ALP can’t be positive about these negatives

Anthony Albanese on Thursday. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Anthony Albanese heads into the Christmas break faced with a political repair job that has eluded most other recent prime ministers.

This is now a pivotal moment in the life of the Prime Minister’s leadership and the prospects of renewal for a first-term Labor government.

No other prime minister in the past two decades – outside the pandemic – has been able to resurrect themselves from negative territory once they’ve landed there.

That’s largely because they were knifed by their colleagues before they had a chance to try.

Not that this is the fate awaiting Albanese in the near term but the reality he now has to deal with, and his colleagues will doubtless begin to consider, is that once a government and its leader get into the sort of funk that he finds himself in, history shows it’s very hard to recover without some significant external event to assist them.

The core issues are competence and political management.

For Albanese, there is no doubt the end of the parliamentary year couldn’t come soon enough.

While the post-referendum political environment deteriorated dramatically for the government, perhaps unsurprisingly, by any measure, the past fortnight has been calamitous.

This is new territory for Labor. Having believed it was unassailable at the start of the year, it now finds itself failing under pressure on traditional political issues, having already failed to deliver on a key progressive commitment.

The Prime Minister will claim to have secured significant wins in the final hours of parliament, with a new funding deal between the states and territories and passage of the more contentious elements of its industrial relations reform agenda.

But these are pyrrhic victories at best.

While important, they are at the periphery of the electorate’s imagination.

The devil is in the details on both and the consequences are also now credibly contestable.

Neither may deliver the positive fiscal or political dividend Albanese was seeking.

More importantly, neither will be sufficient to wipe away the stain of the mismanagement of the immigration detention fiasco over the past month.

This will be the enduring political disaster that will now extend into a long, hot summer for Labor as the opposition continues to try to portray a government distracted from the economic imperative because of its mismanagement of other issues.

The most recent Newspoll has Albanese’s personal approval ratings well into negative territory at minus 13 before this. It wasn’t catastrophic but the trend is against him.

With the exception of the personal recovery that the pandemic afforded Scott Morrison after his approval levels fell to negative 22 following the summer bushfires, no prime minister other than John Howard has been able to turn around significant net negative levels of discontentment.

Again, Howard was the beneficiary of external events, events that suited a conservative leader, and ones upon which he was politically adept at capitalising.

Kevin Rudd went from minus 12 to minus 45 in the space of six months, having never recovered.

Julia Gillard went exactly the same way. Once she had plunged into negative territory, that was it.

Tony Abbott began his prime ministership in the positive, quickly went negative and similarly never recovered.

Likewise, Malcolm Turnbull. Once voters turned off, they never turned back on.

In Albanese’s favour, however, is that Turnbull at least won the next election with a personal satisfaction deficit.

Although he did lose 14 seats in the process.

Morrison is both the contradiction and proof.

He went from minus 22 to plus 41 in the space of two months but this was only because of the pandemic.

His fate otherwise surely would have seen him replaced.

When his numbers turned negative again by the end of 2021, they simply didn’t recover.

Howard stands out as the only leader to have regularly pulled himself out of the clutches of electoral despair.

But they were different times back then.

In 1998, Howard went from minus 30 to almost neutral in the space of five months before narrowly winning the election – by seat count rather than popular vote.

And again, he benefited from external events by making the most of them politically.

In 2001, he went from minus 30 in May to plus 31 following the September 11 attacks in the US, and subsequently going on to win that election.

He remained in positive territory for another four years.

It’s fair to say that the new normal that applies to Albanese is that ordinarily when a prime minister goes into negative territory, they don’t recover unless there is a significant external change.

Albanese could well now be a leader in need of a major disrupter.