Labor must find policy substance to win voters

Next week’s interest rate decision, to be announced on Melbourne Cup Day, could represent the informal beginning of a more significant race: the next election campaign.

The Labor government is drifting. It is becoming increasingly hard to know what the point of it is beyond removing the Morrison government. A KPI achieved the moment the last election was won.

But that purpose has come and gone, so what remains?

Unless Anthony Albanese and his team can find something tangible they want to achieve while in power, they risk the wrath of voters within the next year and a half when a return to the polls is due.

The voice was important, sure – just not to most voters, as it turned out, and it failed. The campaign to achieve it was maladministered, potentially raising voter concerns about the competence of the government. Next week’s interest rate decision, to be announced on Melbourne Cup Day, could represent the informal beginning of a more significant race: the next election campaign, due within 18 months. Labor needs to give voters good reason to re-elect it.

Another rate rise will hurt Australian families already struggling with cost-of-living pressures, stoking fears within the community that further rate rises might follow. That would be part of the Reserve Bank’s thinking if rates do go up.

Recent retail spending figures suggest too many Australians aren’t taking the hint that their spending patterns need to change. A further rate hike, and the threat of more to come, may change that.

Such reasoning is sound economic thinking but potentially disastrous politics for the government. It doesn’t matter that monetary decisions are the purview of the RBA; politicians wear the blame.

Unless the Albanese government develops a compelling economic plan, Australians just may do something they haven’t done since 1931 and remove a one-term government.

To be sure, this certainly isn’t a prediction the first-term Labor government will lose the next federal election. As I’ve written in this column previously, that’s unlikely for a variety of reasons. History is on its side and the opposition still has plenty of problems.

But a Pyrrhic victory for Labor next time, as the lesser of two evils, can’t be the goal of a parliamentary team bursting with personnel who felt their ambitions were cut short when the Rudd and Gillard governments were toppled after just six years in power back in 2013. Unless winning is all that matters, of course.

What would that say about the state of politics in this country?

MPs and senators from that time, including the current Prime Minister, hung around in the hope of another chance at good government. No fewer than 14 members of the cabinet served as ministers in the Rudd and Gillard governments of a decade ago.

The drift we are witnessing now surely can’t fill them with pride.

Somewhat unusually, in opposition Albanese modelled himself on John Howard, using interviews to declare an intention to govern as a policy incrementalist, a traditionally conservative approach. While he preferred to parallel such intentions with Bob Hawke, Labor’s longest-serving prime minister, the Howard comparison served a political purpose: to defuse concerns Albanese was a left-wing radical.

The ghosts of 2019 were circling Labor in the lead-up to the election last year. Albanese slowly and surely ruled out pretty much every policy Bill Shorten took to the unlosable 2019 election he lost, replacing that ill-fated big-target agenda with a microscopically small one voters were comfortable to turn to. It worked.

But now it’s time for Labor to try something new. Again, Howard offers a blueprint. His newly elected 1996 government quickly lost its way, to the point where the unthinkable was on the cards: a history-making one-term government. Decimated in defeat, Labor led in the polls and the Coalition appeared directionless. The then Coalition government had done a few things here and there – think gun and waterfront reforms – but it lacked a second-term agenda to justify re-election.

To help find a purpose Howard announced plans to implement wide-ranging tax reform if re-elected, including the long overdue introduction of a GST. Tidying up the tax system was one of the last reforming pieces in the economic puzzle left unfinished during the Hawke and Keating years.

It gave the Coalition the purpose it needed to argue for re-election. It won the 1998 election plus two more elections. Howard became Australia’s second-longest-serving prime minister.

This isn’t a siren call for Albanese to necessarily be as bold as Howard was back then. There are differences between their situations. Howard’s Coalition had a huge majority, which helped it argue for tough reforms and win at the 1998 poll. Albanese’s majority is much smaller.

It is the singular focus the Coalition had in the lead-up to the 1998 election that needs to be matched by Labor now. It can’t keep being distracted by all manner of ideas mainstream voters aren’t interested in and know won’t help them through these tough economic times: playing footsies with Qantas, picking industrial fights with farmers and miners, countenancing graphic warning labels on alcoholic beverages, continuing to partake in culture wars in the aftermath of the defeat of the voice. Voters don’t care about these things.

They are all distractions that need to be set aside in the name of a well-defined agenda to manage Australia through the economic turmoil of the present. Labor doesn’t need to emulate the boldness of Howard’s GST but it must come up with something less vacuous than what its marketing team probably is working on.

For too long now the tail has wagged the dog in the Australian body politic. Policy thinkers need to guide Labor to the sort of success at the next election that will set it up as a long-term administration. Success built on substance. Doing so also would fulfil the nation’s needs.

If Labor can’t define itself on substance, it doesn’t deserve re-election. Having fulfilled the purpose of replacing the Morrison government, is preventing a Dutton government enough to win again? Perhaps. The polls suggest so. But polling is fickle and by the time of the next election Australians will want a more substantive reason to re-elect the government.

Winning with less would be the most Pyrrhic of victories.

Peter van Onselen is a professor of politics and public policy at the University of Western Australia and Griffith University.