Albanese is the conservative who mugged the Liberals. Let’s hope he seizes the moment

Anthony Albanese is a man who likes props. In the 2022 election campaign, he regularly brandished a one-dollar coin to emphasise his support for a pay rise for workers on the minimum wage. And in the lead-up to this year’s election, he employed his Medicare card as a talisman to ward off Peter Dutton’s supposedly evil plans for the nation’s healthcare system. Clearly, his approach has worked.

Everyone has a Medicare card and Albanese was wise to embed in the public consciousness that Medicare is a Labor Party creation, implemented by Bob Hawke’s government in 1984 against the fierce opposition of the Coalition. Because Medicare, for all its shortcomings, is an entrenched and popular feature of everyday Australian life, the Labor Party of today has been able to leverage Hawke’s long-ago policy success to its great advantage.

Illustration by Dionne Gain

There’s upside for the ALP in portraying itself as a defender of institutions, as it can make the party look less risky, and Albanese leant into this heavily during the election campaign. At his recent post-election address at the National Press Club, he outlined the reasons Labor had won a second term. Electors, he said, had voted for Australian values and for doing things “our way” – that is, not like Donald Trump and Trump-wannabe Peter Dutton. He also cited Labor’s “commitment to fair wages and conditions, universal Medicare and universal superannuation” that “set us apart from the world”.

In some respects, it’s a conservative formulation for a centre-left party: preserving what’s already in place. And that signals some potential downside for the government. Universal super was the joint brainchild of Paul Keating and the ACTU’s Bill Kelty as part of the union movement’s Accord agreement, which also gave rise to Medicare. The historically transformational nature of universal super has been brought into sharp focus this week, with the attainment of the compulsory 12 per cent super contribution and the wider discussion about super balances in the millions of dollars.

Inevitably, talk of that achievement invites comparisons between the current Labor government and the all-conquering five-term government led first by Hawke and then Keating.

Hawke and Keating wasted no time in office. The Albanese government is 38 months old. Inside the same timeframe, the Hawke government had held two summits – on the economy and on tax – and introduced Medicare, a new incomes policy, an assets test on pensions, floated the dollar, changed the banking system, begun the march on super and produced a comprehensive new package of tax measures.

Somewhere within the Labor Party, people will eventually start to ask what a Labor leader 40 years from now will be fighting to preserve from the Albanese years. The course that the prime minister is pursuing – backed strongly by Labor’s national secretary Paul Erickson, who has definitely earned his status as the nation’s campaigning guru du jour – is the one that secured the government’s second victory. In short, the government’s first priority will be about delivering methodically on its promises, namely reducing HECS debts, building 1.2 million homes, continuing the push towards renewables, increasing the number of Medicare urgent clinics, and continuing to keep inflation down.

That makes sense, especially since the national political scene is now a bunch of players who have, to an extent, been mugged by reality. Everyone is a smartie after the event, but no one expected a Labor landslide. The government wasn’t geared up for it. The Liberals had even less of a clue. None of the polls predicted it. YouGov got closest; its central projection was 84 lower house seats for Labor – a mild increase on its majority but still 10 short of the actual, stratospheric result.

The size of the margin in votes and seats has opened up an opportunity for the government to advocate and implement more substantial and transformative policies than it might otherwise have been prepared to produce. Is such a thing possible these days? And does the government have the necessary imagination?

Obviously, today’s Australia is a different sort of place to the Australia of the 1980s and 90s. Today’s society is more complex and multi-hued. The economy is organised differently. Choice plays a much greater role in our lives. Education has been consumerised. Political and social relationships are more layered, and the ways in which we communicate – and how fast we generate, consume and absorb information – are barely comparable. Everyone is a potential expert. A mass media that recorded events in a disinterested way was unremarkable back then. Now, it is viewed as a legacy product, a bit like classic rock. Trust in institutions is nowhere near as strong as it was 30 or 40 years ago. As a consequence, the concept of the common good often looks like a more indistinct commodity.

It’s absolutely the case that a generation ago comprehensive reform of the order pursued by Hawke and Keating was mighty difficult. But having reported and written about both eras, it does look to me that the contemporary environment has more of a “herding of cats” element to it.

That’s why so much will be riding on the government’s productivity roundtable, to be held in the cabinet room on August 19-21. It’s the season for speeches to the National Press Club, and Treasurer Jim Chalmers in his recent appearance beseeched prospective participants and the media to adopt a 1980s vibe for the roundtable meeting. Nominating boosting productivity as his focus for this term, he said the government would not approach the meeting from an ideological point of view and urged the people who’ll be there – “government, business, union and civil society representatives and experts” – to take responsibility for the need to reach consensus.

In other words, the few dozen people who’ll be there will be asked to leave the wheelbarrows they push for a living at the door. In this furiously argumentative and self-interested age, that’s a tall order. But having covered the Hawke government’s economic summit in 1983, I saw that happen thanks to the leadership of Hawke, Keating, Kelty and senior employers and business chiefs. As a result, Australia emerged from a deep recession and remade itself. The stakes might not be as great this time but the chance to achieve something profound is there to be grasped.

Shaun Carney is a regular columnist, an author and former associate editor of The Age.

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