Opinion
Albanese’s is an ‘experimental’ government – and it looks like the experiment is failing
Shaun Carney
ColumnistProbably few would attach the word “experimental” to the Albanese government, but that’s what it is. Traditionally, first-term federal governments in Australia sweep into office with a change agenda, talking up their ideas and asserting their power in big fights from the get-go.
Mostly, it’s worked politically, but not always. The Abbott government started off by enthusiastically killing the Australian car industry and Labor’s taxes on carbon emissions and resources profits. It then moved on to a first budget full of cuts that ultimately cruelled the political futures of its prime minister and treasurer. Still, it flaunted its “new management” status with some energy, as did the newly elected Rudd, Howard, and Hawke governments before it.
Illustration by Dionne Gain
Contrast that with the demeanour of the current government, which conducts itself more like an administration in its third term. Its style is low-key as it makes its way through pre-election promises while coming up with a next-term agenda on the fly. It’s the first new federal government I’ve seen that has sought to build most of its political and policy mandate after winning office rather than before it. That has not happened by accident.
Anthony Albanese has long been unshakeable in his belief that sustained support would come from slow and steady progress on a wide range of policies underpinned by orderly processes. This was always a heroic expectation not just because it differed from past practice but because it assumed that maintaining a basic consensus was possible in today’s increasingly fractured polity.
Australia has long been home to an antagonistic political culture growing out of a binary, party-dominated parliamentary setup. But while there was always a high degree of abuse and intrigue in that arrangement, there was general confidence in the fundamental integrity of the system and a shared belief that the major players – the parties, most of the ministers and the leaders – were at least well-intentioned and making a genuine effort to deliver.
That consensus is broken now. What we have is a crisis of legitimacy. There seems to be little respect across the political spectrum. So much of the political debate is vicious, dismissive and personal, an exchange of absolutist views.
The two-party system is breaking down. It started to crumble after Labor took office under Kevin Rudd in 2007. First the Greens established themselves as a permanent feature in the lower house, and gradually under the Coalition between 2013 and 2022, the teal movement took hold. Significantly, erosion of the big parties took place on both the left and the right. We appear to be on the verge of a situation in which Labor and the Coalition are going to struggle to secure lower house majorities in their own right.
Australians have steadily concluded that joining a party isn’t worth the trouble. Only a tiny proportion of people engage directly with politics by joining parties. Parties don’t cheerily volunteer their membership numbers but if, say, 150,000 individuals out of a total electoral roll of about 17 million could be classed as active members, that’s well under 1 per cent of all voters.
Perhaps unsurprisingly in these post-digital-revolution days in which each individual’s attention has been commoditised, if the ordinary voter feels strongly about a problem, they’re more likely to sign a petition or take part in a march than to tether themselves to a political party.
One consequence of this is that when it comes to politics, an ever-larger proportion of Australians are theatregoers rather than participants. The result is that it’s harder to get people to buy into what is being sold.
It was not always like this. There were no easy fixes in Labor’s heyday under Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. They never tried to apply them, and few expected them to. It was understood that big problems were complex problems that took time to solve.
That is not the mentality these days. Patience is no longer a virtue. People see a problem and – in this digital world – get cranky if no-one can produce a set of instant solutions. Worse, it’s possible that merely making headway can invite a punishment rather than a reward.
The danger for the Labor Party, as it moves into the final year of its first term, is that Albanese’s confidence in his experimental model looks to be based on a misreading of contemporary voters, most of whom do not regard good intentions and “best efforts under the circumstances” as satisfactory. It seems beyond question that respect within the political system is severely diminished. The term “minority government” trips off the tongue easily and appears in a good deal of the analysis of the ALP’s electoral prospects.
In the context of the crisis of legitimacy, an impatient electorate and an increasingly stretched media, minority government would be equivalent to a defeat, with difficult years to follow. The large segments of the media that are already unforgiving – to say the least – of this government would not cop it and would also take down anybody who props it up. We saw that happen during Julia Gillard’s Labor government.
It’s likely that minority federal governments will become a regular feature of the Australian political landscape. If so, politicians, interest groups and voters will need to develop the skills, temperament, patience, tolerance, and humility to make that sort of governance work. Unless they do, the nation will be cooked.
Shaun Carney is a regular columnist.
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