With Coalition comeback stalled, the government’s become its own opposition

On Wednesdays, we wear pink. As the Liberal Party’s first female leader Sussan Ley strode the corridors of Parliament House this week, dressed in a pink pantsuit and accompanied by women from her party, the intended girl power optics were clear.

But optics only serve to highlight reality when the latter falls short. The Labor optics of dynamism and the Coalition optics of renewal only emphasise the ways in which both parties are falling short.

Ley’s phalanx of femininity can’t mask the fact that she’s not just in a political minority in this parliament, but in a gender minority within her own political party. And that the gender skew has policy consequences.

Anthony Albanese and Sussan Ley in question time this week.

The most obvious one this week was the failure to seize on the emotive issue of the day to align the Coalition with the everyday concerns of a large portion of the electorate. On the “female” – I say family – issue of childcare, the Coalition is meekly going along with Labor’s “more regulation will solve everything” approach to answering the abuse scandal. Senator Maria Kovacic mentioned in the Senate that parents might like alternatives, and Ley said some sad words about the awful situation. But the distinct impression remained that there are just not enough Liberal ladies to effectively prosecute the party room case for a different approach in this area.

Instead, the policy rumblings on Ley’s side of politics are coming from the bulls in the Coalition’s traditional climate pastures – down where Barnaby Joyce and Michael McCormack have teamed up on a private members’ bill to repeal the 2050 net zero emissions target, “an ideology that is not going to sustain an energy grid”.

Liberal MP Dan Tehan waved the proverbial red rag when he dismissed them as steers fighting in the neighbour’s paddock. Joyce charged, delivering the first great political meme of 2025 with an impromptu live-TV dramatisation of the difference between steers (emasculated for fattening) and virile bulls like him (who gallop about the paddock, with their climate policies waggling).

Barnaby Joyce plans to move a private member’s bill to repeal the net zero target.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

And there’s your core conflict between the yin and yang of Coalition politics – the pantsuits hesitate on a policy that would be a popular first step in an arduous comeback, while the Akubras rampage out of the gates with old preoccupations – still up for the fight, if not fresh in their thinking. The masculine energy in the Coalition this week was triumphant.

But the Coalition isn’t alone in struggling to live up to the moment. As chatter around the coming productivity roundtable mounts in Canberra, the government will find itself in conflict with its own agenda.

The fact is, Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ much-touted productivity push has always been on an inevitable collision course with the Albanese government’s first-term industrial relations agenda. It was just a matter of time – as it turned out, mere days – until the optics of a dynamic and growth-focused Labor Party clashed with the reality that almost every productivity measure has been or will be thwarted by its first-term priorities.

So while Canberra was abuzz with productivity chatter, the Labor government was busy introducing legislation to the House this week to quash it. The bill would prevent the Fair Work umpire from allowing retail managers to offer workers a 35 per cent pay rise, forgoing penalty rates in favour of a regular wage at a higher rate than they’re currently paid.

Labor wants to pre-emptively block one way in which businesses can negotiate with workers to smooth the work and pay equation on both sides. The arguments in favour of this type of arrangement are that a predictable wage can be more useful to an employee than a lumpy pay packet. Meanwhile, businesses benefit from a reduced administrative burden when they don’t have to navigate hour-by-hour rates within a complex award system.

Streamlining administration is one of the possible productivity measures which will be discussed at the productivity roundtable. It works by ironing out systemic kinks and doesn’t involve anyone working harder. And there’s real potential in this area. Our system is, after all, so complex that even the government department which oversees federal workplace and employment conditions got caught inadvertently underpaying staff. Not to mention the ABC, which ran hard on scandalous underpayments, until it got caught with its own casual staff entitlements uncovered.

Casuals, too, have been a target of the government, though many businesses rely on them when they’re in a phase of growth or during a seasonal surge in business. Amusingly, the “Closing Loopholes” legislation was designed to do the exact opposite of this week’s bill. While the new bill seeks to block the exchange of higher hourly rates for a regular salary, last year’s law sought to make workers on higher hourly rates into salaried employees.

Limiting flexibility between workers and businesses reduces opportunities to create productivity, and the rest are busily being ruled out. Albanese shot down any increase to the GST.

Artificial intelligence has been bandied about as the great hope for Australia, but former trade unionist and now Industry Minister Tim Ayres has foreshadowed a stronger “worker voice and agency as technology is diffused into every workplace in the Australian economy”. Which translates, of course, to curbs on the way it can be used to make work more efficient and inefficient workers less necessary.

One by one, potential productivity measures are being ruled out – not by the media, who Jim Chalmers feared would play the “rule in, rule out game”, but by the party itself. With so much off the table, it now looks like there will be precious little actual productivity left to put on the productivity roundtable next month.

The Labor Party may have gender balance, but is becoming its own opposition as it tries to balance growth and the unions. The optics of the coming talkfest will only serve to highlight the failure if a half-gelded government can’t compromise with itself.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens.

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