Albanese’s small-target strategy has given rise to a dysfunctional parliament

By the end of the sitting day on Thursday, it was all smiles for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. For the sum of $500 million towards social housing, he had corralled the Greens into voting with the federal government on a long list of legislation, from an overhaul of the running of the Reserve Bank to the Future Made in Australia program and changes to superannuation.

The prime minister already knew that for another set of bills – the inchoate social media ban for children under 16 and its draconian amendments to the Migration Act – he could count on the support of the opposition.

Mocking its leader Peter Dutton on the floor of the House on Thursday, Albanese could be heard saying that “you’re not being aggressive enough”. The two men seem to have wedged each other into a perpetual tough-guy contest.

Forty-five pieces of legislation were passed by the end of this, the last sitting week for the year.

A race to secure parliamentary assent for a range of measures before the holiday season is hardly new. But when Finance Minister Katy Gallagher told the Senate that many of the bills in question “have been on the notice paper for almost a year”, she highlighted troubling aspects of this week’s events in Parliament House.

This Labor government has to ask itself how it ended up – as Senator Jacqui Lambie pointed out – having more motions to guillotine debate in this term than the Coalition did in nine years.

Why is some legislation scarcely being debated at all while months of work on creating an environmental protection agency, a 2022 campaign promise, has been set aside seemingly in a bid to placate vested interests and avoid it being weaponised by the federal opposition in the upcoming election?

As for the changes to the Migration Act – the latest episode in the unseemly political scramble caused by last year’s High Court ruling in the NZYQ case – how can it be that Labor ends up giving itself sweeping deportation powers and the right to ban mobile phones in immigration detention, a step it opposed more than once when the Coalition put it forward?

Gallagher placed the blame for the logjam on an “obstructionist” opposition. While Dutton has certainly sought to starve the government of legislative oxygen – voting against caps on international students, for example – one has to ask, as our chief political correspondent, David Crowe, did this week, why Labor has been so hesitant to prosecute the agenda upon which it was elected.

Having won office in 2022 on the back of a small-target strategy, Albanese appears unable to go through the gears and sell his government’s proposals or even its achievements, such as an education package that relieved HECS debt and created fee-free TAFE places. (Josh Burns singing Christmas ditties about them, as he did on Thursday, does not really count.)

The result, as our economics editor Ross Gittins wrote earlier this month, is that “he seems desperate to stay in office, but has no great plans to govern effectively”.

At a time of increasing disengagement in our politics, this stalemate means that the spotlight instead turns to the antics of marginal players in the parliament. The sideshow triumphs when substance is lacking.

As Crowe puts it, the exchanges between senators Lidia Thorpe and Pauline Hanson “created a televised drama that told voters the story of a dysfunctional parliament that was utterly out of touch with ordinary Australians”.

The historical decline of both major parties formed the backdrop for a piece of legislation that didn’t get up this week: Labor’s plan to change the limits on political donations.

While the bill would help curb big donations, the proposal of an $800,000 spending cap in each electorate was widely viewed as a cynical bid to shrink the number of crossbench MPs. What stood out again was the lack of transparency in the discussion.

As Catherine Williams, of the Centre for Public Integrity, said: “It is unconscionable that such complex, significant reform could pass the Parliament without an inquiry. Legislation of far less importance is the subject of inquiries: why not this?”

In the end Labor was forced to shelve its plans for this year at least, with Labor and the Coalition unable to agree on the details behind the scenes.

These issues are by no means specific to Australia. But the fact that parliamentary dysfunction is widespread does not mean it is safe to ignore it.

As Age columnist Shaun Carney wrote in October: “The longer those problems like tax and housing are left to fester, the more complicated they become. The more the inequities are baked in within our society, and the more difficult they are to fix. All thanks to our incredible shrinking politics.”

As speculation mounts over when Albanese will call an election, and whether parliament will even sit next year, this much is clear: if our leaders lack the ambition to make a case to the nation, and then follow it through in a transparent and orderly way, our democracy will gradually become less fit for purpose.

That is an undesirable and dangerous path.