Is Albo sinking into ‘embattled’ territory?

I’ve spent the past 1.5 years wondering which journo would be first out of the gates with a ‘Albo’s prime ministership is in serious trouble’ yarn. Turns out it’s me

Photo by Social Estate on Unsplash

But the journey to good government begins with asking questions about the role of government: Why is it doing something? Can it be done more effectively? And is it meeting the needs of consumers? I believe on the last question, the answer is often no. But none of this will get done unless we revisit the fundamentals of centrism, good government process, and a climate where ideas can flourish.
Jennifer Westacott, AFR (22/11/23)

I imagine running a country is no easy task. Every first-time PM or president faces a steep learning curve and, especially in Australia, L-Plate national leaders typically struggle. I’m not even referring here to the plethora of recent Australian PMs who struggled to serve a full term. Even Big Beasts such as Hawke and Howard had somewhat shambolic first terms. This meant Hawke saw his sizeable majority pared back considerably in 1985, and Howard came close to losing in 1998. His opponent, Kim Beazley, subsequently delighted in pointing out he won the popular vote. (Though back then, it wasn’t considered cricket to call into question the legitimacy of elections on that basis.)

So, the fact Albo is struggling is neither unusual nor necessarily evidence that he won’t, as Hawke and Howard ultimately did, occupy the Lodge for around a decade.

But…

The roots of the problem
Albo has never given off the ‘destined-to-be-PM’ vibes of a Whitlam, Keating, Hawke or Turnbull. As he often points out in interviews, he’s been “underestimated all my life”. He was elected to parliament in 1996, meaning he’s spent much of his adult life as an obscure Opposition backbencher or an only slightly less obscure Opposition frontbencher. Famously, he was on good terms with both Gillard and Rudd and desperately attempted to keep the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd show on the road. (While Albo was always a loyal Rudd backer, he served Gillard honourably and she remains on good terms with him.)

Albo is an amiable, unpretentious fellow with an inspiring log-cabin-to-White House (or housing-commission-flat-to-Kirribilli) story. Even many on the opposite side of politics have a soft spot for him. But precisely because he is so down-to-earth, he doesn’t come as a natural leader of men. He’s the Steve Bradbury of the ALP. His colleagues opted to back Shorten when he initially ran for the leadership in 2013. His colleagues then kept backing Shorten until he managed to lose the unlosable election. Granted, Albo was then elected unopposed as leader of the Labor Party. But things may have turned out differently if anybody else had chosen to run. (On which, more shortly.)  

Of course, Albanese did scrape across the line in the last federal election, but it was hardly a resounding victory.

Unlike Fraser, Hawke, Howard or Rudd, Albo didn’t get much of a mandate. Like many politicians in recent times, he concluded (probably accurately) that a tiny target, don’t-frighten-the-horses approach was wisest while serving as Opposition Leader.

While it’s always the case that elections are lost by governments rather than won by oppositions, this was doubly so in 2022. Many Australians were desperate to see the back of ScoMo, but it’s not like they were swooning over the alternative option. Whether they voted for him or not – and less than 40 per cent of voters gave him their first preference – I imagine most Australians were neither especially enthused nor enraged by Albo, the youthful socialist firebrand turned sober centrist. Voters were, to use the vernacular, willing to give him a go. I get the impression they are still willing to give him a go. However, there’s mounting evidence their patience is wearing thin.

Interesting times
The polls suggest the country hasn’t yet turned against Albanese. Even many of those voters who are beginning to wonder if Albo – good bloke as he may be – is up to the top job can probably be won back.

But Albo’s got a suitcase full of headaches, only some of which are of his own making. I probably don’t need to draw attention to the inadvisability of the ALP, or any centre-left party, being seen to facilitate the release of kiddie-fiddler refugees into the community, so let’s focus on the big-picture stuff. To wit, the putative disappearance of Australia’s middle class and accelerating collapse of what might be termed the ‘neoliberal settlement’.

My pet theory is that incoming Labor PMs have terrible timing and invariably take office just as everything is turning to shit. After narrowly losing the 1969 election, Whitlam had to deal with the long post-WWII boom ending on his watch after he won in December, 1972.

Given Fraser didn’t do much to rectify the situation after taking over from Whitlam, Hawke inherited a recession-ridden, high-unemployment, high-inflation economy that he and Keating then had to painfully transform. There was much progressive joy when Rudd was elected in 2007, but he only got five minutes of clear air before the GFC turned the world upside down.

Likewise, Albo has come to power at the fag-end of a once-in-a-century pandemic, just as everyone is rethinking the fundamental tenets of neoliberalism. Not least the wisdom of Western nations having shipped their industrial capacity – and opened their markets and intellectual property databases – to China. An act of potentially suicidal generosity that China is yet to show any signs of reciprocating.   

Bad news bunny
Imagine you’re ‘Airbus’ Albo. You return from pressing the flesh with the presidents of China and the US (your “fellow world leaders”, as you might quietly but excitedly think to yourself) only to find the following press clippings on your desk in subsequent days.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/easy-gains-on-inflation-are-over-rba-warns/news-story/69e7fd31219cfc51876e04ba16ba18b4
Summary – the head of one of the big banks declares home ownership has “become the preserve of the rich”. Peter Costello observes, “Levels of immigration now are extremely high. No wonder we’ve got rental shortages. What’s going to be driving inflation in the near term? Rents.”

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/australia-is-at-social-breaking-point-where-to-from-here-20231115-p5ekar.html
Summary – in an article encouragingly entitled “Australia is at social breaking point”, high-profile commentator Waleed Aly notes Australians are struggling to afford housing, healthcare and food and are becoming dangerously disenchanted. (“When you’re financially struggling, you tend to lose trust. That’s a problem because trust is the very basis of any functional society. So we should be unsurprised that the Scanlon report found lower levels of trust in government, which in turn delivers lower trust in each other, and everything that comes along with that: greater political polarisation, less national pride, a weaker sense of belonging, and a loss of faith that hard work brings a better life.”) 

https://www.smh.com.au/money/saving/is-this-the-end-of-australia-s-middle-class-20231117-p5ekts.html
Summary: The opening lines sums it up – “Australia, once hailed as the land of opportunity and the epitome of a fair go, is witnessing an uncomfortable shift in its socioeconomic landscape. The middle class, once the backbone of the nation, is rapidly diminishing, raising concerns about a potential decline in our collective standard of living. The idyllic image of the quarter-acre block and the Aussie dream is fading, replaced by a growing cost-of-living crisis that is reshaping our society.”

https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/australia-is-doubling-down-on-a-dumb-strategy-with-high-migration-20231122-p5elyh
Summary: The AFR – the freakin’ AFR! – runs an article entitled “Australia is ‘doubling down on a dumb strategy’ with high migration.

https://www.afr.com/politics/we-have-abandoned-and-alienated-australia-s-middle-class-centre-20231120-p5el7l
Summary: The chief executive of the Business Council of Australia – the freakin’ BCA CEO! – publishes an AFR article that kicks off with a foul apostasy (“I don’t believe the neoconservative line that government is just bad”) and proceeds to make a range of unexpected observations, such as, “I don’t believe Australians want radical agendas on either side of the political spectrum.” (Hang on a minute, not even bold but urgently necessary reforms to make the Australian labour market even more ‘flexible’?!). There’s even a recognition that the lower orders might have one or two legitimate grievances – “These are the people who work hard every day. They often spend unnecessary hours driving in the suburbs of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. They are our essential workers. We found out during COVID-19 just how important they are. And now we have abandoned them. I am calling for us to think about why we continue to alienate them… these forgotten Australians feel very angry. They are starting to build tremendous resentment about the way they feel estranged from so many conversations.”

https://www.smh.com.au/national/i-don-t-do-moderation-in-anything-why-treasurer-jim-chalmers-went-on-the-wagon-20231016-p5eciv.html
Summary: a deeply researched and relatively glowing profile of Jim Chalmers in the Good Weekend magazine. Rather weakly, Chalmers issues the requisite denials (“One of the things that I’m really determined to be is the kind of treasurer that I think Anthony needs”). But if I were Albo, I might be having the odd dark thought about my supposedly frenetically busy Treasurer agreeing to such a time-consuming media commitment at this juncture in the political cycle. I’d even be inclined to worry he might be getting ideas above his station. After all, as Kim Beazley helpfully observes in the piece, “The thing I’ve found about treasurers is that once you’ve been treasurer, you don’t want to be anything [else in politics] other than prime minister.” 

Time for a reset?
I’m presuming it’s around this point in the lifecycle of a first-term Australian government that a Graham Richardson/Arthur Sinodinos-style political hardhead summons up the resolve to march into the prime ministerial office and inform its current occupant they must:

(a) Devote considerably less time and energy to their ideological passion project, be it aggressive IR reform, smashing the patriarchy, bringing back knighthoods, digitally transforming Australia, or advancing Indigenous reconciliation  

(b) Develop a laser-like focus on the kitchen-table issues people actually care about

(c) Sack some underperformers

(d) Announce some sort of reset/fresh start, which will involve axing some unpopular existing policies and/or introducing some popular new ones

Loyalty is one of Albo’s more endearing qualities, so I don’t imagine he is going to be eager to move anyone along. I suspect he’s already accepted that Indigenous reconciliation will need to be put on the back burner for the foreseeable future and will henceforth be ceaselessly emoting over how much he “feels the pain” of everyday Aussies struggling with cost-of-living pressures.

But he needs a reset of the type Howard successfully undertook after the Liberal Party was wiped out in the 2001 Queensland state election. Howard tweaked some policies that were irritating voters and went on to win the next election. Against the aforementioned Kim Beazley, who the Australian voters believed was a nice enough man but lacking “the ticker” to be an effective PM. (Howard also won the following election before losing in 2007 to an opponent who marketed himself as John Howard-lite.)    

I’ve run out of space to get into what the reset should involve in detail. But I will make two brief final observations.

1)     Rudd, who had admittedly managed to antagonise his colleagues in record time after delivering the federal ALP from the political wilderness, was rolled almost exactly 2.5 years after assuming the prime ministership. Albo is now almost exactly 1.5 years into his prime ministership and surely can’t take too many more big hits before murmurings start about a ‘good government losing its way’  

2)     Albo might just shore up his leadership – and become one of the nation’s more significant PMs – if he declares that both sides of politics got a little carried away with the neoliberalism during the last four decades and it’s now time to redistribute some wealth from the top to the middle and bottom of societies, calm down with the mass migration, and return to the Menzies-era policies that facilitated widespread home ownership