Labor fixated on rear view instead of the road ahead

Big ideas: former prime minister Bob Hawke and then ACTU secretary Bill Kelty.

The huffing and puffing over Scott Morrison’s multiple ministries during the worst pandemic in a century would be sublime comedy if the actors weren’t all taking themselves so seriously.

Breathless column inches, including in this newspaper, have been spent eviscerating the former prime minister and his dire “attack on the fabric of responsible government”, as if this doesn’t occur daily in Canberra.

Nothing illegal has occurred, that’s the advice of Australia’s Solicitor-General. The Governor-General has not acted unconstitutionally. Sure, multiple ministries are uncommon when you have so many mouths to feed, but it occurred as recently as the first fortnight of the new Albanese government.

So this is none other than political pointscoring. It’s trying to re-run the last election campaign rather than running a government that faces some of the most complex economic challenges in a half-century.

Kevin Rudd and Cate Blanchett get creative at the 2020 summit in April 2008. Picture: AAP

The high crime Morrison is charged with is he didn’t tell the press, his party or the opposition. Well, shock horror, Victorians are still waiting for the health advice that curtailed their civil liberties in the most savage ways when they were locked in their homes, many unable to work, no visits to loved ones, and don’t even think of being able to attend a funeral.

There’s no appetite for any of this to be investigated and reviewed, but millions will be spent on an inquiry into Morrison. Rather, we have premiers all channelling Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s “Don’t you worry about that”, as if that’s all we as citizens are worthy of receiving.

This week Anthony Albanese spoke for longer and in more detail about an inquiry into Morrison than his much-hyped and Rudd-style talkfest jobs summit, inflation, Chinese incursion in our region, our energy crisis or the need for a massive increase in immigration. Cost of living is just so passe, airbrushed from government media speaking notes.

The more than 4000-word, 30-minute press conference was reminiscent of the worst style of student politics, campus-level McCarthyism. It was actually unbecoming of an Australian prime minister.

Labor looks to be distracted by the minutiae of politics as it is confronted with the stark realities of being responsible for governing. Sure the Morrison inquiry will fill column inches. It will invoke the necessary moral outrage. But we know how this ends. We’ve seen incoming governments convinced that prosecuting their predecessors makes good politics.

Tony Abbott won a landslide victory in 2013. He proceeded to call two royal commissions, no less: one into the failed home insulation scheme, the other into trade unions. One saw former prime minister Kevin Rudd called to the stand. Unedifying as the experience no doubt was, it didn’t shift the dial or have a bearing on the next election.

The second was the much-hyped trade union royal commission, or TURC as it became known. Squarely designed as red meat for the HR Nicholls Society’s crusty donors to the Liberal Party, it also was designed to damage Labor’s opposition leader, Bill Shorten, a former Victorian and national secretary of the Australian Workers Union.

Abbott strutted around thinking this was genius political strategy. It wasn’t. He didn’t last the term as prime minister. He did so badly that Malcolm Turnbull could beat him.

At the 2016 election neither TURC nor home insulation rated as issues. TURC, to be fair though, was damaged further through an act of self-harm as then commissioner Dyson Heydon thought it OK to be a key speaker at a Liberal Party fundraiser.

The lesson for Labor here is the rear-vision mirror distracts from having your eyes firmly on the road ahead.

At play will be the Queensland influence on the Small Target 2.0 strategy for government. Labor in Queensland has used the experience of Campbell Newman to prosecute a negative campaign against subsequent LNP leaders. The small targeters are no doubt (as always, outstaying their welcome) offering a plan that says “Peter Dutton was a Morrison minister, Morrison bad, Dutton bad”.

But this narrative fails to heed the lesson that Labor in Queensland also campaigned on its achievements and its plans for the future. I know because I’ve sat in the room with those who wanted to rail against the one-percenters, to prosecute class warfare, to prosecute the politics of envy. I and others successfully argued for jobs, health and education and promoting the leadership of Annastacia Palaszczuk.

It’s also not a formula for government in economically challenging times. Next month’s jobs summit is already being talked down, expectations management small-target style.

That’s regrettable. Where are the Bob Hawkes, Paul Keatings and Bill Keltys locking in the big ideas that will set Australia up for another quarter century of back-to-back years of economic growth? Australia needs bold thinking. Big plans for tackling complex challenges. The indelible image from Rudd’s version of this was him sitting on the floor with Cate Blanchett with coloured pens and butcher paper. He didn’t make it to the next election either.

Labor needs to roll up its sleeves and tackle the real challenges of cost of living and our position in the global community. It’s not time to get distracted by the cheap politics of inquiries and talkfests. We know how that playbook ends for first-term leaders in first-term governments.