Budget 2020: Albanese takes ALP back to future

Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese after his budget reply speech in Parliament House in Canberra on Thursday night. Pciture: Getty Images

Anthony Albanese has gone back to the future in an attempt to ­rebrand Labor as a party of ­nation-building vision.

He offers the promise of a ­policy platform that will broaden Labor’s constituency built on a legacy of the past. It is an ­acknowledgment of how hopelessly ­detached Labor has become from the aspirations of middle Australia.

But summoning the Hawke/Keating era of big reform as a dais for electoral atonement has been tried before. And it has failed because it has rarely been credible.

Albanese’s pitch is it can be done again under his leadership. The Opposition Leader has signalled there is little daylight between Labor and the ­Coalition on the goal of enduring economic reform. But there is a world of ­difference between them on how to do it.

The Morrison government’s budget outlined on Tuesday a clear intention to shift the driving forces of economic recovery from the public sector to the private — businesses, the families that run them, the engine of the economy.

At the heart of Labor’s ­philosophy remains the core belief that government is and remains the solution.

“The pandemic has shown that Labor’s value of fairness, security and the power of government to change lives for the better are the right values in a crisis,” Albanese said. “They are also the right values for the recovery.”

Albanese has identified four central themes to a Labor model for recovery: cheaper energy, ­sovereign manufacturing capabilities, securing future blue-collar jobs and putting more money into the pockets of families.

He has shifted gears on climate change with a $20bn energy grid expansion — an NBN for electrons — that has adopted the government’s “technology-neutral” approach to emissions and prices.

The centrepiece of the manufacturing renewal was a sovereign train-building industry that Albanese concedes would cost more to produce but have broader economic dividends.

Albanese claimed that historically Labor had been the party of nation-building reform, citing superannuation as a model that “changes people’s lives” and was “the foundation for a new Labor doctrine.”

The “game-changing” productivity reform is a pledge to fix the byzantine childcare system, which would also address the inequities faced by working mothers.

This need is not in dispute and Albanese has rightly highlighted one of the most vexing issues for families and working women. It remains a major drag on productivity and workforce participation. Yet as an enduring legacy, a promise of universal cheap childcare, the ultimate cost has been confined to $6.2bn over the next three years. Beyond that, the baked-in structural costs to the budget are unknown.

Albanese has been forced to lean on Labor’s management of the global financial crisis to establish the economic and fiscal credentials of a future government. This is a perilous equivalence considering the disastrous stimulus schemes that came with it.

To counter the legacy cost of this, he has framed a political attack that seeks to establish a post-pandemic blame for the COVID recession that rests with the government. Yet there is no fiscal strategy for how Labor would pay down the $1 trillion debt that Labor has not disputed was needed to address the crisis.

Albanese’s first budget-in reply speech was at its core, a first attempt to start unshackling Labor from the failed policy agenda and the class war political campaign that cost it the last election.