Albanese has finally woken up to the reality that he needs to change, and fast

The renowned English lexicographer Samuel Johnson is said to have observed that “when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully”. Anthony Albanese doesn’t need to dip into his copy of James Boswell’s famous account of Johnson’s life to find that aphorism, because he’s living it and he knows it’s true.

As prime minister, Albanese has been on the endangered list for a while now. The reasons for that can be outlined briskly. The long Voice referendum campaign left an increasing number of voters disillusioned with Albanese and his government, who seemed removed from their chief concerns about the cost of living.

Illustration by Dionne Gain

But that explained only part of it. For a new government, the whole Labor outfit followed the leader’s example and came off as a cautious, low-energy enterprise. Without a comprehensive, integrated reform agenda that it could explain to the public, the direction of Albanese and his team was diffuse. More and more Australians started asking: why is it there?

It was not so much that the opposition was firing carefully crafted bullets at the government, it was that Labor’s chief messenger was found wanting when it came to commanding and holding the public’s attention. For any government, that is a serious hindrance, rendering it hostage to events.

This much seemed clear to anyone who was paying attention. The great disconnect, until the past week or so, was in the prime minister’s blithe approach, as if he seemed to believe that something would show up to turn around the government’s fortunes.

That could be changing. There are early signs that he has finally come to understand that all those declining poll numbers belong to him and the party he leads, and not someone else who happens to have the same name. He is starting to take measures to prevent an outright defeat at the next election.

Given that the training of a journalist like myself is based on reporting what has happened rather than what hasn’t happened yet, it’s preferable not to get into the predictions game. But it’s beyond question that the government is in political trouble. As things stand, the likelihood that the Labor Party can retain a lower house majority at the election is receding.

Sure, it’s at least an intellectual possibility that things could turn around but Labor’s incapacity to sustainably dictate the political narrative has been a problem for a long time now. At this point, it seems to me that the election contest will be about which major party gets to form a minority government. Why? Because while Labor’s current majority is so slim and its primary support is the weakest it’s been for 90 years, the Liberals would have to pick up a massive swag of seats for the Coalition to govern in its own right. And trust in the big parties is falling. This could become a feature of Australian politics for decades to come.

The encouraging news for supporters of the Labor Party is that Albanese is sending signs that he at last comprehends the immensity of the challenge. The one consideration that always stood a chance of spurring him into action was the prospect of losing his position as prime minister. He loves it and a wholesale rejection of him at the ballot box would just about break him. Every prime ministerial aspirant is looking for a degree of personal affirmation; in Albanese’s case, this element – the seeking of personal vindication – is substantial.

In the past two weeks, Albanese has taken a few small steps aimed at saving the government’s skin. The republic portfolio was ditched. And he signalled that in the wake of the Voice defeat, he’s pushed off consideration of big-ticket action on reconciliation with First Nations people into the future.

The latter will be painful for many Australians. But the raw politics of it is that with more than 60 per cent of voters saying No to the Voice, a judgment of the public mood had to be made. That judgment is that most Australians don’t want to engage with grand projects to elevate First Nations people now – not while there’s housing and cost-of-living stress.

Just what Australians will tolerate policy-wise in this fracturing political and electoral environment – and how willing they are to reward governments for whatever measures they take – is increasingly difficult to determine. The revamp of the Stage 3 tax cuts to favour lower-income workers, for example, looks to have produced no political dividend for the government.

One fascinating new development is that the changes to the Reserve Bank of Australia, which include governor Michele Bullock giving more real-time explanations of the bank’s assessment of the economy, mean there are now three regular institutional voices on economic policy: the RBA, the government and the opposition. Thus this week we have Treasurer Jim Chalmers openly disagreeing with the RBA on inflation.

On Tuesday, the RBA directly affected the political contest by suggesting strongly that it might not cut the cash rate before February next year, which as good as rules out an election before next May. So the “new” Albanese is likely to have extra time to follow a more focused re-election strategy, if he can keep to it.

Shaun Carney is a regular columnist.

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