Turns out Albo isn’t much good at his job
· Michael West
Despite presiding over 94 of the 150 seats in Federal Parliament, it turns out Anthony Albanese isn’t much of a politician, writes Michael Pascoe.
Given the combination of circumstances and opposition leaders he has faced, Anthony Albanese should go down as the luckiest Labor leader ever, verily the Steven Bradbury of Australian politics.
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There’s nothing wrong with being lucky in politics or life. The problem now emerging, though, is more evidence that Albo simply isn’t very good at his job and will need the luck of facing a rabble opposition to continue to hold it.
Albanese has done well by twice posing a small election target and pursuing largely incremental reforms across Labor’s core strengths of health, industrial relations and housing, with a little budget repair and tax/superannuation tweaking on the side. That’s been more than enough to win the political game, given the quality of the competition: post-COVID Morrison, Dutton with Trump, Ley (if anyone remembers) and now Taylor.
Hanson factor
And now, One Hanson is riding the wave of political dissatisfaction Labor has contributed to.
That contribution flows from Albanese turning out not to be very good at his job when he is put to the test. His job, lest anyone forget, is “politician”, not “Prime Minister”. PM is the position he plays as a politician, just as Fraser McReight’s job is “rugby player”, which he does in the position of flanker. (Editor’s note: apologies to AFL fans, we haven’t heard of him either.)
A core task of being a politician is to influence and persuade. It would be nice if that was influencing and persuading towards the greater good, leadership towards the betterment of the Commonwealth, but mostly it’s towards the occupation of the Treasury benches.
Ignoring the gift that has been the Opposition, I’d score the five big tests of Albanese’s skill as a politician as five fails.
1. AUKUS, failPolitically smart before the 2022 election not to be wedged, a failure not to take the chance to review and escape it after the election and again when the US was reviewing and again when the UK was reviewing it and again when the US backtracked and again when the cost of needing to renovate the Collins subs was revealed.
2, The Voice, monumental fail
As detailed by Don Watson in The Monthly ($), “More than likely he reckoned that if the likes of Pat Dodson, Noel Pearson and Marcia Langton and a host of others had given so much of their lives to this cause, he should have the courage to back them in.
But what he needed was the courage to say to them – admirable as they are, formidable as they are – as prime minister, as a politician, as someone who is paid to read the political signs, to lead: “I can’t go on with this knowing I will be leading you over a cliff. Courage is essential, but defeat in this is unthinkable. We must find another way.”
But he didn’t, setting up a mighty slap in the face of indigenous and broader Australian hopes, setting back reconciliation by decades, filing the beautiful Statement from the Heart in the Too Hard basket, marked “not to be opened in my political lifetime”, running and hiding from the other two legs of the statement, Treaty and Truth (Makarrata).
3. Bondi, a no-winTried to stand firm, misjudged the reaction, and subsequently attempted to overcompensate.
4. Housing, the core of our “cost of living” problem. Fail
Merely being less worse than the Liberal Party is still a fail. For all the announcements, for all the money and bits and pieces, some of which have been positive, Labor is barely maintaining the status quo of the central disaster: our lack of anything close to enough public/social housing.
Jim Chalmers accuses the Liberals of being the party of the status quo, but so is Labor on housing for the people who really need it most, the quintile of Australians who will never get to be the feted first home buyers.
Since I wrote this for The Saturday Paper ($) two years ago, there has been no improvement, and there won’t be. The level of the final bar in this graph from that Budget’s papers can simply be repeated with the growth in community social housing at best only matching the ongoing retreat from public housing.
Source: National Housing Supply and Affordability Council analysis of ABS Census data, Treasury
The Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute’s January report on social housing showed the multi-government retreat from providing public housing.
There has been more public housing demolished than built.
Meanwhile, the Commonwealth Rent Assistance bill – effectively subsidising private landlords – has ballooned from $4.7 billion in 2021-22 to $7.4 billion in the new financial year.
5. Tax reform: a political failure of process and ambitionYes, our treatment of capital gains tax, negative gearing of residential housing and various trusts needed reform. So does our GST, the taxing of resources (especially offshore gas), land, payrolls, income and dividend imputation. Much of that lot is state issues and all, except offshore gas, are in the political Too Hard basket.
Abiding by Bismarck’s dictum that politics is the art of the possible, how would a first-rate politician go about implementing possible tax reform when he had promised not to do so?
He or she would start by assisting the case to be developed, by exploring the issues, airing the options, develop a consensus of the willing that would convince him of the necessity of changing his previously stated position – not by baldlly backflipping and announcing changes that then had to be changed within a month after being blindsided by a ferocious media campaign that has the description “liar” sticking.
What could have been
The 2011 tax summit was an example of what could be done. Pushed by independent Rob Oakeshott, Gillard and Treasurer Swan gathered the great and good from business, unions, academia, states and the social sector for three days of post-Henry Review public debate and discussion that made the case for change.
It was a shame that Abbott’s Total Opposition refused to attend – they might have learned something. It was another shame that the tightness of the political race at the time meant reform was not carried further than the subsequent resources rent tax and the pricing of carbon.
And of course, it was a national tragedy, an act of policy bastardry, that the Coalition did its donors’ bidding in scrapping those two reforms as soon as it could.
Nonetheless, the precedent was there for a skilful politician to use. Labor has been accused of refusing to lead, of waiting for others to make a case that it can then follow, but standing back, uninvolved, doesn’t give it ownership of the case. Coralling the debate, the issue, building and selling the necessity for the backflip first, not post factum, is what a politician good at his job would do.
The reform that wasn’t
And then there’s the popular reform that wasn’t: the minimalist picking up some of the windfall profits from the sale of our offshore gas. It didn’t have to be the full 25 per cent levy that gained traction when left to other people to make the running; it just had to be more than Chalmers’ tummy tickle of bringing forward PRRT revenue instead of increasing it.
They are my headline failures, but of course, there are other issues that have shown similar lack of judgment, of political talent.
Albanese’s Captain’s Call of a state funeral for Graham Richardson is a standout. The miserable excuse for a NACC is another. I fear the pending rendering of Dan Duggan to the Trump regime will be defining.
Un cri de coeur. Where to, when trust in our government is gone?
The totality of failures contributes to the electorate’s sourness, the desire to “kick Canberra in the arse”, as an old friend told me last week, someone who is no Hanson fan but sees no other way to deliver the kick, the Coalition being at least as useless.
Perspective is required for how dire that kick is looking. A SMAge report ($) on Labor’s polling dive included this telling paragraph:
“The Labor primary vote is the lowest the party has recorded since its 25 per cent result in February 2025, when the then Peter Dutton-led Coalition was riding high with a primary vote of 39 per cent before suffering a crushing reversal and defeat at the May election.”
That was just three months ago. Hanson’s attacks on workers, women and anyone not just like her have a long way to run. That’s the best thing going for Albanese.
But it will still need leadership, someone, really good at politics, to defuse the nation’s sourness. That, decreasingly, looks like the politician presently playing Prime Minister.