Albanese wants to hit us where we live. It’s a do-or-die strategy

When Dan Andrews was premier of Victoria, there was a lot of talk about how important removing level crossings was to his success. Those of us who lived elsewhere found this mystifying. Once I moved to Melbourne, the mystery cleared up. As you drive the suburbs, you see level crossings – or their replacements – everywhere. Every one that is removed makes life easier.

Tony Barry, a former Liberal official and director of the Redbridge polling company, recently explained to me their other impact. In these times of falling trust, voters find it difficult to accept the reality of anything leaders say. Getting rid of level crossings fixed this problem for Andrews. Each project served as proof his word meant something. Because their impact was (literally) concrete, and because the new bridges and unblocked roads were visible every day, they were a continuing reminder of his effectiveness. His promises in other areas took on more meaning; his words carried more weight than the words of his peers.

Illustration: Joe Benke Credit:

This may sound like the old reluctance to believe anything politicians say. Its contemporary iteration is more total: the sense, in a world grown abstract – and there are many strands here, including the way we experience so much virtually, our inability to take in the number of facts to which we are exposed, the way money has become something we view on a screen rather than hold – that nothing is solid.

Which could stand as a summary of the Albanese government. We get lost amid the overwhelming number of moderate achievements it has racked up, not quite recalling any. Everything feels abstract. It must surely add up to something – but what?

When pundits talk about how important an interest rate cut could be to the fortunes of the government, this is the crucial context. It would not just cheer voters. It could become a concrete sign that the government’s economic plan, whatever it may be, is working: what Barry terms a possible “proof point”. It might signal that the government’s other words, however jumbled, however long-term its pledges, mean something real.

And so the government would have had a mixed reaction to news about job gains last week. On one hand, it can now argue a million jobs have been created in this term: each one a concrete contribution to someone’s life. On the other, that a rate cut seemed to move further off.

A potential substitute for that cut has come into focus with the government’s recent announcements about debit cards and supermarkets. As my colleague David Crowe explained last week, these have the chance of cutting through because – like level crossings – they relate to daily frustrations. But unlike Andrews’ policy, they haven’t actually fixed those frustrations yet.

Still, it is a rare example of a sharp Labor tactic. One of the ways to think about the contest between Peter Dutton and Anthony Albanese is as a battle between tactics and strategy. Repeatedly, Dutton has bested Albanese on tactics. He turned the High Court’s decision on detainees into a political crisis and fatefully opposed the Indigenous Voice to parliament. For weeks at a time, Dutton has managed to steer the national political debate towards topics of his choosing. On Saturday, following the kerfuffle over Albanese’s house purchase, Dutton announced a housing policy.

Do such tactical victories accumulate over time, eventually delivering victory? Or are they, as Albanese has argued in the past, a distant second to strategy? In the last election cycle, he declared his plan publicly at the outset, stuck to it and was rewarded with victory. This masthead’s political editor, Peter Hartcher, not long before the vote, wrote that Albanese liked to remind people “more strategy, less tactics” and of the importance of thinking about “where we want to be in three years, not three weeks”.

Albanese has more or less done the same in government. From the start, he was quite open about his strategy – working steadily in the belief you could both achieve change and bring people with you if the pace was right – and has stuck to it, despite mounting criticism.

Those who believe in tactics over strategy – or who think Albanese’s strategy is wrong – can point to the long polling slide of his government. William Bowe, psephologist and host of The Poll Bludger site, pointed me to three slides of comparable consistency. One occurred in the last nine months of Kevin Rudd’s first prime ministership. There was Labor’s slow slide after Scott Morrison became PM. Then came Morrison’s own slide, from late 2020 until early 2022.

The comparisons are interesting, though lead to no firm conclusions. All started around August to October – but it’s a small data set. And two of the three were followed by losses – but then the other election was pre-empted by Rudd’s removal.

A final notable fact is that the slide in the Albanese government’s share of the two-party-preferred vote has outlasted them all: it has been going for two years. But then, those two years overlap almost entirely the period since inflation peaked, at the end of 2022. I’ve written before about a survey showing governments tend to lose elections 40 per cent of the time. But if that election takes place within two years of that inflation peak? Their chance of losing doubles, to 80 per cent. We are still in that phase. It ends as 2025 begins.

Presumably, Albanese decided his purchase of a clifftop house would not end up mattering much. This suggests much the same thing as Albanese’s approach to the last election and the one coming: that he doggedly backs his own political judgment. Both his 2022 victory and the fact Labor remains around 50-50 in the polls, despite inflation, give him good reason.

If Labor has a clear victory next year, Albanese will have more reason still. His reputation as a political strategist will be cemented. But if Labor goes a long way backwards, that reputation will be severely damaged. More importantly, so will the strategy he has argued for. The idea Labor can gather achievements slowly over time, in the hope of gradually building both reform and political capital, will likely die. And Australia’s two-decade-long search for a workable model of long-term government in these fast-moving, polarised times will continue.

Sean Kelly is a regular columnist, former adviser to Labor prime ministers Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, and the author of The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison.

Get a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up for our Opinion newsletter.