James Morrow: Albo’s big bet on the country turning left

The further the Albanese team believe they have a mandate to go, the harder they risk being whipped back to some centre point of politics, writes James Morrow.

On the campaign trail, Anthony Albanese was keen to project himself as a safe pair of hands, someone who wouldn’t move too far too fast on anything, the sort of gent for whom even a new pair of glasses was remarked upon as almost a minor act of rebellion.

Yet, in office, the man has proven himself to be something more of a gambler who is betting not just that policy moves won’t blow up in his face but that the entire Australian political settlement has shifted, without anyone noticing, to accommodate them.

This week’s kerfuffle over Temporary Protection Visas is a perfect example of how this works.

On the one hand, figuring out some more permanent settlement for 19,000 or so refugees who have been here since before Operation Sovereign Borders could be seen as simply the fulfilment of a campaign pledge, a feel good sop to the left.

The PM was very keen to assure us, after Home Affairs chief Mike Pezzullo took a Dorothy Dixer on this in a Senate estimates hearing, that there were plenty of “mitigants” to keep this adjustment to TPVs from restarting the boats.

Underlying all this was a bigger wager, not just that people smugglers wouldn’t hear the news and fuel up their boats, but rather that there was room for Labor to play in this space and not get burnt by the politics.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at Parliament House on Tuesday,

This is a big one, given the unhappy history of Labor and boats during the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years.

Whether this bet goes the PM’s way remains to be seen. But either way, we can start to see a pattern.

Industrial relations changes won’t lead to a wage-price spiral, he and his ministers told us (another big gamble). But if they do, they believe the politics will play in their favour because whatever the inflation and interest rates do, people will be grateful for the pay rise.

So just as Albanese seems keen to move beyond the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd experience on borders, he also appears to want to unpick the old Hawke-Keating consensus.

And of course there is the biggie, the Voice, which we are told is simultaneously just a minor act of courtesy and yet which even many of its academic backers say will lead to discussions of treaty and shared governance based on race. Boiled down, it is another example of the Albanese playbook which offers the PM cover of moderation when his opponents attack him as radical: We’re just doing reasonable things around the margins and the right should stop hysterically screaming that the roof is going to fall in.

Former Prime Ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard.

Yet it also means that with every step the government becomes an even greater hostage to fortune, with the threat of more boats or global energy market disruptions or, as was briefly and weirdly mooted at a White House press briefing Monday, space aliens leaving them increasingly exposed.

And lurking behind all this would appear to be a belief that there has been some fundamental yet largely undetected tectonic shift in the underlying politics that have governed Australia since perhaps as far back as the 1980s. That is, that the sensible centre-right architecture of society has shifted to something greener, softer and, to use a much abused word, compassionate.

There are practical reasons why the PM and Labor might think they are on a winner here.

Big corporates have become woker, for lack of a better term, because of the weight of union superannuation money and various diversity certification schemes that act like modern day papal blessings.

Schools have become engines for progressive propaganda, climate alarmism and the demonisation of modern Australia as an illegitimate settler state.

Prime Minister Bob Hawke and Treasurer Paul Keating during the 1980s.

The green lobby has been extraordinarily successful, with the help of a sympathetic press especially the ABC, in talking down nuclear while suggesting that if Australia just stopped burning coal we’d never have bad weather again.

And young people at the last election fled the Coalition in droves – even if, as Bugs Bunny once said, they don’t even own a drove.

The challenge for the Coalition is that this confidence on the part of Labor becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

One election does not a realigning of Australia’s broadly centre right orientation, but the way to keep these trends from hardening into concrete is not to go out to try to meet Labor on its own turf.

And that is why there is a far bigger danger for Labor, which came into office quietly assured of its mandate to change the nation and whose most inside insiders last year reckoned they had at least a good three terms in them.

And that is this: The further the Albanese team believes they have a mandate to go, the harder they risk being whipped back to some centre point of politics.

Again, every global shock, every interest rate rise, every power bill, and quite possibly every High Court challenge that empowers a future Voice to Parliament to throw sand in the gears of government will test this basic law of physics ... and see if Albanese’s big bet pays off.