Labor’s year in clover

The challenges facing Peter Dutton by

Mark Kenny

In 2008, at the Australian zenith of the American custom of rating the first hundred days in power, Kevin Rudd issued a fifty-five-page booklet to mark his new government’s quotidian ton. Inevitably, it proved nothing much at all. Critics said it was both premature and simply validated the critique that Labor under Rudd had ‘hit the ground reviewing’. The Sydney Morning Herald worked out that Rudd had initiated an inquiry every four days, which sounded bad. But after eleven years of John Howard’s government, many things required attention. As Rudd countered, Howard had initiated ‘495 inquiries and reviews in 2005–06 alone’.

Of course, so far out from the next election, these arguments were boutique affairs. A meatier juncture for interim evaluation comes with the first trimester of the three-year parliamentary term, which, for the current forty-seventh parliament, ticked over in May.

Self-evidently, a year encompasses a full cycle of annual events, including international meetings and a federal budget (or even two) in which election promises were either honoured via appropriations, or deep sixed.

The first-year snapshot brings something else of interest. In the Westminster parliamentary tradition, it is a two-for-one birthday, twinned by what we might call the annus frustratus of the freshly spurned. Such is the lot of the ‘shadow’ government that the victor’s year in clover marks a year in Coventry for the vanquished – twelve months in which to reflect, regroup, and, ideally, reposition. Is that what Peter Dutton’s Liberal National Party coalition has been doing – repositioning?

According to the truism, oppositions do not win elections, governments lose them. Generally speaking, this takes more than a year and, historically, more than a term. There has been no single-term federal government since 1932. This underscores the impotence of opposition parties, forced to lie in wait until their time comes. Even when it does, calibrating effort to suit the circumstances requires skill and discipline. Counter-intuitive as it may seem, sometimes an opposition’s best approach is to stand back while a tiring government makes errors of its own accord.

Labor learned this the hard way in 2019. In hindsight, Bill Shorten, Labor’s then leader, explicitly tried to ‘win’ the election that year, notwithstanding the fact that in almost every published opinion poll – for the entire term – he was already on track to become prime minister. We know how it ended. Transformative policy ideas tabled in good faith from opposition provided an otherwise policy-bereft Coalition government with the content needed to mount scare campaigns. We recall Labor’s plans to curb franking credits, negative gearing, and capital gains tax breaks, and to drive rapid decarbonisation. For Scott Morrison, these ‘tax’ increases proved to be a lifeline.

Lesson learned. In 2022, Labor under Anthony Albanese endeavoured not so much to actively win an ideas war as to facilitate a vacant Coalition government’s loss. A time-hardened parliamentary tactician, Albanese knew in his bones that Morrison was cooked. He eschewed the usual social democratic temptation to think big and inspire the electorate’s imagination with bold – read, risky – policy creativity. Labor’s lowest ever winning primary vote of 32.6 per cent was a price he was prepared to pay and proof that his sole aim was to craft a parliamentary majority after preferences if necessary, rather than to engage in a heady public debate over detailed program ideas.

A powerful, if suitably mundane takeout here for opposition parties is the importance of being there or thereabouts when governments start to fail, and of providing safe harbour to voters who, unnerved by government under-performance or ineptitude, might consider switching loyalties.

Sexy, this is not. Indeed, it seems a far cry from the romantic allure of big colourful ties, big social spending, and big nationbuilding reforms during Gough Whitlam’s time. But then, Labor knows how that ended also.

If 2019 had an electoral analogue, it was 1993, when a fatigued and unpopular Labor government under Paul Keating pinched another term against an ascendant opposition. The unwieldy Fightback! manifesto being spruiked by John Hewson proved difficult to sell and, for a skilled tactician like Keating, easy to skewer. Hewson would later joke that Fightback! was the longest suicide note in Australian political history.

If 2022 had an analogue, it was 2007, when Rudd, to whom Albanese was close, modelled a churchy social conservatism and mounted an audacious claim to greater economic restraint. It was a calculated presentation designed to give jaded Liberal voters permission to move on safely from Howard without betraying some of his core principles.

As a keen student of these election lessons – the good and the bad – Albanese always knew what had to be done once he assumed the reins of leadership. His captaincy would be workaday Labor, ‘not pretty, but pretty effective’, to borrow a pithy campaign slogan used by the dishevelled former Queensland Nationals senator, Ron Boswell.

In some ways, the hardest part of such an uninspiring approach to leadership is surviving long enough to fight the election. Colleagues become doubtful; competitors circle. Albanese weathered his share of doubters through the hard pandemic months as Morrison buddied-up with Labor premiers (initially), handed out billions, and seemed for the first time to have a purpose. Labor’s poll numbers sank. Questions were asked about whether it was time for a change, perhaps to a woman. Might Tanya Plibersek wrong-foot Morrison, some wondered. Albanese cautioned colleagues to hold their nerve, insisted he knew what he was doing – and prevailed.

In office, his approach has been unspectacular, methodical and pragmatic. For many progressives, it has also been inadequate. Yet he is determined to craft a new political terrain for Labor built on traditional values of social and environmental responsibility, and encompassing economic aspiration. His motto speaks to left and right – ‘nobody left behind and no one held back’. The cadence of his government is incrementalism, its watchwords balance, listening, and unity. Albanese says it is about making Labor as ‘natural’ a party of government federally as it has become at state level.

The recent 2023–24 budget evinced this step-by-step advance, with small but widespread increases in JobKeeper, rent assistance, and, crucially, the Single Parenting Payment. The opposition attacked it as inflationary, but failed to pierce its overall formula. Others derided it a box-ticking exercise delivering a lot for a little, and a little for a lot.

Albanese’s second year will see economic conditions toughen considerably, bringing harder political choices to the fore. Prime among these is the notorious Morrison-era stage-three tax cuts already legislated to begin in July 2024, which promise big gains for the wealthy. Progressives want it scrapped. Some believe Treasurer Jim Chalmers would privately welcome the external pressure from critics to give him the political leverage needed to win an argument in Cabinet. This is a misreading. Chalmers and Albanese remain wedded to stage three because Labor supported the measure while in opposition. They feel the integrity of the government rests on keeping election promises – an explicit failing of the slippery Morrison government that Albanese made stick during the last election. Between now and the next budget, this debate will become trickier as the economy slows and jobless numbers climb, making a repeat of the 2022–23 surplus less likely.

Progressively minded voters will also be consumed during this period by the fight to secure a historic constitutional change to create an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament, among the most important changes to the Constitution since its inception. Albanese named this as his major term-one priority when claiming victory on election night.

Dutton, by deliberate contrast, has gone the other way, not only opposing the referendum proposal outright, but binding his party room to the same position – a step not taken by Howard in the 1999 republic referendum, nor by Malcom Turnbull in the 2017 marriage equality national postal survey. That decision, and others on climate change, social and affordable housing, superannuation, and immigration, have taken Dutton closer to the kind of divisive negativity exhibited by Tony Abbott.

But is this really weakness masquerading as strength? Dutton knows only too well that the only people who can remove him as leader are his parliamentary colleagues. He knows also that few leaders who take over immediately after losing office last long enough to become prime minister. Yet he is caught in a bind. By preaching to the choir and offering a hard-line style of leadership, he keeps the true believers happy in the party room. Thus it feels safer in the short term. Paradoxically, it makes the party he leads less attractive to the very mainstream voters needed to avoid future election losses.

As a freshly elected leader, he might have immediately signalled a shift to where progressive voters were on climate, women’s rights, and corruption in politics – three key areas where Labor had been positioned better and where teal independents had unseated Liberals in supposedly ‘safe’ inner-city Liberal strongholds. Instead, he doubled down, flagging a possible revival for Liberals in regions and suburbs, rather than urban areas.

It was an oddly bullish response, heavy with bravado and aimed at salving his party’s wounded ego rather than recovering lost heartland. It backfired spectacularly on April Fool’s Day 2023, when his party surrendered the safe suburban seat of Aston in a by-election, the first time a government had increased its majority between elections in 103 years. Dutton used the lee of that catastrophe to come out against the Voice, and has since signalled immigration as a battleground. More broadly, he is playing for time, hoping a deteriorating economy will rebound on the Labor government.

Back in the 1980s, Howard told the journalist Anne Summers that the times would eventually suit him. It took a decade during which Howard would hold the Liberal leadership, then lose it, before gaining his eventual vindication. One wonders if this is Dutton’s unstated play? Has he concluded that giving a voice to those opposing the Voice will scupper it, thus weakening Albanese, or that the economy will yet turn savagely against Labor, despite its non-inflationary restraint and budget surplus, plunging households into crisis?

It is not an entirely stupid strategy. After all, being there when an election is called is half the challenge for any opposition leader. Ultimately, though, the people Dutton must convince are voters, not politicians. That means actually listening to younger voters and former Liberal backers – many of them women – who see a competent Labor government addressing climate change, prioritising defence and national security, and delivering the first surplus in fifteen years. A procedurally sound government speaking in optimistic, inclusive terms about national unity.

For Peter Dutton’s reflexively divisive leadership, year two may get worse, and that could well make it his last. g

Mark Kenny is a professor at the Australian Studies Institute at ANU. He was for many years a senior political journalist in the Parliament House Press Gallery. He hosts the popular politics podcast Democracy Sausage with Mark Kenny and is a columnist for The Canberra Times.

This article is one of a series of ABR commentaries on cultural and political subjects being funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.