Winning the 2022 election could be a poisoned chalice for Albo

If the Prime Minister has any chance of winning the next federal election, he needs to get a handle on Australia’s biggest problem.

In the anxious weeks leading up to May 21 an odd little bubble kept popping up to the surface in some of the smarter heads on both sides of politics.

A thought that made the losers feel better and the winners feel worse.

The thought came in words — expressed to me in identical terms by a number of operatives — and the words were these: “This would be a good election to lose.”

With dark economic storm clouds gathering on the horizon and the supposed “miracle” post-Covid recovery now looking like the prospectus for a ponzi scheme, whoever won power was sure to be handed a certain kind of sandwich washed down with a poisoned chalice.

Would the federal election on May 21 have been a good one to lose? Picture: iStock

That storm has now well and truly broken and the only real question is the scale of the damage it will unleash. Inflation and energy prices are heading off the charts, the interest rate genie is out of the bottle and workers can’t even get a pay rise to keep up without that too being cast as fuelling the fire.

We can leave it to the economists to argue over the scale and precision of these impacts but one thing in Australian politics as certain as night follows day is that power bills kill governments — especially the last Labor one. And herein lies both good and bad news for both the party and the nation.

The good news is that Anthony Albanese’s Government is, and will be, nothing like the last Labor one.

The new Albanese government will be nothing like the one that came before it. Picture: Jenny Evans/Getty Images

It is obviously a matter of public record ad nauseam that I have been an outspoken supporter of Albanese for the prime ministership since even before he became Labor leader — and indeed when that prospect alone looked like a mathematical impossibility. But he has honestly exceeded even my expectations, as well as those on the other side of the fence.

The Australian’s conservative foreign editor Greg Sheridan was effusive in his praise of Albanese’s baptism of fire on the world stage, shoring up Quad support, a strengthening of the US alliance, and an Australian charm offensive in the South Pacific to counter Chinese overtures.

And another prominent pro-Liberal commentator and friend of mine texted me after this whirlwind tour de force to say: “I just tweeted something in support of Albo. I don’t even know who I am anymore.”

Meanwhile on the economic front Treasurer Jim Chalmers has been open and frank in admitting we have a problem — which, as we all know, is the first step to recovery — and, notwithstanding my sympathies for Tanya Plibersek, Albanese’s Cabinet line-up is pretty bloody solid.

So that’s the good news.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers has admitted that Australia has significant economic problems. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Andrew Taylor

The bad news is that Labor’s equally solid-looking position in the House of Reps is in fact more like a house of cards. The 77-seat majority was a ballsy win but also a scrappy one.

We all know swings are never uniform but this election was nothing like a wave. It was a bizarre combination of still water and tsunamis.

There was a massive deluge of seats in WA as well as huge swings in Chinese community seats in NSW and Victoria but these came off the back of once-in-a-lifetime factors such as Morrison siding with Clive Palmer over border closures in the west and the Coalition’s perceived anti-Chinese sentiment in the east.

As Kerry Packer would have said, you only get one Clive Palmer in your lifetime and Albo’s had his.

Meanwhile in Tasmania and Queensland Labor largely went backwards, as it did in the quintessential suburban Sydney seat of Lindsay.

According to Joe, you only get one Clive Palmer in your lifetime and Albo’s had his. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Dan Peled

A campaign in which you get a swing of 3.3 per cent nationally but fail to pick up the most marginal Coalition seat of Bass on just 0.4 per cent is a worry. A campaign in which you fail to gain a single seat in Queensland, the birthplace of the ALP, while losing three to the Greens is a red flag. And a campaign in which you win government but a seat like Lindsay actually swings towards the Liberal party is a giant woolly mammoth in the room.

If Labor is serious about winning the next election — and staking its place as the natural party of mainstream suburban Australia — there will have to be a reckoning about this. Otherwise it might as well start packing up now.

Thankfully the people actually in the parliament are doing everything right. Climate and Energy Minister Chris Bowen will not only be able to ignore the teals in the lower house but has carefully crafted his policies so he can completely bypass the Greens in the Senate. God bless that man!

More importantly he is currently throwing all climate rhetoric out the window in an effort to tackle the acute energy crisis hitting here and now. As he remembers better than anyone, if you lose control of power bills, you lose control of power.

Australia is lucky to have a new and very good government. It now just needs a party to keep it there.

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