Albanese could boldly go where no first-term government has gone before (for a century)

Anthony Albanese still has many believers. Even the worst opinion poll for him suggests 45 per cent of voters support his government. Still, with an election imminent, surely some of those rusted-on backers must be asking “how did it come to this?”

After less than three years in office, Labor’s chances of retaining a lower house majority look increasingly remote. Signs are that most voters are choosing between sending Albanese to the gallows or granting him a reprieve by slapping on an ankle bracelet on him and restricting his movements as the leader of a minority government.

Illustration by Dionne Gain

Paradoxically, Albanese has more riding on this election than he did back in 2022. This contest will define his legacy. It’s one thing to win an election against a three-term government that mostly ran on autopilot and cast two leaders aside along the way. It would be another thing entirely to lose a majority or lose office altogether after just a single term in which there was no internal dissent inside his government. The first line about Albanese in any history of this time would be about his failures.

Getting into this predicament took some doing, especially given the reduced quality of the opposition. Peter Dutton’s overarching objective since 2022 has been to avoid the fragmentation of the Coalition and to make it through to this election in one piece. He’s managed to do that.

But it’s not too much to say that his attitude to policy formulation is flaky. Last year, he promised a drastic cut in the net overseas migration, only to discard the promise months later. Last week, he vowed to intervene in the insurance industry but after Nationals leader David Littleproud declared that intervention wasn’t Coalition policy, Dutton said he’d merely been issuing a threat.

This week, he instantly matched the government’s $8.5 billion pledge to lift bulk-billing rates, claiming that he’d pay for it by wiping out 36,000 public service jobs. Is it a policy he would have come up with anyway? Is it a good policy? Does he care? Dutton’s obsession with the 36,000 public service positions Labor has created warrants a column all on its own. Apparently, the public service numbers bequeathed to Labor by the Morrison government hold some mystical significance for the Liberal leader.

Dutton’s policy approach is not serious enough and yet he’s got the government on the run. How come? There are serious gaps built into the prime minister’s way of doing things. No question, the 12 increases in the cash rate since he came to office hurt hundreds of thousands of householders and shook confidence in the government. But a skilled advocate in the Hawke, Keating or Howard mould could have limited the damage. Unfortunately, Albanese doesn’t have a pedigree in vigorous advocacy and that has proved costly.

His apprenticeship for the prime minister’s job could not be called expansive. A lifer as a parliamentarian and a frontbencher since 1998, his policy resume has an almost singular focus. From 2006 until he became leader in 2019, he occupied various iterations of the rarely controversial infrastructure and transport portfolios both in and out of office. This limited his ability to dive deep into other policy areas and denied him the opportunity to establish a wider network of interest groups, business leaders and senior levels of the bureaucracy. It also fuelled his closeness to former Qantas head Alan Joyce, which became a problem for him last year.

It meant that the policy engine Albanese brought to the leadership was suited more to a family sedan than a V8 muscle car. People who’ve worked alongside him – and like him – note his discomfort with geopolitical issues and say that his resort to brief comments and generalities when he’s speaking about defence and foreign affairs matters is the tell.

Albanese has tried to remake his role as leader into something more suited to his talents and experience, hence his aversion to disruptive policy positions in opposition and, once he’d become prime minister, his devotion to what he calls steady, predictable, orderly processes. There was a lot of unintentional political risk in that approach. In these fragmented times, when attracting attention is at least half of the battle, slow and steady can mean that not enough people notice what you’re doing or why you’re doing it. Worse, they start to conclude you haven’t been trying hard enough to work on their behalf. That can be a problem that feeds on itself; for example, early voter feedback on the bulk-billing announcement has been that it should have happened earlier.

A distinctive feature of Albanese’s time as prime minister has been his reluctance to change his public demeanour, policy direction and political strategy, even though by the mid-point of the term he started to seriously lose support. He’s not the only new PM to have a troubled first term. John Howard and Tony Abbott got into terrible strife. At his nadir, Howard took matters into his own hands. He chose a radical option, argued for a new tax system with a GST and seized control of the national narrative. Despite a negative swing, his government was re-elected. In Abbott’s case, his colleagues didn’t wait around. They replaced him with Malcolm Turnbull after just two years.

By contrast, Albanese stuck with his plan and his colleagues in the cabinet, the caucus and the party organisation – recalling the charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War, when British cavalrymen armed with swords followed a misdirected order and charged headlong towards a heavily armed Russian artillery battery – let him have his way. He’s moved into a more attacking mode lately but it’s very late.

All hope is not lost for the government. The “fair go” instinct that has guaranteed a second term for every government for the past 90-odd years might kick in, although the political settlement is remaking itself so quickly Labor wouldn’t want to rely on it. And the opposition’s half-formed vibe-as-a-policy offering could come to Labor’s rescue when voters get to the moment where they have to fill out their ballot papers. Globally, these are genuinely frightening days, making the stakes so high. How did it come to this indeed.

Shaun Carney is a former associate editor of The Age and a regular columnist.