It stung a few in the Albanese government this week that Hawke-Keating era union leader and Labor hero Bill Kelty had declared them “mired in mediocrity”.
The former ACTU secretary, who held office longer than the governments of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating combined, was reported in the Australian Financial Review as having offered a withering private assessment of Labor’s latest ruling incarnation.
“Paul Keating was right,” Kelty reportedly told a small gathering of business leaders in Melbourne earlier this month. “The government needs a greater dose of imagination.”
Hawke, Keating and Kelty are from the era of the boosted social wage – delivered through the prices and incomes accord – and the floated dollar: far-sighted measures implemented when times were good.
With so many Australians now highly geared, hugely stressed and fearing the slightest policy tweak in the wrong direction, it seems counterintuitive that there’d be much public appetite for big, brave ideas right at the moment.
Nevertheless, boldness is getting the big tick from voters – provided it doesn’t come at a cost.
Political researchers report that after five rugged years of fire and flood, plague and financial pressure, many Australians are in fact not satisfied with a cautious, steady-as-you-go approach to governing. They’re looking for courageous leaders with exciting new ways of doing things.
But – and there is a but – they need to be absolutely sure there isn’t some hidden high price or other fine print that would render these policy ideas ultimately undeliverable or more trouble than they’re worth. The desire for boldness comes with conditions and the appetite for downside risk – for danger – is low.
It seems this metric is applied most rigorously to ideas emanating from the major parties – those described as the parties of government – and less to those from Greens or independents who are seen as lobbing interesting suggestions from the sidelines and exerting important influence but not likely to be responsible for delivery and implementation.
This is the backdrop to the current policy debates on housing and energy in particular. The stand-off over the government’s housing agenda in a Senate-only sitting week was a government-orchestrated exercise to both drag attention back to an issue it wants to be talking about and to highlight that the Coalition and Greens are obstructing.
It ended with the Coalition largely settling back with the popcorn while the government and Greens slugged it out for the high moral ground. Weirdly, both sides in that fight seemed happy to be having it. Both clearly believed it served them well. As one astute analyst observed this week, surely they can’t both be right.
The government argued the Greens – like the Coalition – were “blockers”.
“They put forward things which are uncosted and unachievable,” the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, told ABC Radio National on Thursday. “Really just the vibes of policies rather than serious ones.”
His departing NDIS minister, Bill Shorten, went further.
“The Greens are a formidable and destructive political part of Australian life,” Shorten said on the same radio program on Friday. “The Greens are playing in the sort of competition where they’re the party of protest, they’re an outrage factory. So, they can be all things to all people because they’ll never have to implement their policies. So, they play by a different set of rules. And what they do is they create anxiety.”
Also sticking to their talking points, the Greens argued the government was a disappointment.
“I think people are wondering right across the country, ‘what is wrong with this government?” Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young asked on Thursday. “Can’t they just be better? Can’t the prime minister just be better and not so crap?”
Labor’s research is suggesting that even allowing for the fact that they don’t mark minor parties as hard, voters are tiring of the parliamentary stalemates on important issues and starting to suggest the Greens are holding things up without presenting viable solutions. The Greens don’t need research to tell them people are disillusioned with the government.
The cost-of-living crisis is the common driver of all of this sentiment. Strategists report it is comparable only with the emergency phase of the Covid-19 pandemic and times of war in its all-pervasiveness and capacity to swamp every other issue.
It’s also fuelling this willingness to support those looking for new solutions, to reward the courageous and favour the brave.
The Coalition is trying to tap into that with its as-yet-uncosted idea to build nuclear reactors at seven locations around Australia, pitching it as a bold, low-emissions, future-focused solution to Australia’s energy needs.
“The majority of Australians now support and embrace the nuclear technology, and we had the bravery and took the decision to implement that policy,” opposition leader Peter Dutton told the Minerals Council’s annual conference last week.
Dutton drove home the point about courage twice, seeking credit for his yet-to-be-fully-revealed industrial relations policy, too.
“I think we’ve shown the bravery and our determination to set the agenda in what we believe is our country’s best interests,” Dutton said. “And we’ll do that in relation to industrial relations as well.”
Just as Dutton is appealing to those open to a bold vision, Labor’s riposte targets the internal voice of that caveat on their willingness: but how will it work and what will it cost me?
“We don’t see any costed policies for the one thing that they’re talking about, which is nuclear energy sometime in the 2040s,” Albanese told Radio National’s Patricia Karvelas. “They can’t tell us how it will be built. They can’t tell us how much it will cost. We know that it will produce under 4% of Australia’s energy needs.”
Pressed on whether he was, indeed, too timid as Kelty and Keating and others have suggested, Albanese rattled off a list of policy achievements, from adjusting the Coalition’s tax cuts package, to overhauling the NDIS, reforming aged care, intervening in gas and coal markets and, yes, “a $32bn plan for housing”.
He said there was “nothing timid” about any of it.
“Many people will look back at the past and romanticise the past,” Albanese said, in a none-too-subtle swipe at the sideline elder-critics. “What my government has done is dealt with the present and set us up for the future.”
He didn’t mention his agenda to drive the transition from fossil fuels to a clean-energy economy, badged as the Future Made in Australia and also still significantly mired in that uncooperative Senate.
In the government, they acknowledge it doesn’t have the pizzazz or instant pay-off of a floated dollar, but they still reckon Kelty could give them a bit of credit for that.
Perhaps if they win a second term, the grey-beard critics will pipe down. Although with friends – and foes – like all of those, you couldn’t be certain of either.
