Albanese will need to put cost of living at the centre of ALP national conference

Anthony Albanese, Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles and the Minister for Foreign Affairs Penny Wong may have done enough to fend off dissent at this week’s ALP conference in Brisbane. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Success for Anthony Albanese at Labor’s national conference this week will be a maintenance of the status quo. Boring is good but maybe not good enough.

The Prime Minister needs to re-enforce his position as leader of a government that is responsible and fully focused on cost-of-living pressures.

There are two audiences at ALP conferences. The party faithful, who need to be respected, and the electorate, which can’t be ignored.

The conference is unavoidable. The risk is the optics of a government talking about itself on fringe issues.

Fears of a left-wing breakout at the first in-person conference since 2019 may be overstated. While the Left faction may have numerical dominance over the conference floor for the first time, it is marginal and will be managed, as it has been for years, by a pragmatic centrist group charged with protecting the government and the party from itself. This includes Victorian Right-aligned Richard Marles, South Australian senator and SDA whisperer Don Farrell, elements of the mainstream Left aligned to Albanese – the AMWU and the UWU among them – and the NSW Right.

The other balancing force against the Left having supremacy is the fact that the two most senior members of the government are of the Left – Albanese and Penny Wong.

The Left is captive to the reality that there will be an overriding reluctance to not embarrass its own.

But when you get 402 Labor members in a room together, anything can happen. As one Labor official put it: “The thing you worry about are the unknown unknowns”.

The worst outcome for Albanese would be a perception of the tail wagging the dog on any issue that would deviate the government from currently held centrist positions on internally contested policies

To ensure stability, Albanese has already elected appeasement over prime ministerial decree.

Desperate to avoid a threatened condemnation of AUKUS, or a fundamental change to the party platform over its position on Israel – which Albanese had pledged to maintain – cynical deals appear to have been done, delivering ill-advised policy decisions over the past week to appease sectional interests.

Adopting a position on West Bank Israeli settlements may have been enough of a trade-off to ensure peace on AUKUS, but it has come at a longer term cost to the national interest.

A union-driven inquiry into trade deals also sends a concerning message to trading partners, with the potential for sovereign risk.

Albanese has traded bipartisan government policy for conference stability in the belief that few will notice or care. At this stage of the cycle, with Labor in power for more than a year, there will be an undercurrent of pressure that questions whether Albanese is doing enough on Labor’s broader reform agenda.

There will be calls for more ambitious tax reform and the perennial battle between Labor’s green wing and the forestry unions and the AWU will no doubt feature.

Yet while the potential for flashpoints remains, Albanese, Wong and Marles appear to have done enough to ensure these are avoided.

If nothing happens, it will be a win for Albanese, but another week will have gone by when the government isn’t talking about the issue that matters most to most people.