Budget 2020: Anthony Albanese has one job: tell us how he’d govern

Anthony Albanese has only one task to achieve when he formally responds to the budget.

He must do more than simply snipe at the edges and chase headlines with political attacks on the government. The Labor leader needs to lay out the party’s blueprint for how it would govern.

Anything less will have been a mortally lost opportunity.

Most Labor MPs are convinced an election will be called within a year from now.

If this is in Albanese’s thinking, Thursday night’s speech becomes a critical moment in the reconstruction of the Australian Labor Party.

Having set the bar for the government through his rhetorical attacks on the budget failing to deliver any enduring or “game-changing” economic reforms, Albanese now must deliver one of his own.

He appears to have already laid the groundwork for this, having made mention of Paul Keating’s superannuation guarantee as a legacy reform of the kind Labor must pursue again. So Albanese’s challenge will be to set a credible policy agenda based on lasting and substantial productivity-driving reform that doesn’t involve a disastrous repeat of the high-taxing thirst of the previous Labor opposition.

Narrowcasting to interest groups on issues such as social housing isn’t it.

But having taken the government to task over the COVID debt bill, the Labor leader has put immediate constraints around his own spending. Anything Labor does now will be a mixing of the money pot with the likely repeal of at least some of the measures announced by Josh Frydenberg in Tuesday’s budget. Albanese surely can’t spend more.

There are other, even more fundamental, issues Albanese must address Even before the pandemic hit, the electoral and internal structural crisis that was identified in the party’s post-election catharsis had not been addressed.

The pandemic put them further into the never-never.

If anything, some of those schisms that existed within a deeply divided caucus over issues such as energy policy and the failure to confront the dual constituency crisis of the modern ALP, have only been magnified. Albanese cannot ignore this and hope a grand unifying economic plan will resolve it. At best, it will only delay it. He must address these significant structural tensions to prevent any visionary stamp he may seek to put on an economic and social-policy agenda being undermined by the increasingly vocal tribalism of his caucus.

If Albanese’s speech is nothing more than a political attack on the Morrison government, filled with fatuous jingles such as the “Morrison recession”, without putting in the building blocks of Labor’s path to the election, it will have been a waste of time.