Thursday, March 30 2023: the day the bill for the historic referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament was introduced and met with a standing ovation — and the day the cold emptiness of the opposition benches provided an immortal image of the feckless Peter Dutton as opposition leader.
The message of contempt was as vivid as it was absolute.
It’s therefore unsurprising that, to the minds of many moderates and progressives, the sonorous collapse of the Liberal Party across the mainland — completed with the fall of the Perrottet government last Saturday — is a cause for celebration. The sense, even if only subliminal, is that the triumph of mendacity, corruption, division and brute rapacity that has become so synonymous with the Coalition brand, but most particularly the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison era, is over, and a rare moment of progressive dominance awaits.
Internally for the party, its spectacular demise is nothing less than an existential crisis writ large, one that beckons political decay in the absence of any reckoning and which threatens to consign the party to years of internal civil war, discontent and footnote-like irrelevance. As the disdain and faux outrage with which Dutton conducts himself attest daily, it’s obviously proving difficult admitting “you have an ugly baby”.
But as this saga unfolds and autopsies on the Liberal Party’s lowest point in modern history gather pace, two pressing questions about the state of Australian politics suggest themselves. What accounts for Albanese Labor’s small-target politics in this seemingly golden age of progressive opportunity? And in what ways is it destined to remake the Australian political landscape?
In answer to the first, the received wisdom is that the general smallness and lack of ambition visible in Labor’s agenda on issues such as tax, welfare, climate change and, dare I say, even integrity, is a symptom of timidness. Having taken a bold agenda of reform to the 2019 election and suffered an ignominious defeat, a spooked Labor thinks the skirmishes invited by substantive reform in these areas, not least from News Corp, are too chancy to contend with. And so political incrementalism must inevitably be reduced to the order of the day, or so the narrative runs.
The alternative reading is that none of this is some accident of history or unfortunate aberration that falls to be reconciled come Labor’s second term. On the contrary, this is New Labor: a party that has not so much drifted as consciously stepped to the right and, in so doing, has abandoned basic fairness as an organising principle in many of the most fundamental areas of government policy.
If this seems decidedly unlikely or uncharitable, consider Labor’s intransigence on JobSeeker and the foreshadowed stage three tax cuts. On the former, “budget constraints” have proved a common refrain whenever Labor is prodded about raising the miserable allowance from $50 to $88 a day in line with the Henderson poverty line. Indeed, so it was this week, when Tony Burke told listeners on RN Breakfast that the government is “not going to be able to do in the budget, you know, everything that a Labor government might want to do straightaway”, before adding he’d done his best as industrial relations minister to help JobSeeker recipients into jobs.
The stage three tax cuts, by contrast, elicit no such objections, despite the fact they’re slated to drain the public purse by at least $250 billion over a decade — more than twice the amount the suggested JobSeeker raise would cost — and herald the destruction of the country’s progressive tax system.
The same comparison can be made of Labor’s refusal to boost the Medicare rebate or pause the annual indexing of student debt amid the worst cost-of-living crisis in years. These are plainly reforms that would benefit low- and middle-income households, and yet Labor conversely remains committed to defending negative gearing, franking credits and generous superannuation concessions — benefits that largely accrue to the wealthy and carry a combined price tag of more than $837 billion over 10 years.
It’s true there has been some limited movement on superannuation and franking credits in recent weeks, but it’s minimal and bitsy, and has in any event been shelved until after the 2025 election.
“We don’t begrudge anyone who has made a lot of money [off the taxpayer] or saved a lot of money or takes advantage of the tax breaks that are legitimately available to them,” Treasurer Jim Chalmers recently reminded Australians on this front.
“If you have done well in super, that’s a good thing.”
Similar statements, it bears mentioning, can be traced to June 2019, when Morrison was still preening himself on his “miracle” win. There, Albanese and Chalmers described a $200,000 wage as “aspirational” rather than “top end of town”, never mind it’s more than three times the average annual salary. The point here is neither of those descriptions nor the statements that followed can readily be dismissed or excused as political flourishes. The common thread that runs throughout is emblematic of a shift in political identity — the language or politics of aspiration unspooled from the constraints of fairness championed under Bill Shorten’s Labor.
This isn’t to deny that the government has moved in a number of directions the Liberal Party of today wouldn’t dare trek. Clearly it has. There’s the discontinuation of the Bernard Collaery prosecution for one, and the return of the Nadesalingam family to Biloela for another. Not to mention the granting of permanent protection to many (but not all) refugees subsisting on temporary visas, the diplomatic repair-work on the foreign policy front, the decision to abolish the Administrative Appeals Tribunal polluted by years of Coalition cronyism, and, not least, the inquiries into robodebt and Morrison’s secret ministries.
But these were always easy pickings, the low-hanging fruit, if you like, left by an exquisitely appalling government. The lack of public resistance on every score militates against the idea they were in any way controversial or surprisingly bold. And perhaps more to the point, none ran contrary to the drumbeat of Labor’s newfound aspirational politics.
Which brings us to the why. What conceivable political advantage would Labor see in asserting itself as the dominant party of the centre-right — progressive on social issues, yes, but economically conservative when it comes to the poor, populist when it comes to the wealthy and upwardly mobile, and hardly dissimilar from the opposition when it comes to business (as its climate policy testifies)?
The answer is that it’s a position that appeals to the disenchanted Liberal voter base and those described by Sydney Morning Herald columnist Waleed Aly as “hip-pocket voters” — those who are, by definition, “aspirational” and see an appeal in tax cuts, even if they themselves don’t immediately benefit from them, if ever. It also proceeds on the assumption the Liberal Party is incapable of mending itself and returning from the abyss. So, in occupying this position, while Labor might bleed some votes from its left flank to the Greens or the teals, it’s betting it won’t be enough to occasion actual losses. And even if it did, swings in Liberal territory would probably compensate. Majority secured.
A similar phenomenon was brought into sharp relief in the recent Victorian election. There Labor tilted east, picking up traditional blue-ribbon heartland, through policies — such as the second stage of the Suburban Rail Loop — which favoured Melbourne’s east and largely ignored the west where it suffered 10-12% swings against it. Notably, however, no seats in the western suburbs fell to the opposition.
If this same or similar strategy is front of mind for federal Labor, it would explain why the government sees no paradox in its support for the stage three tax cuts and its singular indifference to the poor. It would also explain why, this week, Albanese was equally indifferent to the spectre, he raised, of no social and affordable housing relief when confronted with the legitimate concerns of the Senate crossbench over the government’s flawed housing policy.
When asked whether the government would countenance the Greens’ proposed amendments, Albanese told reporters that Labor is “happy to have” an all-or-nothing argument with the minor party about it “between now and the next election”. In other words, he’s not bothered about the 176,000 households languishing on the social housing waiting list; he’d rather enjoy the political advantage of wedging the Greens, who, for their part, called the response “morally repugnant”. It’s hardly an inapt description, particularly when it’s remembered Albanese is a man who regularly cites his own public housing roots as a point of pride.
All of which brings us to the implications of this gambit, much of which will turn on the capacity of the Liberal Party to refashion itself as a moderate political force. If it were to achieve this, and soon, Labor’s strategy would probably fail. If, as is more likely, the Liberal Party proves incapable of overcoming its extremist tendencies, Labor would probably consolidate its vote at the next election and the two-party system would collapse, leaving Labor with no viable opposition except, one would hope, in the form of the Greens and independents in a situation not wholly dissimilar to that of today.
Yet the problem with this position — where one major party becomes so supreme, so dominant — is it’s liable to breed a politics of contempt. A contempt for political opponents and political debate, a contempt for the public and basic standards of transparency, and a contempt for institutions and conventions, not unlike that manifested by Dutton’s Liberal Party in parliament on Thursday. It’s a politics of contempt likewise discernible in the unprecedented allegations levelled against the Andrews government this month by former IBAC head Robert Redlich. And indeed, it’s possible we’re already seeing a similar arrogance begin to creep into federal Labor, if Albanese’s housing position vis-à-vis the Greens and the government’s wider failings in the areas of freedom of information, whistle-blowing and its new yet anaemic anti-corruption body may be taken as a guide.
The logical upshot, against this backdrop, is a country with the hallmarks of democracy but an absence of the conditions required to properly sustain it. Perhaps more dangerously, as inequality rises with the long march of time, it could foster widespread political discontent and reverse the appeal of the Liberal Party in a manner not so dissimilar to the gathering of storms witnessed in Trump’s America.
The future of Australian politics, in other words, could be taking shape before our eyes, and the potential long-term consequences it carries are as depressing as they are bleak.
