The strange events at Parliament House in Canberra this week point to a larger problem

By the end of the sitting day on Thursday, it was all smiles for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. For the modest sum of $500 million towards social housing, he had corralled the Greens into voting with the federal government on a long list of legislation, from an overhaul of the running of the Reserve Bank to the Future Made in Australia program and changes to superannuation.

The prime minister already knew that for another set of bills – the inchoate social media ban for children under 16, and draconian amendments to the Migration Act – he could count on the support of the opposition. Mocking its leader Peter Dutton on the floor of the House on Thursday, Albanese could be heard saying: “You’re not being aggressive enough”. But the two men seem to have wedged each other into a perpetual tough-guy contest.

Finance Minister Katy Gallagher, Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Friday. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Forty-five pieces of legislation were passed by the end of this, the last sitting week for the year.

The race to secure parliamentary assent for a range of measures before the holiday season is hardly new. But when Finance Minister Katy Gallagher told the Senate that many of the bills in question “have been on the notice paper for almost a year”, she highlighted troubling aspects of this week’s events in Parliament House.

This Labor government has to ask itself how it ended up having more motions to guillotine debate in this term than the Coalition did in nine years. Why is some legislation scarcely being debated while months of work on creating an environmental protection agency, a 2022 campaign promise, has been set aside in a bid to placate vested interests and avoid it being weaponised by the federal opposition in the coming election campaign?

Gallagher placed blame squarely on the opposition’s “obstructionist” approach, and while there is no doubt that Dutton has sought to starve the government of legislative oxygen, one has to ask why Labor appears hesitant to prosecute its agenda.

Having won office in 2022 on the back of a small-target strategy, Albanese appears unable to go through the gears and sell his government’s proposals or even its achievements, such as the package of education measures that relieved HECS debt and created fee-free TAFE places. The result, as our economics editor Ross Gittins wrote, is that “he seems desperate to stay in office, but has no great plans to govern effectively”.

At a time of increasing disengagement in our politics, this stalemate means the spotlight instead turns to the antics of marginal players in parliament. As Herald chief political correspondent David Crowe put it, exchanges between senators Lidia Thorpe and Pauline Hanson “created a televised drama that told voters the story of a dysfunctional parliament that was utterly out of touch with ordinary Australians”.

As speculation mounts over when Albanese will call an election, this much is clear: if our leaders lack the ambition to make a case to the nation and follow it through in a transparent and orderly way, our democracy will gradually become less fit for purpose.

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