When the former Prime Minister, Paul Keating, recently claimed that Australia was losing its “strategic autonomy” and turning into “the 51st State of the United States”, the current Prime Minister froze in the headlights.
Possibly caught before his staff could give him a few dot points, Albanese said “Paul was a great Prime Minister – that ended in 1996. Paul has views. They’re well know. The world has changed between 1996 and 2024. My government is doing what we need to do today, and everyone will get a go here.”
These forlorn sentiments attracted an eyewatering riposte from Keating (Pearls and Irritations 10 August 2024) that can only be augmented by modest embroidery.
Albanese praises Keating with unconvincing sincerity. He illogically implies that the value of his predecessor’s views expired in 1996 when he ceased to be the Prime Minister. He doesn’t engage with Keating’s comments or try to justify his own position – he just changes the subject. And his claim that everyone “will get a go here” is much at odds with the smothering secrecy with which the AUKUS, for example, is embalmed.
If Albanese’s behaviour in this case was atypical, it might be possible to keep disappointment within reasonable bounds. Unfortunately before and after he became Prime Minister Albanese has been inept at taking the community into his confidence about policy via clear, plain-speaking advocacy.
As is notoriously well known, when the Morrison government sprung the AUKUS deal on Albanese, he rolled over within a couple of hours.
Major policy must be treated with much more respect than that. Albanese should have said “Hang on. I want to be fully informed on this massive deal and I want the time for the ALP to go through proper due process before it takes a position and that time will be after the election when the people have had a chance to see it and when, if I win, I will have the benefit of full advice from the public service and the military.” He didn’t and the AUKUS albatross is now around the necks of all Australians.
The international editor of the Australian Financial Review, James Curran, is right when he complains about the Albanese government’s “persistent failures in communication, an unwillingness to take the public into its confidence and the inability to explain the basic strategic purposes of why Australia seeks to acquire nuclear powered submarines.”
As Opposition Leader, Albanese also rolled over on the Morrison government’s tax cuts. That is, in the lead up to the last election, an ALP leader was unprepared to run the case against tax cuts that essentially would have transferred wealth from the less well off to the more wealthy. Then in government Albanese cancelled the Morrison tax cuts, gained little political credit for doing so and whacked a discount on the reliability of his word.
Then there’s the Voice referendum. There is a case to be made that it could only have succeeded with the support of the Liberal-National parties. Evidence of Albanese’s attempts to get them on side before he committed to the referendum are not thick on the ground. Sure, he put a lot of effort into the Voice campaign. Yet even then Albanese failed, in several major speeches, to make out the case, seemingly content to rest on repeated quips about “If not now, when?”
The so-called “Future Made in Australia” may well be an Albanese brainchild born of an idea that Australia should “make things”. It’s difficult to know what to make of this policy because again he’s made no convincing case for it. Meanwhile taxpaying funders of the program cannot be told of the expected internal rates of return on particular investments because of implausible claims of “commercial-in-confidence”. Albanese says “My government wants to reinvigorate Australia’s industrial base to create wealth and opportunity” but he doesn’t address the fact that as the country shed a good deal of its manufacturing industry it enjoyed a long period of continuous economic growth and prosperity.
If Albanese is weak on advocacy of policy particulars, he not so flash on overall strategy. His recent article in The Australian newspaper titled “Time for big, bold ideas: PM’s vision for the next decade” contained few “big ideas”, big, bold or otherwise. Instead, he treated readers to a numbing collage of platitudes – “Australia is the greatest country in the world.” “Australians are future shapers”. “Australians work hard and dream big”. “We stand at the dawn of what can and should be Australia’s decade.”
Citizens will not be properly engaged in government by such anaesthetising palaver – they’ll be alienated from it. Albanese should look to Keating’s example and speak to the citizenry in ways that grab their attention and make them think and participate more in public life.
As his prime ministership has matured, as it were, Albanese has been growingly criticised for timidity and a lack of policy ambition. These tickings-off are not entirely unfair although they seem to be more about symptoms of different problem – a struggle to grapple effectively with policy and explain it.
What’s plain is that Albanese is no Whitlam, Hawke, Keating or Gillard when it comes to policy. Yet if he is to be one of his “future shapers” of “Australia’s decade”, he needs to do a lot better. As the bottom of his hourglass rapidly fills with sand, he risks missing out on the chance to invert it.
Paddy Gourley is a former senior public servant.
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