Anthony Albanese made a lot of promises in his election campaign - but has he delivered?
Anthony Albanese talked a big game as Opposition Leader. So how exactly is he tracking after 18 months in the top job.
Labor made a lot of promises to the Australian public as it campaigned to win the hearts and return to power after a decade in the political wilderness.
Anthony Albanese sought to characterise his opponent as “all promise and no delivery”. But just over 18 months into the gig, how is he and Labor tracking?
NCA NewsWire undertook a deep dive into some of the election promises Labor made to see just how they’re doing.
Broken promises
Mr Albanese pledged his government would roll out 50 GP-led Urgent Care Clinics to take the pressure off hospital emergency departments.
At the time, Labor said the clinics would be existing GP and community health centres and be open at least 8am to 10pm seven days a week.
Health Minister Mark Butler vowed in April 2022 that all 50 clinics would be up in running in the next financial year.
Some $358m was allocated to the roll out over five years in the federal budget, and an additional eight clinics were added to the target.
While all 58 clinics are now open, the government missed its own self-imposed deadline and hence can be considered a broken promise.
The government says all of the UCC will be open by the end of 2023.
The Pacific Engagement Visa is another example of a missed deadline. At the election, Labor promised to establish a new visa category to allow up to 3000 Pacific Island and Timor-Leste residents to permanently migrate to Australia each year.
It was to begin in July 2023 and visa places would be allocated by a ballot or lottery process.
But the self-imposed time frame came and passed after negotiations stalled with the Senate. It ultimately passed the parliament in October, with the ballot set to commence in 2024.
Another mandate was the requirement to have a registered nurse onside 24/7 which was a key recommendation of the Aged Care Royal Commission.
Labor received some heat earlier in the year after it could not say when its self-imposed deadline of July 1 would be met.
The legislation to enforce the promise passed parliament in October 2022. A recent audit office report found the early implementation of the 24/7 RN and mandatory care minutes was “largely effective”.
As of September, 88 per cent of residential aged care homes reported a registered nurse on duty 24/7, compared with government estimates ranging from 46 per cent to 80 per cent in 2020 to 2022.
Small facilities in rural and remote areas that have struggled to find RN’s have been given exemptions.
In progress or questionable
During the election campaign, Mr Albanese and his frontbench team made a big song and dance about getting real wages moving again.
The government has already claimed a win here, as wages grew by 4 per cent in the 12 months to September, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
But the claim is slightly misleading. It fails to consider the impact of inflation, which continues to outstrip the growth in earnings hitting 5.3 per cent in September, according to seasonally adjusted figures.
It implies a real wages cut of 1.3 per cent, meaning people on average can buy less with their pay packets, despite wages growth hitting a 14-year high.
However, the government did put in a submission to the Fair Work Commission in both 2022 and 2023 backing an increase for the lowest paid workers (even though it didn’t specify a percentage).
Over two years after first promising to criminalise wage theft, the Albanese government flagged its intention to slap employers caught underpaying workers with jail time.
But the legislation is just one thread of the government’s contentious omnibus industrial relations reforms, the Closing Loopholes Bill.
Other parts of the bill include a crackdown on labour hire, introducing minimum pay and conditions for gig economy workers and an enhanced pathway to permanency for casual workers.
Failing to secure support from the Coalition means the government will have to convince the Greens and two crossbenchers to come on board to vote for the bill in the Senate.
That’s while also fighting a battle to convince business groups to support it.
So far the bill has been delayed for consideration until February 2024 when a senate committee hands back its report into the proposal.
Housing was also a key pillar of the government’s election strategy.
In Mr Albanese’s 2021 budget reply speech, he announced Labor, if elected, would establish a $10bn off budget fund to build 30,000 social and affordable homes over five years.
The bill finally passed the parliament in September after being twice held up after the Greens agreed to vote for it in favour of securing an extra $3bn for public and community housing.
The promise will be considered in progress until it meets its own benchmarks of houses built.
Mr Albanese waited to unveil his Help to Buy scheme until Labor’s official campaign launch last year.
The policy, he said, would provide help to Australians on low and middle incomes to buy houses by giving eligible applicants a commonwealth equity contribution of up to 40 per cent of the purchase price of a new home, or 30 per cent for an existing home.
It was set to cost $329m and would be introduced alongside the continuation of the first home guarantee scheme.
It wasn’t until Labor’s National Conference in August that the Prime Minister confirmed it would come into effect during 2024.
But given state and federal legislation is needed to enact the scheme and a Greens party that has vowed to use the proposal to push for more action for renters to convince, there is still work to do.
On the environment, the government succeeded in its promise to legislate Australia’s commitment to net zero emissions by 2050, as well as its 2030 goal of 43 per cent reduction.
But whether we will meet that target is up in the air.
The annual climate change statement presented in Parliament in late November suggested Australia will be on track to cut greenhouse emissions by 42 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030 – a whisker behind the official target.
Labor has long been committed to the three components of the Uluru Statement of the Heart: Voice, Treaty and Truth.
But after the failure of the Voice referendum in October the fate of its promised Makaratta Commission is uncertain.
Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney has said the government did not want to be rushed into a decision.
The government’s first budget set aside $5.8m to start setting up a commission to oversee treaty-making and truth-telling. Only $607,000 of that funding has been spent, according to officials.
Labor went to the election with a number of promises around aged care. Most broadly, it said it would “raise the standard of aged care” by mandating an average of 215 minutes of care per day, as per the royal commission.
Aged Care Minister Anika Wells signed the mandatory minimum, which must also include 44 minutes of care from a registered nurse from October 2024, into law in October.
This promise will be considered delivered should providers meet the benchmark by the 2024 deadline.
If you’ve watched question time in the past year, you will be no stranger to the Coalition’s ribbing over a promise to cut power bills by $275.
The opposition has repeatedly claimed the government has not delivered on its promise. But the pledge was made as part of Labor’s Powering Australia policy.
Labor said the plan, which was independently modelled by RepuTex, would cut power bills and reduce emissions by boosting renewable energy.
But the $275 would not come into play until 2025: “It will cut power bills for families and businesses by $275 a year for homes by 2025, compared to today.”
Another promise which will surely cause the government a headache over the next year will be to not tinker with the contentious stage three tax cuts.
The tax cuts passed parliament back in 2019 but won’t come into effect until July 1.
It gives Labor until the May budget to mull over whether it wants to make changes to the $20bn cuts.
Stage three removes the 37 per cent marginal tax rate for those earning over $120,000 and reduces the 32.5 per cent tax rate to 30 per cent for people earning between $45,000 and $200,000.
Economists say the cuts are inflationary. But electorally, it will be tricky to dump them, and the Liberals will be quick off the mark to declare it a broken promise Labor does.
A dramatic crossing of the floor by five Liberal MPs sank the Coalition government’s religious discrimination bill just months before the 2022 election.
Scott Morrison promised ahead of the 2019 election he would legislate new anti-discrimination protections for people of religious faith, including in schools and hospitals.
However, disagreements over a so-called statements of belief clause and the protection of gay students and transgender students ultimately derailed the bill at the final hurdle.
Labor promised to prevent the discrimination of people of faith but would act to protect all students and teachers, whilst maintaining the right of religious schools to “preference people of their faith in the selection of staff”.
Since coming to government, the Attorney-General, Mark Dreyfus, requested the Australian Law Reform Commission to review religious exemptions for educational institutions.
The review was due to report back in April but the deadline was extended to December 31.
Achieved
It was one of the single biggest spending measures in the campaign – a $5.4bn pledge to raise childcare subsidies to 90 per cent for low-income earners.
Despite pressure to fast-track the subsidies it came into effect on July 1 this year, as intended.
The productivity commission inquiry into the system (which was also promised) handed back its draft recommendations in November, urging the government to fund three days of childcare for all families.
Medicines were a big focus for Labor ahead of the election. It unveiled plans to “slash the cost” of the maximum Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme from $42.50 to a maximum of $30.
Labor introduced the bill in September 2022 and allocated $781m over four years to the measure in the budget. It passed the next month with the changes starting to flow through from January 1.
It also moved this year to allow Australians prescribed with certain medications to collect double the amount they can collect with each script, which Labor said could save people $180 per year.
After staring down a big fight from the Pharmacy Guild, the 60-day dispensing measure passed the parliament and came into effect on September 1.
A promise to legislate 10 days of family and domestic violence leave was achieved pretty soon after the election, passing the parliament in October 2022. It’s since been rolled out across businesses. .
It was one of Labor’s most successful campaigns in opposition: the call for a robodebt royal commission.
The income compliance program was ruled unlawful and the Commonwealth settled a class action in 2021.
Moving quickly, the Albanese government established the royal commission on August 18 2022. The final report, which included 56 recommendations and one closing statement, was handed back on July 7, 2023.
Labor agreed to all of the recommendations in principle.
A key pillar of Mr Albanese’s election campaign was to hold a referendum on the Voice to Parliament. He promised, if elected, Labor would “move quickly” on a vote and recommitted to it in his victory speech.
Draft wording was released at Garma in July 2022 but the referendum was not called until October 14.
Despite the Australian people voting against the Voice, the promise is considered fulfilled. The other components, such as truth and treaty, are less set in stone (and discussed below).
Mr Albanese spoke a lot from opposition about restoring Australia’s relationship with our Pacific neighbours and China.
His globetrotting might have drawn the ire of those at home but it has worked. A visit to China in November marked the thawing of relations with Beijing.
On gender equality, the government has delivered on making pay equity an objective of the Fair Work Act and legislate so large companies will have to report on their pay gap publicly.
It was an unfulfilled promise that frustrated many within the parliament in the lead up to the 2022 election. The Coalition had said they would deliver an anti-corruption commission but never did.
Labor vowed to legislate its version, the National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) by the end of 2022.
It got close to not meeting its own deadline but ultimately the bill passed in late November 2022.
Paul Brereton, a former NSW Court of Appeal judge who led the inquiry into allegations of war crimes by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan, was appointed to lead the commission, which opened its doors on July 1 2023.
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