Insights into Albanese’s diverse networks of power

In preparing our new series on Anthony Albanese’s power network, The Australian received some good advice from one of the Prime Minister’s close friends and former colleagues. “You don’t get to be prime minister as leader of the Labor Left unless you can do something remarkable and bring people with you,” we were told. “I’d say he’s an overnight success 40 years in the making.” The people Mr Albanese has brought into his circle are a trusted, diverse group of advisers, bureaucrats, business leaders and lobbyists. He and his government also have the ear of trade unions, and they have his. On Friday, the series begins by focusing on what has emerged as a hallmark of the Prime Minister’s leadership in its early months – his effective relationships with what less effective Labor politicians, such as former leader Bill Shorten, used to deride as “the big end of town”. Mr Albanese saw the folly of class warfare, for his party and the economy.

Earlier, he absorbed the lessons of the Rudd-Gillard era when the acrimonious relationship between the government, especially treasurer Wayne Swan, and the mining industry over the proposed mining super-profits tax was highly damaging. Many of Mr Albanese’s longstanding relationships across Australia’s corporate circles date from the Rudd-Gillard years. They were forged when he was transport and infrastructure minister. He appointed Sir Rod Eddington, chairman of beverages giant Lion, a former British Airways chief executive and a former News Corp board member, to head statutory authority Infrastructure Australia.

By 2018, Mr Albanese was a senior opposition member and his pragmatic outlook was clear. He used his Whitlam Oration that year to propose an alternative to Mr Shorten’s anti-big-business approach. “Labor doesn’t have to agree with business on issues such as company tax rates but we do have to engage constructively with business large and small,” he said at the time. “We respect and celebrate the importance of individual enterprise and the efforts and importance of the business community.” It was clear then that his longstanding membership of the Left, in contrast to Mr Shorten’s membership of the party’s Right, was largely irrelevant to their outlooks on policy and governing.

Mr Albanese’s approach in office has been evident before, during and after Labor’s Jobs and Skills Summit at the start of this month. He actively has enlisted business to help deliver his economic and social agenda to lift wages and productivity and close the gender gap in earnings. He is doing so, in part, by modernising his party’s relationship with the private sector. This will be good for Labor and good for his government. It also should be good for the nation, although business needs to ensure it is not swept along in proposed changes that could be damaging to its interests and to the economy. Changes to the multi-employer bargaining regime that could open the way for a return to pattern-style bargaining is an example. That has long been supported by the ACTU and the ALP. Hard-headed employers and business groups fear it will encourage widespread strikes and wage breakouts, and disadvantage small business.

The power series continues on Saturday in Inquirer. It will explore Mr Albanese’s relationships with controversial business leaders such as Qantas chief Alan Joyce and iron ore magnate Andrew Forrest, and with former university vice-chancellor Glyn Davis, who heads the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, and West Australian Governor Kim Beazley. It also will report on why Mr Albanese left untouched the national security architecture he inherited from the Coalition. Understanding Mr Albanese’s networks, the people who are his confidants inside and outside government and his praetorian guard in the ALP, provides insights into how he and his team are likely to tackle the challenges facing the nation.