Albanese holds so much power over his MPs they’re scared to rein him in

As Labor MPs schemed against or simply deserted their prime minister Kevin Rudd in June 2010, few would have thought their actions would be afflicting a future Labor government 14 years later. But take a look at the condition and steadily declining popularity of the Albanese government and you can see it happening.

With the campaign for the next election less than six months away and with the government having started to fall behind the Coalition in the published opinion polls, it’s worth asking if the ALP allowed itself to absorb the lessons of the Rudd-Gillard era too deeply for its own good.

Illustration: Dionne Gain

The overnight defenestration of Rudd in his government’s first term by Julia Gillard and her backers led to three years of stress and humiliation and, ultimately, three terms in opposition before an election victory in 2022.

To say the ALP was traumatised by the Rudd-Gillard wars is to severely understate the case. Determined to ensure there could never be a repeat of the orgy of plots and counterplots, it placed a series of obstacles in the way of those who would try to oust any leader midterm.

This changed the party’s culture, weakening the power of the caucus and, in turn, making the leader vastly more powerful and secure in the position.

Stability and certainty are essential, for sure, and steps had to be taken to guarantee that the sort of reckless game-playing that infected the ALP for more than 10 years before 2013 would be stymied. To that end, the caucus rule that 60 per cent of Labor MPs would be needed to force a leadership spill in opposition and a whopping 75 per cent when in office certainly settled things down.

In the four terms between 2001 and 2013, Labor went through five leadership changes. In the four terms that followed, it changed leader once, from Bill Shorten to Anthony Albanese. In fact, it hasn’t held a leadership ballot since 2013; Albanese assumed the leadership unopposed in 2019.

But has the stability carried a cost? At every level of politics, there’s a need for dynamism and accountability too. More than a few of the prime minister’s colleagues are still scratching their heads at his purchase of a $4.3 million house on the NSW Central Coast during a housing crisis, wondering how it could happen.

They’re mystified not only by the transaction but the offhand way he responded to media questions about it. The purchase was bound to become public knowledge but his initial public response – that his fiancee Jodie was a “proud coastie” and that he knew what it was like to struggle because his mother lived in public housing all her life – seemed offhand.

It looked as though he hadn’t given his public explanation much thought and couldn’t believe that it could pose a problem for him, even though it was clearly trampling all over the government’s announcement of its intention to stamp out predatory banking charges.

There’s an irony in caucus members’ unhappiness. In their own way and mostly inadvertently, they’ve contributed to the situation in which their leader appears to be sailing along.

After all, they’ve granted more internal power than any previous Labor leader. Shorten, in his two terms as leader, operated under the same rules and was never challenged but he did have Albanese, who he had beaten in the 2013 leadership contest, around, regularly promoting his credentials as a possible replacement.

Since becoming leader in 2019, Albanese has had no potential rival manoeuvring away in the shadows. Nor has he been challenged or seriously questioned in the caucus about the government’s direction. Apart from Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ successful push to tweak and spread more evenly the Stage 3 tax cuts, which led to the only brief pause in Labor’s sliding post-2022 poll ratings, Albanese appears to have met no serious pushback in the cabinet, either.

Even within the party organisation, he exercises enormous power. Recently at his direction the ALP national executive took over federal preselections in Victoria on the pretext that most of the state’s seats had been affected by a redistribution. Candidates were allocated along factional lines. This is the second successive federal election that Victorian rank-and-file members have been denied a vote in preselections.

Failure and even sometimes tragedy – in the dramatic sense of the downfall of a main character – have dogged federal Labor governments stretching back more than a hundred years. During World War I, prime minister Billy Hughes split from his government over conscription. In the Great Depression, Jim Scullin’s government fell after two years. The Whitlam government was sacked. The Rudd-Gillard government exhausted itself in short order. The Hawke-Keating period, which enjoyed a balanced dynamic of a lively caucus, cabinet and rank-and-file, with strong, policy-focused leadership, is the historical outlier.

In most walks of life, a majority of 50 per cent plus one is good enough, applying an effective discipline on an incumbent to always bring their A-game and to take soundings from the widest array of sources. In its desperation to put the horrors of 2010-13 behind it, the party diagnosed a broader organisational problem when it instead could well have been a one-off problem caused by the personalities of Rudd, Gillard and their associated agitators.

All this stability – where is it taking them?

Shaun Carney is a regular columnist, an author and former associate editor of The Age.

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