Support for Labor in its heartland has been waning. Can it win the battlers back?

This story is part of the April 26 edition of Good Weekend.See all 11 stories.

Johnson Mirzai is an Australian citizen with opinions, and whether they reflect a bigger story is unknown a week before the May 3 election. He’s 66, has four children and five grandchildren, and before he retired he was a machine operator. He’s in T-shirt and jeans, chatting over a flat white with mates in the Macquarie Mall in Liverpool, a 50-minute drive from the postcard Sydney of the Opera House and Harbour Bridge.

At one end of the mall is an imposing Westfield shopping centre, and to the side is the historic St Luke’s Liverpool church, where elderly men, many on walkers and mobility scooters, play chess outside and chat in the sun. The strip of shops indicates that this area, in the federal seat of Werriwa in south-west Sydney, is what’s known as diverse: Long Phuong beauty salon, Vietnam food and bubble tea, a discount store (“Never Pay Full Price Again”), Al Afrah Jewellery.

Mirzai lives in a community housing project, but nonetheless his rent has risen to about $240 a week, up more than $100 in recent years, he says. He knows that inflation and high prices are international phenomena, and gets that governments can’t solve everything (although he wishes the government would do something about Coles and Woolworths: “They are ripping people off left, right and centre.”)

“I always voted Labor. I grew up in a tradition with Bob Hawke, Bobby baby,” he says. He ticked the box for Labor at the 2022 election, but this time, for the first time, he’s voting Liberal, mainly as a protest against the shock of high prices. “It’s a big decision for me, but I have already made my mind up,” he says. As for Liberal leader Peter Dutton, it’s a shrug: “Why not give him a go?”

Mirzai’s decision is “bloody oath” due to the cost of food, the cost of medicines. “Thank god” he doesn’t own a car. He manages a self-aware smile when he says that when he meets friends for coffee, he orders no more than one. And he notices people around him. One study commissioned by the ABC found that 93 per cent of those who rent in Werriwa suffer “stress”, meaning at least a third of their income goes towards housing costs. “People are doing it hard, they give you a smile, but I can see it in their faces.”

Voting is as much an emotional as a rational decision. Whether a Dutton-led Liberal government would ease the troubles of people like Mirzai is doubtful, but he’s lost trust in Australia’s political system and especially in Labor, Australia’s oldest political party and one of the oldest social democratic parties in the world. Werriwa is the heart of the heartland, held continuously by Labor since 1934, although redistributions have shifted its boundaries. Its luminaries include former prime minister Gough Whitlam, Hawke-era minister John Kerin and, less comfortably, former leader Mark Latham.

Whether Liberal candidate Sam Kayal defeats Labor’s MP Anne Stanley in Werriwa or not, or whether Labor’s disciplined campaign rewards it with minority or majority government, it won’t camouflage the slow-moving but inexorable shift across the country over the past two decades. Labor, founded to represent the interests of the unionised working class against the ruling class, has been haemorrhaging support in its once-assumed seats in the outer suburbs of major cities, especially in Sydney and Melbourne. This election will reveal whether it can turn that around.

In 2022, Labor won government and Stanley, 63, who still lives in the house she grew up in Werriwa, was re-elected with a 5.3 per cent margin. It’s now officially a marginal seat where, not long ago, that was unthinkable. Stanley, quietly spoken and thoughtful, understands the frustration about long-neglected infrastructure in the outer suburbs and the pain of rising prices in low-income suburbs. She is well aware that Werriwa is one of the seats the Liberals are convinced is a struggle-town electorate within its grasp, so much so that it held its campaign launch in Liverpool. So it’s getting attention: promises of a new urgent care clinic – bulk billed, no appointment necessary – and a $1  billion upgrade to the notorious Fifteenth Avenue, a road connecting western Sydney to what will be the new international airport.

At the announcement, NSW Premier Chris Minns, whose government will pay half the cost, called the two-lane road a congested “goat track”. Albanese acknowledged the “cracker of a project” had been “sitting on the books for a long period of time”. (The Liberals have matched the promises.) “These poor people spend, you know, so much time on that road,” says Stanley. “Would I like to have seen this road upgraded five or 10 years ago? Absolutely.” Both her parents voted Labor and so did her grandparents. “We’ve changed a little bit as a society. My parents’ generation, you basically chose a party, and that was really the only option, there weren’t a lot of independents or other options. We should just listen to what we can do better.”

Werriwa ALP MP Anne Stanley says the party should listen to suggestions on how it could improve.Credit: Brent Lewin

Look more closely at seats like Werriwa and you can see Labor’s problem. Stanley’s primary vote – where people put a number “1” against her name – dropped almost 8 per cent at the last election. Support for the Liberals’ Kayal also fell more than 4 per cent, while right-wing parties, such as United Australia and the Liberal Democrats, attracted more than 8 per cent each. Labor spectacularly lost the adjacent seat of Fowler, which it had held since its creation in 1984, to independent Dai Le after it assumed locals wouldn’t care if it parachuted in a northern beaches outsider, former NSW premier and senator Kristina Keneally. The primary swing against Labor there was more than 18 per cent.

‘What has the government done for this area? They’ve done nothing. They take it for granted.’

Former truck driver Mark Xuereb.

Look closer still at Werriwa booths in the suburbs of the old Green Valley Housing Estate, built by the state government in the early 1960s during another housing crisis (with echoes of 2025, residents complained bitterly that the estate was built long before the services arrived). The swings were huge. Green Valley East: Labor’s primary vote down almost 18 per cent; Green Valley North, down close to 12 per cent; Green Valley West, down 17.5 per cent.

At the Green Valley Plaza, Mark Xuereb, a former truck driver, keeps an eye on a trolley of groceries while his wife picks up $73 in medicines at the chemist. “I’m 55 years old, and I’ve always voted Labor like everyone else,” he says.

Xuereb’s rent has risen three times in the past year; buying food is about bulk-buying specials to freeze, and he can no longer afford comprehensive car insurance for his 2016 car. He’ll probably vote Labor again, but without enthusiasm.

“If you were to ask anybody around here, what has the government done for this area? They’ve done nothing. They take it for granted.”

Werriwa voter Mark Xuereb, who will probably vote Labor as usual but this time without enthusiasm – especially after copping rent, food and insurance increases.Credit: Brent Lewin

Liberal candidate Kayal, a 52-year-old accountant, arrived in Australia from Lebanon as a child – his father worked in a factory, his mother a homemaker. He was once a member of the ALP. “I feel like the Labor Party left the workers, the working class, many years ago,” he says. “The Liberal Party is really the party of the workers, of families, aspirational Australians.”

That view can seem more wish than reality, especially given the party’s poor start to the campaign. The idea that the realignment of Australian politics will one day confirm the Liberal Party as the natural home of “battlers” has been flirted with before – Howard’s western Sydney battlers in the 1996 election, for instance – but party leaders insist Peter Dutton is serious. Perhaps he has no choice, as the Liberals’ once blue-ribbon seats in comfortable suburbs have abandoned the party for more progressive independents.

On two issues, Liberal sources say, policy shifted to fit the strategy. One is health, vital to outer suburban voters, so the party has matched Labor’s main promises on Medicare. The other is industrial relations, where it has put up with business grumbles to insist there’ll be no major changes to Labor’s reforms. And, while mostly a state issue, it emphasises suburban fears about crime. “There has been a long-term trend away from Labor in their traditional working-class seats,” says Liberal campaign spokesman James Paterson, “but this could be the election where it reaches a tipping point and sees seats flip, especially in Victoria.”

Former ALP member Sam Kayal, the Liberal candidate for Werriwa, says the Labor Party left the workers “many years ago”.Credit: Brent Lewin

Eyes on Australia

This will be a rare Australian election that will be analysed internationally. Cost-of-living pain and anxiety about immigration meant, according to a Financial Times analysis, that every governing party of the 12 developed Western countries that held national elections in 2024 was punished, either tossed from office or saw its support tumble. The most spectacular example was in the US last November, when a Democrat administration, considered the most pro-labour for decades, had non-tertiary-educated voters and those earning less than $US50,000 a year abandon it for Donald Trump.

In Europe, the angst revolves around the collapse of social democratic parties and the rise of the far right. Germany’s Social Democrats, one of the West’s most established centre-left parties, slumped to just 16.4 per cent of the vote in February, with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) becoming the second-biggest force in parliament.

In the UK, Labour tossed out a loathed Tory government after 14 years, but its vote was about as poor as Labor’s in Australia in 2022: around a third of voters. Recently, in a call to arms to his cabinet, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer wrote that “if governments are not changing the system in favour of working people, then voters will find someone else who does”. He meant the surging, anti-immigration Reform UK Party. He pledged his government would stand up “for ordinary people who feel shut out and ignored by elites”, a reference to the argument that centre-left parties are being rejected because of their rightward shift on economics, their embrace of the “identity politics” concerns of well-off progressives, or both.

Labor likes to think of itself, and Australia, as different – “Australian exceptionalism” in an uncertain world, as Treasurer Jim Chalmers puts it. The whiplash of Trump’s America, including tariff chaos and unreliability towards long-time allies, is likely to have dampened enthusiasm for an anti-incumbent “up yours” in Australia or in Canada, where an election will be held on April 28. Our compulsory voting – Australia is the only English-speaking country to insist its citizens vote – and our preferential voting system can protect us from the ravages of extremism elsewhere.

But there is no doubt that outer suburban voters are grumbling. “They’re rebelling,” says Paul Strangio, author and emeritus professor of politics at Monash University. To date, they have not rebelled into the arms of the Liberals. The upturning of political conventions may be seismic, but Australia has not, to date, embraced far-right, anti-immigration candidates and parties. Instead, the disillusionment with both Labor and the Coalition’s ability to meet the moment has an Australian flavour, with surging support for “anyone else”: independent and minor parties gaining 32 per cent support last time, close to the majors.

The Coalition is in all sorts of trouble: it holds just eight of the 48 metropolitan seats in Melbourne and Sydney to be contested at this election, and bled six seats to more progressive “teal” independents in 2022. With 54 seats at the start of the campaign, it is 22 short of the number needed to form a majority government, a huge and unlikely task. For Labor, it is battling the Greens on its left in seats like Wills in Victoria and Kevin Rudd’s old electorate of Griffith in Brisbane. The rebellion is deep.

Strangio is writing a book on federal politics this century, and he argues that Australia, while not immune to international forces, remains an outlier “partly because of the momentous reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, plus the fact there were social policies bolted on to the economic reforms that insulated Australia from the worst of the economic excesses and downturns, the deep inequalities that we’ve seen in other countries”. These were the Hawke/Keating reforms that balanced a reduction in protection, tax reform, floating the dollar, deregulation and wage restraint with the “social wage”, including Medicare and compulsory superannuation. Add to that a more intentional approach to multiculturalism, including an encouragement of citizenship, and the relatively mild impact of the 2008 global financial crisis under Rudd’s government, and perhaps Australia really is special.

Then Labor prime minister Paul Keating queues for afternoon tea with women from western Sydney’s Bankstown electorate in August 1993. Credit: Andrew Taylor

The nostalgia for a golden era is wearing thin. “The reforms are running out of puff,” says Strangio. “To some degree we did lose sight of class inequality, and it’s now rearing its head, and aligned with that is generational inequality. I continue to wonder how long our young are going to be patient and forbearing. We’re on borrowed time.”

Rhetorically, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese sounds like a working-class bloke, mentioning his youth in public housing to the point of parody. When the election was called, it was about “having a real crack”. He was asked by broadcaster Neil Mitchell whether he personally cleans up his dog’s poo. Yes, said Albo, he would never ask staff to do that. “I’m a working-class kid from Camperdown and always will be. Never ask anybody to do something you won’t do yourself.”

Treasurer Jim Chalmers, the heir-apparent Labor leader, posted videos on social media during Tropical Cyclone Alfred in shorts and a T-shirt, wielding a shovel to clean out drains. The election is the “battle of the burbs”, he says. He grew up in outer suburban Logan, in Brisbane’s south, “where it felt like the opportunities in Australia aren’t always fairly shared”. “Where I’m from means everything to me,” he told the Curtin’s Cast podcast. “A prime minister from housing commission, we’ve got a treasurer from Logan City … it says something good about the opportunity that is available to people in this country.”

Former NSW Labor premier Bob Carr says the “crazy universe” of centre-left parties torturing themselves over niche issues, such as whether a trans woman is a woman, “hasn’t taken off here” in a substantial way. Labor sticks to a deliberately narrow script, deflecting the biggest questions of the future of the US alliance, growing inequality and the crisis of climate change. It’s all about cost of living, with one ad boasting that “whether you’re a truckie, a teacher, or a tradie, you’ll get another tax cut under Labor”. It has a laundry list of help: a $150 rebate for energy bills; paying doctors incentives to bulk bill more GP appointments; reducing the cost of PBS medicines to $25; ending non-compete clauses for those earning less than $175,000 who change jobs; a modest “top up” tax cut from July next year; help to pay for household batteries.

The housing crisis, a generation in the making, attracts big policies from both sides, with one from Labor conceding market failure: a pledge to build 100,000 new homes exclusively for first-home buyers. Chalmers reassures us that Australia has “turned the corner” and is well-placed to withstand global turmoil. Isn’t that enough?

Who are the working class?

On May 3, the headlines will be about which major party can form government, but former Labor strategist Kos Samaras says Labor’s approach to its working-class base has not been good enough for a long time. He has been pushing the party to face what he sees as the truth for more than a decade. The working-class people Labor is supposed to represent – no longer dominated by hi-vis-wearing, unionised male workers, but a mixed group comprising hospitality, care and health workers (especially women), self-employed truck drivers, gig workers and the children of working-class migrants – do not believe Labor listens to, or understands, them. Samaras knows well that Labor, since at least the 1970s Whitlam era, has stitched support from urban professional idealists to its traditional base – and that has long created tensions – but he argues the reckoning is coming, if not at this election, then soon.

Samaras is a nuggety, super fit former assistant secretary of the Victorian ALP and director of political consultancy firm RedBridge. His parents migrated from Greece, his stepfather worked for Ford, and his mother for the Footscray markets. He has watched Labor’s drift from its heartland seats since the early 2000s, camouflaged at first by huge margins. “The flip is now occurring,” he says. “At the last federal election, Labor won seats like Higgins [in Victoria], Bennelong [in NSW], Reid [in NSW]. Putting aside Western Australia, they did really well only in highly educated electorates, and they struggled everywhere else.”

Former ALP strategist Kos Samaras says the party’s been taken over by a professional class that doesn’t understand everyday working people.

Samaras knows the outer western and northern suburbs of Melbourne intimately. On a map, they are an unbroken splash of red. He grew up in a housing commission place in the seat of Calwell, which includes battler suburbs such as Broadmeadows and Craigieburn. It’s considered a low-income and low-educated area, with a migrant population that’s changing fast – about a quarter of its population are Muslim.

In 2022, Labor’s primary vote dropped more than 9  per cent in Calwell and the Liberal candidate gained more than 7 per cent on a two-party preferred basis; that is, after preferences were distributed. In the 2019 election, when Bill Shorten was Labor leader, the primary vote declined by 4 per cent. Further south is Lalor, former prime minister Julia Gillard’s old seat, which saw a 7.5 per cent drop in primary support for Labor in 2022.

Lalor overlaps the state seat of Werribee, whose voters savaged the Victorian government in a byelection in February, stripping 16.5 per cent from its primary vote, with the humiliation of waiting days to declare the narrowest of victories. (The Liberals had a 3.65 per cent swing; the rest spread around minor parties and independents.) Then there’s Gorton, down 10 per cent in 2022. And Scullin, named after Depression-era Labor prime minister James Scullin, was down more than 14 per cent. They are all so “safe”, the ABC’s chief election analyst Antony Green rarely bothers with them.

“Labor people say, ‘Well, it all comes back to us [via preferences],’ but yeah guys, I’ve been around for a long time, something’s wrong,” says Samaras. He is “bourgeois” now, comfortable and middle class, “but for the people I care about, absolutely, I think [Labor’s] completely abandoned them”; the party has been taken over by a professional class that doesn’t socialise with everyday working people and doesn’t understand them.

He offers the example of Labor’s Medicare announcement in February that would boost incentives for doctors to bulk bill more patients. “My private muttering was, ‘All right you f---ers, why didn’t you do that two years ago? Why would you wait for our people to burn for two years?’ ”

“Political realignment” is a dry term for an earthquake under way in Australian politics, one that has been rumbling for a long time. The Australian Election Study has been surveying Australians since 1987, and is the leading source for voters’ political attitudes and behaviour over time. In 1987, 60 per cent of respondents who self-identified as “working class” cast their vote for Labor. By the last election, it had declined to 38 per cent with the Coalition up slightly at 33 per cent, the rest fleeing to independents and minor parties.

‘The Coalition have kept hold of lower incomes and tradies, suburbia, and outer seats in capital cities.’

Jim Reed, director of the Resolve Political Monitor

Dr Sarah Cameron, a political scientist at Griffith University and a chief investigator for the Election Study, says that self-identified social class is complicated, once being defined by occupation: manual workers and labourers versus professional and white-collar workers. Now, it’s more nuanced. Assets including houses and shares are more important as is, crucially, education. “The most important factor is education,” Cameron says. “Those with a university education tend to be more likely to see themselves as middle class, whereas those without a university education are more likely to see themselves as working class.”

Traditionally, it was the Liberal Party that attracted voters with degrees. In 1996, 44 per cent of those with a university degree voted for the Liberal Party, compared with 38 per cent for Labor. That steadily changed. By 2019, it was neck and neck in the Australian Election Study, at 36 per cent. At the last election, it crossed over. The Liberals were down to 24 per cent from people with degrees and Labor was at 35 per cent. The Coalition still attracts people on higher incomes, but that’s softening, too. Social democratic parties across the West see the same trend.

The federal election campaign is ongoing and polls have seen a shift to Labor, but Jim Reed, the director of the Resolve Political Monitor, which conducts opinion polls for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, says that while in March Labor had recovered from its low point in January and February, the swing back wasn’t uniform. At the 2022 election, Labor received support from 54.5 per cent of suburban voters, but by the January-March Resolve quarterly survey, Labor support had slumped to 46.5 per cent, with the Coalition on 53.5 per cent, a swing of 8.1 per cent. “Labor has won back the more highly educated and remunerated,” said Reed. “The Coalition have kept hold of lower incomes and tradies, suburbia, and outer seats in capital cities. That’s exactly the pivot we’ve seen long-term, and it is an international trend.”

These heartland seats are transforming at speed, and it’s hard for any party to keep up. Scullin centres around the City of Whittlesea, a designated Victorian growth area. Drive straight north from the oh-so-cool inner-city Fitzroy North – recently voted Melbourne’s “most liveable” suburb – and in about 25 minutes you’ll get to Thomastown, where Italian and Greek immigrants ran market gardens after World War II. Further north, it’s the rural edge of the electorate, to suburbs like Wollert, throwing up family homes as fast as they can be built. Three-quarters of the residents in Wollert have parents who were both born overseas, and recent migrants have flocked here, particularly from India. Andrew Giles, the federal MP for Scullin (but who doesn’t live there), is unlikely to be troubled on his 15.4 per cent margin, but the primary swing against him last time – of 14.2 per cent – was impossible to ignore.

New housing in Wollert, part of Melbourne’s Scullin electorate in the city’s northern suburbs; three-quarters of Wollert’s residents have both parents born overseas.Credit: Peter Tarasiuk

Aisha Khurram and her husband Khurram Javed, migrants from Pakistan and now in their early 40s, moved from Thomastown to Wollert five years ago because the houses were newer, the parks plentiful and it was close to their two children’s schools. The former dairy farms of Wollert are now home to more than 24,000 people, up from 9060 in 2016. Most people in the area have mortgages and this family’s was just under $500,000. It’s a common story; they say interest-rate rises have cost them an extra $900 a month.

“I mean, two, three … OK, fine, it is what it is. But then 12? That was a kick,” says Javed of rate hikes. He works full-time in IT and Aisha went back to work 18 months ago to help out with the mortgage rise; previously, she was caring full-time for their autistic son. She is the program co-ordinator for Hardship Help, an emergency food-relief program, where people can get grocery basics, such as cucumber, silverbeet, plums, chickpeas, lentils, milk and bread for free. The number of clients seeking emergency relief at the Whittlesea Community Connections group has grown 44 per cent in the past two years.

Newer migrants know nothing of Labor’s history or the glory days of the unions. The couple won’t make up their mind about whom to vote for until the day of the election, or perhaps the day before. Javed hasn’t forgiven the Labor state government for its world record-breaking COVID-19 lockdowns, five-kilometre travel limits and curfews – “I think we’re scarred for life,” he says – but Dutton’s comments around race haven’t impressed him, either. Perhaps he’ll look at the independents. There is little faith that whether Labor or the Coalition is returned, it will make much difference: “I don’t think so, not at all.”

Wollert sits on northern Melbourne’s rural fringe.Credit: Peter Tarasiuk

Trumpist policy disasters

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer reportedly studied Albanese’s cautious approach before the 2022 election, a policy-light platform focused on a “small target” strategy, concentrated mostly on excoriating his
unpopular opponent Scott Morrison. According to an article in Politico in March, British Labour – with close links to its Australian cousin – watched in alarm as opinion polls indicated that the government here could be booted out after a single term, something that hadn’t happened since the Depression.

Ryan Wain, executive director at the centre-left Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, told Politico that British voters felt a “pervasive sense of decline” that couldn’t be addressed with piecemeal policies. “Our message to this government would be: what’s our transformative agenda? Don’t wallow in decline, but face up to it,” he said. “Unlike in Germany and Australia, I do think Keir Starmer and Labour have recognised the need for that transformation. Certainly in recent months.”

YouGov is a respected global public-opinion company, and its director of public data, Paul Smith, says the incrementalism of Albanese’s first term was out of step with the dissatisfaction of most Australians. That dissatisfaction is mirrored across the West. “People want bigger change, and what they’re offering is a couple of slices of salami, when actually what more people want is the steak, something which is meaningful.”

YouGov’s latest in-depth polling, in which 38,629 surveys were conducted, was released in late March, and it found a shift back to Labor, which was then just ahead on a two-party preferred basis. The survey includes predictions for every seat – always a fraught exercise – and YouGov found that the biggest swings against Labor were in its safest seats. Smith says the now-abandoned Trumpist Coalition policies of forcing federal public servants to go back to the office and sacking public sector workers were disastrous for the Liberals trying to appeal to everyday workers. But if the Liberals lose, “that will not be an endorsement of politics as usual”.

If cost of living is the dominant issue, YouGov’s poll early this year about who or what was to blame for the crisis goes to the heart of it. Forty-eight per cent said it was the fault of big corporations; just 35 per cent blamed government decisions and 17 per cent said it was due to economic factors beyond their control. “The problem for Labor is that once upon a time, if you asked the question, ‘Who’s best at standing up for working people against big corporations?’ then 40 years ago you would have had more than half the respondents say Labor,” says Smith. “Now, 29 per cent say Labor, 25 per cent say the Coalition, and the majority say neither.”

Smith says that in a time of frightening and unpredictable change, people want a bigger agenda that embraces greater government protection, “not this kind of management talk about how we have done this program and that program”.

Is this what Australians really want? Labor remains fearful of Bill Shorten’s 2019 election loss to Scott Morrison. Shorten had a substantial agenda, was contemptuous of the “big end of town” and promised a “bolder, better, more equal Australia”. He proposed redistribution policies with losers as well as winners, including abolishing negative gearing, and franking-credit reform to pay for it.

As the ALP’s post-mortem of the 2019 campaign concluded, the result was counter-intuitive and devastating: “Low-income workers swung against Labor. Higher-income urban Australians concerned about climate change swung to Labor, despite the effect Labor’s tax policies on negative gearing and franking credits might have had on them.” Labor gained a swing of 1.1  per cent in inner-metropolitan seats, but had a 2  per cent swing against it in outer-metropolitan areas.

Former Victorian senator and cabinet minister Kim Carr is adamant that Labor learnt the wrong lessons from 2019. There was nothing wrong with the policies, he says; the fault was “our own incapacity to argue our case”. Carr is a socialist left warrior and a Labor member for 50 years. He has been critical of the government’s “small target” strategy and subsequent decline in its traditional base due to a relentless focus on marginal seats. The good things that Labor has done – reorienting tax cuts towards lower-income people, substantial industrial relations reforms, billions to fund more social housing and affordable rentals, a focus on renewable energy and more – have barely registered in voters’ minds.

“It’s no good running out your shopping list of things that you’ve done because even when prompted, people could not identify these achievements because there was no overarching strategy as to what the purpose of the government is,” he says. “You need to offer ambition, you need to offer hope that you do have solutions to contemporary problems, that the state is there to serve the public and that the economy should be there to serve the public. You must deal directly with this proposition that increasing numbers of people think that the economy and political system does not serve them.”

Carr stresses that he thinks the government has got the message, and he remains hopeful about the election. “Since Christmas, this government has tried to build a new argument as to why it’s in existence, and as a result, its vote is consolidating.”

Bob Carr says the choices for centre-left parties around the world are “grotesquely difficult”. Traditional party loyalty is disintegrating, global orthodoxies of free trade and a “rules-based order” have been upended, uncertainty is embedded. He is sceptical that a left-wing populist approach, a big reformist agenda, is the answer. “Economic populism – go left on economic issues – has been tried, and it hasn’t worked,” he says.

He points to the US, where Joe Biden was the most pro-worker president in decades and Trump won as an anti-establishment disrupter. Progressive US senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren advocated to “put the bankers in jail, redistribute the wealth, [provide] free university education, free health care. [Warren] couldn’t get a majority in her own state in the [2020 presidential] primary. [Sanders] was beaten by Hillary Clinton [in 2016] with more centrist politics. I just can’t see an example of it working. You lose aspirational voters, as we did in 2019.“

So what does Labor do to re-engage its heartland supporters in our outer suburbs? Bob Carr pauses for a minute. “I can’t offer great insights,” he says.
“No one’s written the textbook on this. It’s all in a state of flux.”

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