Albanese may have a clear vision for Australia, but it’s not clear to the rest of us

In Victoria last week, the prime minister was able to talk about one of his favourite topics: infrastructure. The North East Link Project would “allow commuters to skip 18 sets of traffic lights and take 15,000 trucks off local roads”. Cutting through abstract economic debates, he declared: “This is what productivity benefits look like, right here and now.” In Western Australia, he visited an Urgent Care Clinic: “We promised 50, but delivered 87.”

We know Anthony Albanese’s values and where he stands on most issues, but what where is Australia going under his leadership?Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

This is politics as Albanese often practises it: concrete, both literally and figuratively. It is concerned, above all, with tangible and demonstrable benefits. On both visits, he was asked about the defection of senator Dorinda Cox from the Greens to Labor. Twice, with only slightly different wording, he explained that Cox had decided the Greens were “not capable of achieving the change that she wants to see … if you’re serious about social change in Australia, the Labor Party is where you should be”.

Last week, the overwrought political debate continued around the government’s proposed superannuation tax changes. Those changes are minor. The original impulse behind Australia’s modern superannuation system was the opposite. One of that system’s originators, former union leader Bill Kelty, three years ago described to journalist Jennifer Hewett how it all began, early in the Hawke government. “Paul [Keating] said we gotta make up our mind what we are, and what we want to do with super”. They rejected various pathways – most notably, “we don’t want to be tinkerers or reformers”.

Illustration by Joe BenkeCredit:

Instead, they decided: “We want to start a new system … We will be revolutionaries. We will change the system. But we will not tear down the existing system. We will build a new system.”

Interestingly, Kelty’s phrasing is almost directly the opposite of a phrase Albanese has come to like, and which he deployed two days before the election. Kelty said he and Keating decided to be revolutionaries, not reformers. Albanese said: “I don’t pretend to be a revolutionary. I’m a reformist.”

Which fits with Labor’s proposed tax hike on the earnings of superannuation balances exceeding $3 million. Remember we are talking about a rarefied set of Australians: in 2023, The Australian Financial Review, one of the loudest critics of the change, reported that earnings from such a balance would get you “two luxury holidays a year, home renovations every five to 10 years and comprehensive health insurance”. This is definitely not revolution.

So why all the fuss? Treasurer Jim Chalmers answered that last week. He did so, probably smartly, in fairly indirect language, as though trying to walk a line: clear enough to reach journalists listening, not so sharp as to draw more attention to the issue. In essence, he said three things. First, because the rich want to hang onto what they have. Second, because a couple of newspapers are obsessed – most people don’t care.

Third, most interestingly, he said, “A lot of people say they’re in favour of tax reform in the abstract, but they very rarely, if ever, support it in the specific”. Unfortunately, this has become a constant in Australian political debate, most egregiously on display in relation to the Indigenous Voice to parliament. Everyone, it seems, wants change, so long as it’s not the proposal on the table.

But there is one other reason the superannuation tax is getting attention: because it’s what’s on the table right now. Smart governments know they can’t dictate what people say – but very often they can determine the subject talked about. Labor wants to legislate this policy, so that’s what’s being talked about.

And here we come to one of the political difficulties that attends Labor’s “reformist” preference for smaller changes. The upside is that, much of the time, most people won’t mind the changes. But the downside is that if you keep announcing small policies, you find yourself constantly fighting small battles. And this, over time, risks leaving you looking like a government concerned only with small things.

Of course, it is possible to deliver large change through a series of smaller shifts; after all, the superannuation system built by Keating and Kelty came in stages. But here we come back to that initial discussion between those two men, the decision to “build a new system”. The small changes were in service of a grander vision. And this in turn was part of what Keating has described as taking “the whole model on” – building a new economic system.

A lot of time has been spent discussing whether the Albanese government is sufficiently bold. This remains an important question. But alongside this is another crucial one: what is Labor building towards? There have been some attempts to define its broader vision, most notably Albanese’s “progressive patriotism” and Chalmers’ “values-based capitalism”. But as articulations of the government’s idea of the Australia it is building, these remain very much works in progress.

We know Albanese is interested in making material improvements to people’s lives. And we know that he believes in reform over revolution. If it is true that this depends on a belief that smaller changes can slowly accumulate into something larger, this still leaves one thing we don’t know: what that “something larger” is.

We do know it involves values such as “fairness” and “kindness” – but, perhaps ironically given Albanese’s concern with tangible politics, it is the concrete way the government’s aims might one day fit together that remains hard to discern, the precise dimensions of its ideal model of Australia.

Albanese may know what this “something larger” is; or he may still be feeling his way towards it; or he might believe that such shapes emerge organically over time, if with each smaller change, a government stays true to its values. If Labor wants us to believe those changes are larger than they now seem, at some point it will have to tell us what greater project they are a part of.

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

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