Anthony Albanese’s emergency recall of all Labor MPs to Canberra for snap caucus meeting to discuss relief measures for middle Australia from the ongoing inflationary impact on cost-of-living is a huge risk.
It is also a measure of how seriously the Prime Minister takes the poor political standing of his government and ebbing public support.
The real danger is that the outcome of the meeting will have to be an unqualified new direction for Labor policy and politics or it will seen as a panic move which only makes things worse.
Albanese’s meeting of all Labor MPs and Senators three weeks before Parliament resumes is designed to crown his own month-long midterm election-style campaign to convince middle Australia he has recovered from the Indigenous voice to Parliament referendum failure and is concentrating on the thing that matters most: cost-of-living.
He needs this to work and for concrete, affordable proposals to take pressure off middle-Australian families, not just those on welfare, to be decided and implemented.
If there is no real relief the costly excursion to Canberra will be seen as yet another empty “summit”.
Despite his New Year vague promises to address more cost-of-living relief in the May Budget and not to have changed his “position” on Stage Three tax cuts Albanese is now saying he wants to hear from Treasury and Finance now and listen to what his colleagues are saying.
If there are solid results Albanese will be able to point to a new direction and justify the cost to taxpayers of easily half a million dollars for the summit.
But, there are enormous risks in the questions it raises about his leadership, political judgment and Labor itself.
For a start: inflation has been a problem for more than a year, Jim Chalmers as Treasurer has been working on it for longer than that and Labor MPs were concerned about the cost-of-living impact on their electorates last year. Yet an emergency meeting is being held now to allow them to talk to each other.
Who hasn’t been talking for the last year and what has the Treasurer being doing?
The snap caucus meeting – which smacks of a “jobs summit” – also raises great expectations that middle Australian families will be given real relief including on the hot kitchen table topics of grocery bills, power costs, housing and petrol prices.
More of the same for welfare recipients – justified as it is – will not satisfy the growing legion of disaffected working families.
What’s more the meeting will provide a platform for those Labor MPs who want to dump or change the legislated Stage Three tax cuts which Albanese has defended with weasel words.
And, surely there are those who will want to speak out about the crushing central pressure of energy costs. Will MPs concerned about job losses want to raise the contentious, remaining industrial relations changes?
Either way there is huge potential for division and dissatisfaction only days before Parliament resumes.
Finally, unless this meeting is better planned, organised and unified than so many other of Labor’s plans and proposals of the last year it will be seen as empty, costly, divisive and ultimately damaging issue just as the priority referendum turned out.
Albanese may be aware of the fatal mistakes his predecessors Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott made at this time of the election cycle and parliamentary schedule but he has to be careful that in trying to avoid a mistake he hasn’t made one.
Of course, if all he was after as an Australia Day distraction he could just announce that he was appointing Linda Burney, his Minister for Indigenous Australians, as the next Governor-General.
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