As Labor hopes dwindle, the party lacks the courage to change

Labor leader Anthony Albanese. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Flavio Brancaleone

It shouldn’t be all doom and gloom in opposition these days.

There are opportunities for an opposition based on the wholly credible notion that we can never go back to a pre-pandemic normal. Most people understand that when COVID-19 spread out of China and across the globe, shutting entire countries down and putting global economic output back twenty years, things can never be quite the same. Therein lies a twinkle in the eye of any reformist.

Perhaps not the Great Reset, a post-pandemic utopia imagined by the sorts of obscenely wealthy folk who speak earnestly at Davos fora of a post-Capitalist future where larger piles are shifted over to smaller ones, as long as no one touches there’s.

Anyone who was looking for policy detail in any Opposition leader’s Budget-in-Reply is at best a supreme optimist. It never happens. Rather, Budgets-in-Reply are more often rah-rahs to the base, flag waving exercises full of trenchant criticism of the government and the chance to land a few zingers along the way.

And so it was with Anthony Albanese on Thursday night. The redoubtable Albo switched seamlessly from hand on heart progressive solidarity to stand up comedy.

N.B.: The line of “smirk and mirror” directed at the Prime Minister was possibly funny once but on the fifth telling becomes a solid self-inflicted blow to the gut.

Albo really needs to get some new material. I would have said we have a Prime Minister who says there are up to three Hong Kongs and God knows how many Taiwans out there after Scott Morrison babbled in an interview last week, basically enunciating PRC policy in the China Sea as if it were our own.

Critics say Scott Morrison cannot admit when he is wrong. Picture: Sam Mooy/Getty Images

On Thursday, when asked if he misspoke on SBS, Morrison stoically declined to do so and got angry at the impertinence of the question.

It was further evidence that Morrison is precisely what the critics say about him. Unable to admit error even though it’s right there for all to see on the tape.

But back to Albo’s speech. There was detail of a kind there. A $10 billion investment in public housing. Far be it for me to sniff at a proposed $10 billion investment but it’s hard to get excited about something that sits a) firmly in the esoteric and, b) is a drop in the ocean where money will almost be certainly wasted and standards of construction a bit on the hit and miss side.

Where to after losing unlosable election?

The thing is, once you go to the people, with a high taxing, big spending agenda as Labor did under Bill Shorten less than three years ago and manage to lose the unlosable election, where do you go from there?

The answer appears to be a reversion to the small target, policy light, reform absent crack at government in the hope the mob in power somehow falls over at some point between now and the next election.

If we can call it a strategy, it is not much of one. We could call it the Stephen Bradbury approach to winning but that’s tough on Bradbury who I’m sure set out to salute at the icy leger but not necessarily as the last man standing.

The “good bloke but …” leadership credentials have also been tried and found wanting. The affable Kim Beazley led the party to a couple of defeats in 1998 and 2001 and was well on his way to a third drubbing when the party sifted through the dismal offerings in the pantry and decided instead to go with a bloke who managed to find the business of shaking hands beyond him. Ironically, Big Kim, a large humanoid, played the small target strategy to a tiny ‘t’, and it got the party nowhere.

Principle should count for something

If you’re going to hit the canvas you may as well go down swinging. Principle should count for something in politics. Labor’s woes stem from the fact that it has mistaken narrow opportunism for principle.

Labor is nowhere on refugee policy, hiding up the back in the hope no one mentions it. When government refugee policy boasts locking up three-year-old children indefinitely, spending millions to keep them incarcerated at Christmas Island and with only their siblings and parents for company, it should not be a difficult moral argument to prosecute.

If Labor can’t win that argument, I’d suggest Old Chif’s Light on the Hill has been replaced by an insect zapper in a pizza shop in Sydney’s inner west with an especially nasty Bogong moth infestation.

Climate policy is a ‘we’ll-get-around-to-it in the fullness of time’ mess. Tax policy is the same as theirs only somehow different.

It’s not just Albo. It’s the entire party. The things they said they believed in immutably less than three years ago are now a deep source of embarrassment. It’s hard to take them seriously.

Confusion reigns

Where is the moral courage? It’s bound to be there somewhere sitting under inches of dust, some really big spiders and a Manila folder marked ‘Dividend imputation/Franking credits’ policy.

Labor’s problems go beyond the black letter of policy. Utter confusion reigns within the party that, while there is a fresh new constituency to appeal to in the form of urban graduates, environmentalists, LBGTQI folk, progressive advocates et cetera, there remains its traditional supporters who like and need economic growth, driving cars, and who may or may not work in the mining industry.

We all know the hard electoral facts. Labor has been in power for precisely six years of the last 25. And if it gets walloped again either later this year or early next, that dismal figure is reaching for three decades as the common denominator.

The answer is not whether it’s Albo or some other as yet unanointed leader still to emerge. The party’s very survival as a force in federal politics is up for grabs. Tough times require courage.