bribe. Courageously, McKay refused the offer and reported it to the authorities. As payback, former Labor powerbroker Joe Tripodi organised a smear campaign, funded by Tinkler, which some believe contributed to her defeat at the 2011 election.

After her defeat, McKay abandoned Newcastle to contest Strathfield in suburban Sydney, winning the seat in 2015. Since then she has been shadow minister for police and roads, and then for transport and roads. Overall, her performance in those roles has been competent but not outstanding.

Minns, a former assistant secretary of the state branch, became MP for Kogarah in southern Sydney in 2015, and was appointed shadow minister for water resources. His ability and presence impressed many, and he was soon seen as a potential leader, although to his detractors he is a show pony. Minns contested the leadership against Daley in November 2018, winning a respectable twelve votes to Daley’s thirty-three.

Both candidates drew support, and opposition, from across the factions. The party’s state secretary, Kaila Murnain, who had fallen out with Daley’s predecessor Luke Foley, made it clear Minns was not her preferred choice, and some major unions were unforgiving of his early call for less union influence in the Labor Party.

McKay’s victory represents a preference for the safe option over an untried, inexperienced but possibly inspirational leader. She is something of a replica of the person she replaced: like Daley, she has a good media image but beneath the appealing surface lacks a solid grasp of policy and detail.

Interestingly, Labor MPs, who have seen leadership contenders close up and have a finely honed sense of electoral survival, were somewhat less enthusiastic about McKay than the rank and file. Although she won 63 per cent of the membership vote, her share in caucus was 58 per cent.

The closeness of the caucus vote is part of the reason why this drawn-out, no-holds-barred struggle resolved nothing decisively. The wounds will fester, exacerbated by the claiming of spoils by the victors when shadow ministerial positions are distributed. Minns is likely to wait quietly for McKay to stumble, and it is hard to imagine McKay besting the astute and well-briefed Berejiklian in debate.

On the other hand, the Coalition is governing with the slimmest of majorities. Historically, a fourth successive term, which the Coalition will be going for in 2023, is a rarity. There is some speculation that Berejiklian may quit midterm, handing over the leadership to treasurer Dominic Perrottet, who is not considered to be overburdened with charisma. If McKay can unite her team, avoid major missteps and keep up the pressure, she has a chance of becoming the state’s second elected female premier. •

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At thirty-nine, with a wife, two children, a mother and a sister dependent on his income, Maurice Blackburn’s move back to the law was a necessity. But it didn’t mark the end of his political career, and after he moved into federal politics in 1934 he held the Melbourne seat of Bourke for nine years. A politician at heart, he was always more interested in “participating in the framing of law” than in “practising it.”

An intellectual who could read four or five books a day in several languages, Blackburn was something of an odd figure among the working-class, trade unionist party men. Committed to working for social justice on a number of fronts, he only “reluctantly inhabited” the party system and would follow his own path if he thought it was right. So much so that he was twice expelled from the Labor Party, first in 1935 after he defied Labor’s ban on membership of the Victorian Council Against War and Fascism, considered to be a Communist Party subsidiary, and again in 1941 because of his affiliation with the Australian-Soviet Friendship League. Like many “pink” intellectuals, his position in relation to communism was constantly under suspicion.

Carolyn Rasmussen’s biography is the result of years of researching labour history and a long personal connection with the Blackburn family. Her decision to write a joint biography of Maurice and Doris Blackburn was an inspired one, a little reminiscent of John Rickard’s A Family Romance: The Deakins at Home, though combining both their private and political lives.

From the time Maurice Blackburn and Doris Hordern met in 1913, their relationship was one of mutual love and shared activism towards achieving a fairer society. Rasmussen cleverly interweaves the couple’s public and private lives, separately and together, within the chronological chapters, thus achieving a richer dynamic than is customary in political biographies. The forensic detailing of Maurice Blackburn’s contributions to and conflicts with the labour movement (which could easily leave the reader lost in a forest of acronyms) is offset by a sympathetic account of the couple’s life together and their different personalities. Doris, a woman with “bounding physical exuberance,” loved the beach and the outdoors, while the more introverted Maurice was plagued by hidden anxieties and frequent headaches, the latter possibly a precursor of the brain tumour that would cause his death.

Doris Hordern had begun her political life in the Women’s Political Association, or WPA, becoming joint campaign secretary to the pioneering parliamentary candidate Vida Goldstein in 1912–13. Young and idealistic, she learned a lot about the political process and also about the prejudice against female candidates. As war approached, though, she found the growing “sex antagonism” of the WPA and its offshoot, the Women’s Peace Army, confrontational. Rasmussen notes, a little cryptically, that Doris also became “uncomfortable” about the role the dynamic feminist and pacifist Cecilia John played both in the WPA and in Goldstein’s life. Doris and Maurice, who was also a member, split from the WPA soon after war was declared.

The couple became involved in the Free Religious Fellowship, a progressive church led by socialist intellectual Fred Sinclaire that attracted many of the small band of Melbourne left-wing intellectuals. Its ranks included Vance and Nettie Palmer (a couple whose relationship was also defined by their combined love and work ambitions), poet Bernard O’Dowd and playwright Louis Esson. Maurice and Doris were married by Sinclaire in a low-key ceremony in the Fellowship’s rooms in December 1914.

Doris’s political life was restricted while she was bringing up their three children (a fourth died in infancy), but she remained active in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. She was at her best with preschool-aged children and worked within the kindergarten movement for many years, but was less comfortable in her mothering role as her children grew older.

When Maurice Blackburn died at sixty-three in 1944, he was eulogised by the party as “an intellectual who was also a man of the people.” It was noted that “his simple, friendly, unaffected manner made him easy to approach,” and his commitment to principles was a major theme. But when Doris was approached at the funeral by prime minister John Curtin, with whom Maurice had endured a difficult relationship, she turned away.

Doris had never been comfortable with the essentially masculine, working-class world of the Labor Party. She had felt the condescension of university-educated women too. As a young woman she had held literary ambitions and she continued to write throughout her life. Several of her poems are included by Rasmussen, most of them sweet occasional verses but some revealing her private feelings. One begins, “Don’t look down your nose at me.”

Widowed at only fifty-five, she appears to have blossomed after Maurice’s death. She stood successfully as an Independent Labor candidate in her husband’s former seat of Bourke in 1946, holding it for three years and working for women’s and civil rights, family support and childcare. She did not want to be styled a feminist, saying that her concerns were with humanity as a whole. Active until her death in 1970, she became president of the Australian Council for Civil Liberties, which Maurice had helped co-found with Brian Fitzpatrick, and was also involved in Aboriginal rights.

Rasmussen says that she did not want to write the life of “Saint Maurice,” who was in danger of being canonised after his early death. Now, with his “disciples” also dying, she wished to retrieve him, and Doris, from the footnotes of labour history. She has achieved more than this, writing a fine and fair biography of the couple that not only illuminates labour history but also reveals the still-present dangers of not toeing the party line. •

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It’s the fact that Keneally is a rising star and a great forensic media performer whose success is largely measured in quantums of limelight.

The plan, apparently, is for her to apply a relentless blowtorch to minister Peter Dutton, particularly on the big increase in asylum seekers arriving by plane on his watch. As the opposition leader gushed on Monday, “Peter Dutton will know he’s alive each and every day with Kristina Keneally as the shadow minister.”

After taking government in 2013 the Coalition had a rude awakening. They stopped the boats in no uncertain fashion, after Kevin Rudd’s disastrous policy fiddles had produced an escalation in arrivals, but they got barely any credit from voters. It was almost as if this wasn’t the defining Australian political issue of the twenty-first century after all, and that people were more interested in bread-and-butter economic matters.

Now, it’s true that when immigration, refugees and unauthorised maritime arrivals are pushed to the front of voters’ minds, it’s good politically for the Coalition and bad for Labor, regardless of who is in government. That can never be changed. But while Australians much prefer the Coalition on the issue — going right back to John Howard in 2001 — they are also aware that these same politicians can be tempted to be too clever, to manipulate it, to play them for mugs: like Howard and the “children overboard” in 2001. Voters can be cynical.

The problem for Dutton as minister has been that whenever he’s tried to conjure up a gratuitous piece of scare-mongering, like the claim that refugees will take your hospital bed, it’s been too obvious. People know they’re being had.

Now Labor will do his work for him, ensuring that immigration, and asylum seekers in particular, is regularly on the front pages.

But wait, there’s more: the crafty shadow minister is doing a bit of “triangulating,” internalising and tweeting this slice of Dutton-speak about keeping Australians “safe” from the unwashed hordes:

@AlboMP’s decision to introduce a Shadow Home Affairs portfolio sends a clear message that Labor will ensure Australians are kept safe. Labor fully supports offshore processing, boat turnbacks where safe to do so, and regional resettlement.

Wait, isn’t it supposed to be all about preventing drownings these days?

Labor trying to out-tough the government on “border protection” is like the Coalition promising to be the party of protecting penalty rates. If people are really going to cast their vote on that issue, there’s only one choice.

More recently, Keneally seems to be saying she’ll be making the case for a bigger immigration program. That too, from opposition, is a political disaster waiting to happen.

Bill Shorten’s biggest mistake was loading himself up with big, comprehensive policies, seeming to take to heart from facile urgings to “rediscover the reformist zeal of the Hawke–Keating years.” (Facile because Hawke and Keating were in government, not in opposition, and also because very few of those great reforms celebrated today were taken to elections first.)

But Shorten handled immigration and related matters reasonably well. Shadow minister Shane Neumann was a missing-in-action man, and when he did speak you could see why. But that was preferable to swashbuckling in this sensitive area.

Albanese, judging from his positioning in past Labor leadership stoushes, always seemed one of the smart ones when it came to understanding the dynamics of electoral politics. (He backed Kim Beazley against Mark Latham in 2003, Beazley against Kevin Rudd in 2006, and Rudd against Julia Gillard — both times.) Not for him the Latham–Gillard fantasies of out-Howarding Howard.

But this appalling decision will come back to bite him and his team. Keneally is totally the wrong person for the job — unless making asylum seekers an election issue is the aim. •

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These are the changes Kevin Rudd rammed through caucus and the national executive in 2013 to placate voters’ fears of continuing instability under a re-elected Labor government. It didn’t save him, but it immensely assisted his successor as party leader, Bill Shorten.

Under the rules, an opposition leader can only be toppled by a petition signed by 60 per cent of caucus members (for a prime minister it’s 75 per cent). This is followed by a membership vote and, eventually, a caucus vote, with the results of both counted equally.

Such a difficult, drawn-out process meant a quick, clean execution was no longer possible, even if the requisite signatures could be collected. With no incentive for his enemies to generate instability in the media, Shorten could prioritise long-term strategy. (Off-the-record briefings to the media are the main way of building momentum for a political ambush, the best-known exception being the Liberal Party’s 1989 toppling of John Howard, organised in total secret.) And so he became the longest-serving federal opposition leader on either side since Kim Beazley held the job from 1996 to 2001.

This allowed Labor to present itself as a paragon of stability against a government ripping itself apart — just as Tony Abbott did from 2009 to 2013. It seemed to work splendidly until around 7.15pm Australian eastern time last Saturday.

There’s a temptation after every election to believe the winners have discovered the cure for electoral mortality, particularly if they do better than generally expected (Daniel Andrews in Victoria last year) and triply so if they win against the election-day odds, as Scott Morrison has done (and you have to go back to 1993 for the last time this happened).

This government, this prime minister, just can’t be beaten (seasoned politics watchers agree) and the opposition will be out of office for at least two terms.

Morrison will enjoy a level of authority in his party room not seen since at least Tony Abbott’s early months. Never underestimate old Scott (they’ll say), he’s the guy who comes from behind, the guy who’s best with his back against the wall. We’re behind in the polls? So what, remember what happened last time.

The Labor leader will suffer the inverse: unmeetable expectations. Labor insiders will insist (wrongly) that if 2019 taught us anything it’s that we need a leader with high approval ratings.

But even the most highly regarded opposition leaders lose their gloss after a couple of years. With a shopsoiled leader in 2021, and the next election due a year later, desperation will creep in.

Kevin’s Rules should keep the wolves at bay. In theory. But they can be overturned by a simple majority of caucus. Yes, that would be messy, and hard to explain, which is a strong disincentive to act. But with so much at stake, perhaps not strong enough.

This government will be approaching nine years of age at the 2022 election, and there is no reason to believe running this country will be any easier. The Senate will continue its logjam, inducing a degree of policy paralysis.

For the last few years Labor has operated under the misapprehension that a virtuous platform, in which policies are stated and costed and fully paid for, would reap its own rewards. It won’t make that mistake again. It will go to the next contest with a lighter policy load.

Whoever is Labor leader at the next election should, all things being equal, have a better than even chance of becoming prime minister. But three years is a long time to survive.

Perhaps a wise, ambitious aspirant would sit this one out. •

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