‘Pregnant moment’ for Albanese government. But can Labor deliver?

It’s almost always a special moment. When a new member of parliament gives their first speech. It’s typically a lawmaker’s peak of idealism before creeping egoism begins its stealthy takeover.

Every speech includes a revealing tale of journey, usually an insight into life, and often a breathtaking flash of humanity.

“I was pretty angry by the time I joined the Labor Party in 2016,” Ali France, the woman who unseated Peter Dutton, told the House of Representatives on Tuesday in the first of the new parliament’s first speeches.

Illustration by Simon LetchCredit:

Why? She only had time to push her four-year-old son out of the way before an out-of-control car crushed her against a Brisbane car park wall. Surgeons amputated her leg to save her life. She survived years of more surgeries, more pain, more trauma, and what she described as “the mother of all unconscious bias”.

“Labor delivered the NDIS, but people with a disability still struggled to be seen, to get around and to get jobs. Landing a job was incredibly difficult for me. People only saw disability. It was like I was born on the day of my accident.”

The former journalist paddled her way out of her funk in an outrigger canoe and her new confidence “ushered in a new era that I like to describe as ‘failing forward’, the just-bloody-do-it era”.

She failed forward twice in campaigns to seize Dutton’s seat before her triumph in the May election, making her the first person to unseat an opposition leader. And she campaigned while still grieving the death of her 19-year-old son, taken by leukaemia last year.

She said she’d devote her time in parliament to returning to the people of Dickson the same kindness and opportunity that she’d been given.

An emotional Prime Minister Anthony Albanese congratulates Ali France, the member for Dickson, after she delivered her maiden speech on Tuesday.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

It’s a measure of the breadth of Labor’s victory that it removed the leaders of the two main rival parties, not only the Liberals’ Dutton but also the Greens’ Adam Bandt.

Sarah Witty took Bandt’s seat of Melbourne. The second of the new MPs to address the House this week, she told of her own heartache and pain, a decade of trying for a baby but “pregnancy after pregnancy ending in loss”.

“I remember, after a devastating loss, my mum gently said to me, ‘Maybe you were meant to be a mum for all children.’ At the time, her words hit a wall. I was too shattered to hear them or to let them in.” But slowly she realised her new path: “I stepped into the world of foster care, not out of ease but out of a deep-seated need to turn my pain into something positive.”

Some days, said the former Subway franchisee and one-time chief executive of the non-profit Nappy Collective, were beautiful. Others tested her and her husband to the limit. One day’s experience changed everything. A boy she fostered for two years, call him Matt, asked one day if he could tell her a secret.

“As he usually didn’t say much, I was pretty excited for him to start a conversation and excited to possibly hear a story from a day at school. ‘Sure, mate. What’s your secret?’

“Now, I’m not going to tell you what that secret was because, number one, it was a secret. But, number two, no child should have experienced that secret. The only person I told that secret to was his caseworker.”

That moment set her on the path to parliament. With every decision she makes, “I will always ask myself, ‘What would Matt need so that he and the hundreds of children like him can grow up to be the best people they can be?’” She committed herself to working for more home building, addressing climate change, public education and equality for all.

Sarah Witty, the member for Melbourne, delivers her maiden speech at Parliament House.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

The prime minister and his senior ministers spent nine hours in the House this week respectfully listening to the first speeches of these and 16 other new MPs. Eight more are to follow on Monday.

(The government increased its majority by 17 at the election, but the technicalities need not detain us.)

Many speeches were moving, some inspiring, all interesting. The new representatives spoke of social justice, equality, workers’ rights. A recurring motif of the first nine speakers, all Labor, was that all offered thanks to the trade unions who had supported them, campaigned with them and, in some cases, employed them.

But, strikingly, it wasn’t until the 10th new MP rose to speak that we heard any discussion of the economy. Why does this matter?

Because it’s hard to deliver social justice and opportunity without good jobs in plentiful supply. It’s hard to generate jobs without investment. And it’s hard to pay for new programs and entitlements without ever-increasing revenue. You can’t have wealth without a wealth machine. And that can only be a successful economy.

To be fair, a number of the new Labor members spoke of the importance of small business. But it was only when the 10th speaker, Ben Small, the new Liberal member for Forrest in Western Australia, rose to speak that we heard about the central place of the economy in national success. And failure.

Small, a former ambulance paramedic, said: “We are slowly sleepwalking as a country into decline, as investment capital flees our shores whilst we become less and less competitive, with lower and lower productivity.” He’s right.

It wasn’t all bleak: “Yet I see limitless potential for an Australia that is bolder, braver and more bountiful as a nation, and I am convinced that deep within our communities is the pride and passion to achieve more for our country and for each Australian to achieve their potential, to maintain a safety net for those deserving a hand up, and to again become a country of ‘can’.” As opposed to “can’t”.

The traditional trade-off in policymaking is between equity and efficiency. The overriding purpose of the Albanese government so far has been to restore some equity. This is for very good reason. For decades, Australia had been drifting into deeper and deeper inequality.

The former Treasury secretary Ken Henry told the National Press Club recently that we Australians collectively have been guilty of “intergenerational bastardry” by running down our natural environmental resources. You could use the same words to describe the housing crisis. Or the rundown in wages and wealth of working Australians. Or the accumulation of national debt.

All of these amount to an older generation pulling up the ladder of improving living standards.

Albanese has not fully solved any of these crises. But his government has tried to stop the decline in living conditions and to start improving them.

Consider the shares of national income devoted to wages compared with company profits. In the decade to 2022, the wages share fell by 3.6 percentage points of national income. Which doesn’t sound like much. But it equates to $60 billion a year in lost wages across the economy, according to economist Emma Dawson, formerly of the Per Capita think tank and now head of the Labor-aligned Chifley Research Institute. That’s $600 billion across the decade.

“So where did that lost wealth go?” she posed in a recent paper. It all went to company profits. Albanese has reversed this slow-motion, macro-scale wealth transfer. In the government’s first term, the trend reversed. The wages share rose by 3.8 percentage points.

The era of callous unfairness was best symbolised by the Morrison government’s robo-debt disaster, says Dawson. “People were desperate for a rebalancing towards fairness and opportunity. The government did try to do that through wages and industrial relations changes, Commonwealth rent assistance, more support for single mums, and it is important to restore to the community the idea that the government is there for them, not just to answer the call of the biggest businesses and the wealthiest lobbyists.” Democratic despair is the pathway to national ruin, as the US reminds us daily.

In its second term, the Albanese government has the opportunity to extend its equity agenda. Indeed, it was re-elected on policies of extending social benefits through a more generous Medicare and cheaper pharmaceuticals. All of which is expensive. And the budget is in deficit.

But Albanese also has the opportunity to repair the slowing wealth machine, to generate more jobs, higher wages, more investment, more profit and more tax revenue. “Good social democratic governments do both,” points out Dawson. “Drive growth, support the private sector and distribute opportunity across the whole community.”

This was the achievement of the Hawke-Keating era and why it is so lauded. And, with the government’s productivity roundtable next month, it is perhaps available to the Albanese-Chalmers government.

It is a potential pivot point. Dawson likens the government’s equity policies of its first term to seizing the low-hanging fruit. Its second term and commanding majority provide the chance to make structural change. “They have the authority and the opportunity. It’s a pregnant moment.”

The idealism of Labor’s new MPs is admirable. They are now part of a government that is in a position to not only deliver on their problem-solving passion but also figure out how to pay for it.

Peter Hartcher is the political editor.

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