Albo is secretive and unaccountable – just like ScoMo

Along with most other Australians, I was under the impression that the country had voted out prime minister Scott Morrison in 2022. Increasingly, I’m not so sure. The similarities between Anthony Albanese and his predecessor have created unhoped for continuity in all the wrong areas. Not much would be different if we were now in the third term of a Morrison government.

Anthony Albanese and Scott Morrison shake hands after Morrison’s valedictory speech in parliament in 2024.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

By the end of his rocky time as prime minister, Morrison was deeply unpopular, including among his colleagues. A major contributor to this was, ironically, his obsession with doing the popular thing. Voters sniff out so-called leaders who slavishly follow focus groups and polling. Even relatively minor decisions stalled long enough to accommodate message testing and an electoral temperature check.

Albanese shares this failing and others. Both prime ministers 30 and 31 rather fancy buying votes on the country credit card. Each leader has a penchant for mystery on matters of no import to national security. So much continuity and change, to borrow a slogan from Australian prime minister #29 (Malcolm Turnbull).

In opposition, Albanese railed at “a shadow government that preferred to operate in darkness”. In government, he dialled it up. The Centre for Public Integrity recently reported that government secrecy is the worst in a decade. The proportion of freedom of information requests released in full has plunged from nearly half under the Morrison government in 2021-22 to just a quarter under Albanese in 2023-24.

Industry groups and advocacy bodies are required to sign gag orders to be included in talks with the government on policies that affect them. This stifles their ability to bring the public into the debate over the decisions concocted behind closed doors. Advocates are frozen out for speaking publicly about their issues. Some journalists also say there’s a blacklist if they write something the government considers unfavourable. It’s common for media inquiries to ministerial offices to encounter delays and deflections. This is not just staff being overly risk-averse. It’s Albanese’s trademark approach.

His government began with another furtive act: a $2.4 million payout to Brittany Higgins who claimed the Morrison government had covered up her rape in Parliament House. The new Labor government shut Higgins’ former boss, Linda Reynolds, and chief of staff Fiona Brown out of any opportunity to dispute the case.

Linda Reynolds was shut out of any opportunity to dispute Brittany Higgins’ allegations.Credit: Composite image/Holly Thompson

This week prime minister Albanese piled superciliousness on secrecy when questioned on the matter. “A judge found the issue on Brittany Higgins very different from the way that you characterise it,” he deflected, taking a swipe at the reporter for reading the question.

In fact, both judges Michael Lee, who presided over what became a civil rape case, and Paul Tottle, who heard the defamation case brought by Linda Reynolds, found in their exhaustive judgments that the issue was exactly as the reporter had characterised it.

This dismissive approach ought to invite greater scrutiny, yet somehow Albanese is allowed to get away with it. Again and again.

In October, independent senator David Pocock highlighted an ingenious form of influence-peddling, which, without his outrage, might never have become public.

Senator David Pocock, who sought to tackle the prime minister on detail.Credit: Illustration: Stephen Kiprillis

The Parliamentary Sports Club, of which the prime minister is president, receives funding from businesses in return for access to the participants. Donors include the lobby group for the big gambling companies. Pocock says this puts the prime minister in a very awkward position, “as he’s effectively the president of a lobbying firm”. The prime minister simply labelled Pocock’s concerns “absurd” – and that was an end to the matter. The media is too overwhelmed, the public too tuned out, and the influencer-commentators too partisan to pursue his haughty dismissals.

In an attempt to disprove accusations that it has too little ambition, the emboldened Albanese government is expanding on the Morrisonian repertoire. It excels in finding creative new ways to make itself even less accountable.

At the Sydney Institute’s gala dinner last week, the powerbroker many in Labor call “the Godfather” and this masthead has identified as a “the power behind the prime minister”, senator Don Farrell, gave a speech gleefully describing the government’s “democratic” proposals to increase the number of seats – with all the potential upside for Labor given its current advantage in urban electorates – and donation laws that cap public campaign activity at election time.

These laws primarily affect minor and independent parties. Labor, which has a raft of aligned unions whose falling member fees are more than compensated for by the money they receive from industry superannuation funds, needn’t worry that it will be starved of third-party support. As well as donating directly to Labor, many unions run their own well-resourced campaigns. It’s surely a coincidence that they champion Labor causes.

In combination with the gag orders the government requires of organisations it negotiates with on policy, the donation caps create an environment in which organisations will divert yet more funds to achieving outcomes through lobbying behind closed doors.

As a result, this supposed transparency measure to strengthen our democracy will have the exact reverse effect. We’ll hear less, not more, about what is being spent and how. Citizens will be shut out of the conversation entirely – if they’re even aware that one is going on.

For the conversations which can’t be avoided, there are those trusty old polls to anticipate public opinion. The prime minister went visibly cool on the warming climate just about the time it was revealed that hosting the COP31 gabfest in Australia would cost upward of $1 billion. For long enough to run a focus group or two, Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen was left under the impression that Australia was still going all-in on the bid. Then, presumably, the focus group feedback was in, and the bid was over.

The politics of energy has shifted and the power-focused prime minister has moved with the message – something that could as well have been said when Scott Morrison suddenly signed up to net zero by 2050.

The government has changed, perhaps the country has changed, but our prime ministers haven’t. The political environment is becoming less open and less participatory. Eventually, it will just be the illusion of democracy.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is an insights and advocacy strategist. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens and is a senior fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies. She is also an advisory board member of Australians For Prosperity, which is part-funded by the coal industry.

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