Albanese now realises he’s on a rescue mission to save the sinking ship

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has recently established a new rescue service. Its mission is to save his government, his party and his place in history. Don’t underestimate the level of desperation or the difficulty of the task.

As 2024 neared a close, the penny finally dropped for the PM: the government was heading for the electoral precipice. Since then, he’s been all over the country making announcements, appearing in the media, calling a meeting of the national cabinet and generally being busy.

Illustration by Dionne Gain

Compared with the languid, rhetorically diffuse way in which he’s presented himself since taking office, this looks like an all-stops-out effort. Which it should be, because that’s what it will take if the government is to survive. With at most four months to go until we vote, success is far from assured and there’s a decent chance that this more focused approach will prove to have been applied too late.

It took a long time, well before the last election, for the government to get itself into this tough spot. Labor drew lessons from previous moments of difficulty and failure in this century, but it’s not clear they were the right ones. From its previous time in office, all but wrecked by the Gillard-Rudd leadership tussle, it concluded that future leaders should be almost fully protected from a party room challenge.

From its defeats under Bill Shorten in 2016 and more particularly 2019, the lesson was: don’t be ambitious in policy, don’t attract enemies by challenging powerful interests. The combination of making the leader a king and pursuing a small-target strategy has sucked most of the dynamism out of the caucus and, it seems, the cabinet. It’s also sidelined the party at the grassroots; in recent times, it has become common practice for Albanese, members of the national executive and their state proxies to decide preselections. That was fine when things were going well, but not so much when they went awry. Who wants to risk the wrath of the monarch?

What happened under Albanese was a departure from Labor’s traditional mission as the party that applied an honest critique to society and the economy, and sought to redress the worst inequities once it attained office. It was not afraid of big thinking and ambitious policies.

Often, Labor governments were seen as noble failures. The Whitlam government is the best example, but its attempt to introduce universal healthcare, the forerunner to the Hawke government’s Medicare, stands as a great achievement. So too does the NBN under Kevin Rudd and the NDIS under Julia Gillard.

Should this government fall and cede power to Peter Dutton, what would be its enduring legacy? This is what is concerning a lot of government MPs: are they about to become the Antipodean version of the Democrats in America, who let a poor situation develop into a bad and ultimately irretrievable one?

What the government has achieved is much more than nothing, and it has avoided scandal to boot. It has delivered the stage 3 tax cuts to every taxpayer; repaired the industrial bargaining system; taken on wage theft and zombie contracts; improved pay for workers in aged care and child care; created the Help to Buy shared equity program for low-income families and the $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund; reformed the Reserve Bank; tightened up and defended the NDIS; introduced the National Anti-Corruption Commission; introduced a social media ban for under-16s; and legislated for wiping some student debts and a cap-and-trade scheme for heavy carbon emitters.

Also, to try to reduce reliance on international supply chains and capitalise on emerging technologies, it has initiated the Future Made in Australia scheme, costed at $22.7 billion over 10 years. It’s a decent list.

So why has every pollster and researcher found that in focus groups, voters struggle to nominate what the government has done for them? And why have the same pollsters found that since early 2023, the government has steadily lost popularity? The true believers, mostly drawn from the middle class, are at this point reaching the blame-the-media stage. In an ever-more fragmented media environment, that cannot be a sufficient explanation.

In my view, the key reasons for the government’s popularity troubles include: failure at the outset to nominate as its greatest policy challenge the inequality and intergenerational wealth divide caused by the nation’s housing arrangements; the slowness to portray itself as the people’s defender when increasing grocery prices and rises in the cash rate laid bare this massive problem; the inability or unwillingness to explain where the government wants to take society and make the lives of its citizens better; a leader whose demeanour has suggested that he lacks energy and enjoys the trappings of office too much; and the folly of calling a referendum for which the public had not been prepared.

Added to this has been Albanese’s communications problem. Like it or not, most voters view politics by taking notice of the party leaders, and the three-year electoral cycle means that a prime minister must campaign every day. It suited Albanese to promise not to be Scott Morrison and to assume that what he framed as measured, orderly government would produce political benefits. It’s been clear for a while now that this was wishful thinking.

Unfortunately for the ALP, Albanese showed in the 2022 election and in the lead-up to the 2023 referendum that he is not a good campaigner. Over a longer period, he’s proved to be a woeful communicator. He has clocked up 29 years in parliament, six as party leader and almost three as prime minister, and you have to wonder if the old dog can learn new tricks – especially when he will simultaneously be teacher and pupil. That is some rescue mission.

All the same, there is still fluidity in this electoral contest. Donald Trump’s radicalism, viewed from across the Pacific, could swing the atmospherics of our election campaign in all sorts of directions. It could turn off Australian voters and make Albanese’s incrementalism look a safer bet. Or it could render Dutton, with his rhetoric always on the fan-forced setting and his politics of resentment, more desirable.

Albanese has just a few short months to save himself from going down in history as the man who let his prime ministership slip through his fingers after just three years.

Shaun Carney is a regular columnist.

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