Dunkley by-election a time to reflect on political leadership

Whatever the result of the Dunkley by-election on Saturday, the opportunity to reflect on the current state of political leadership that favours popular shortcuts over the hard yards of considered policy and reform must not be overlooked. Anthony Albanese has followed his small-target 2022 federal election strategy with policies designed to play to the mob and meander with minimal effort along the path of least resistance. This is true of the voice to parliament referendum, where the Prime Minister was willing to “give it a crack” but not crack the whip to secure a winnable position for the referendum vote.

There is a similar timidity in the government’s approach to bringing unsustainable spending on the National Disability Insurance Scheme under control, an issue that, left unchecked, will certainly lead to bad decisions in other areas to compensate. Scrapping the stage three tax cuts was a crude appeal to the masses at the expense of structural reform. It no doubt was calculated that voters would overlook another broken political promise in exchange for a personal financial gain. Voters in Dunkley, where cost of living has been the hot-button issue in the campaign, will be a litmus test on whether this is true.

Regardless of the outcome, populist policy must always be seen for what it is: political weakness. This is the story across a broad front of industry policy where the federal government increasingly is turning to its protectionist instincts and subsidies to sandbag a desire to pick future economic winners. Higher energy prices have not dissuaded a promise of more government support for new renewable energy projects and to ignore other options. Steel producers are being given millions of dollars in subsidy payments to continue operating while being hit with higher green imposts. The subsidy train soon may be extended to nickel and lithium because the Albanese government’s vision of a manufacturing future is rooted in commodities and products in which we are no longer competitive in the global market against countries with lower wages and less environmental protections such as China and Indonesia.

Changes to industrial relations laws that promote work from home while forbidding bosses to contact employees out of business hours is the antithesis of the productivity-boosting changes needed for a prosperous nation. As public sector unions vote themselves new legal rights to change their work arrangements, private sector employers are warning of a shift to offshoring jobs to countries where labour is cheaper and regulations less onerous. The government’s anti-productivity actions are compounded by the removal of individual workplace agreements in favour of industry-wide collective bargaining and trade union oversight.

A lack of leadership is there as well in the disastrous handling of the release of 149 foreign detainees in the wake of last year’s NZYQ High Court ruling. The shock to public confidence over the release of rapists and violent criminals, some of whom have been rearrested for new crimes, compounds existing community concerns about a breakdown in law and order. Crime is a hot-button issue for voters in Dunkley as it is for voters across Queensland and in Alice Springs, both places where juvenile crime is running unchecked. Combined, it presents a worrying outlook for a nation that has prospered on the back of industries such as mining for coal and gas, industries that are being rejected by the fashionable elites. Proposed reforms to higher education risk repeating the mistake of forcing ill-suited students to take up expensive university studies while ignoring the trend to industry-specific training. Public institutions, meanwhile, will be regulated by an increasingly bloated bureaucracy.

It is, as editor-at-large Paul Kelly writes in Inquirer on Saturday, all happening in a period in which debate about the big issues, the origins of our cultural, democratic and policy malaise, are too big to handle. Instead, there is a fractured society and a “doomed demand for leaders to show moral values amid a society that cannot agree on what constitutes virtue”. This extends to the handling of our response to the October 7 terrorist attacks in Israel where there has been a lack of leadership by both politicians and law enforcement to a worrying rise in anti-Semitism. It all fits with Kelly’s analysis that the progressive manifesto is that Western liberalism is immoral, with its tolerance of white supremacy, colonisation and invasion, racism, sexism and patriarchy, climate action cowardice, tolerance of inequality and acquiescence before a capitalism too exploitative of workers and too greedy for owners. Kelly says people can agree or disagree with former prime minister Paul Keating’s policy vision. But few can dispute his lament that Australia has lost its way on numerous fronts – economic growth is weak, per capita incomes languish yet economic reform is barely registered, social progressivism is an article of faith, the culture war is entrenched, Indigenous reconciliation is marooned and governments are strong on short-term politics yet weak on deliverable vision. There are many reasons, but a fractured society is top of the list. What is missing is policy courage and true political leadership.