Anthony Albanese is not our best leader. He should go now.
It’s an open question whether Tanya Plibersek would be the best candidate to lead the Labor Party as Australia’s next Prime Minister. Jim Chalmers is the obvious alternative and there could be others. Both would have a strong claim if there were to be a vacancy.
There is no vacancy and there will be no challenge. But there should be a vacancy, because Anthony Albanese is not our best leader. He should go now.
He has run his race as Prime Minister and he should go quietly and voluntarily early in the New Year. Penny Wong and Richard Marles should also vacate their leadership positions to effect a much-needed change at the top of the Labor government.
Labor’s election chances in 2025 are marginal. The ALP national primary vote in 2022 is an all time low at 32.58%. That figure is actually a drop in support from the 2019 election which Labor lost. There is no evidence that Labor has any real chance of being returned as a majority government next year. There will almost certainly be losses in Western Australia and probably Victoria – with Queensland and NSW unlikely to yield additional seats in any balancing numbers.
As most informed commentators are already predicting, a likely election outcome is a minority Labor government. If it is led by Albanese it will, in all probability, fail. His record of cooperation with the Teals and other cross-bench MP’s has been fractious and unproductive. A shaky minority Labor government will pave the way for Peter Dutton to form government – possibly earlier than the nominal 3-year timeframe.
To make the case even gloomier, it is possible that the Dutton-led Coalition may scramble over the line and win minority government in 2025. It’s not a good time for incumbent governments anywhere in the world and Dutton has proven himself an effective Opposition leader. As George Megalogenis has observed, Dutton’s nuclear power promise is a huge political risk, but it puts him in ‘the future business’. That is territory Labor has always claimed as its own primary credential for national government. Albanese is showing no signs of being a leader for the future. That said, he has many good personal attributes and has served the ALP well as a party organiser and a minister in the national parliament.
Labor Party elder Barry Jones wrote this about ‘Albo’ in an October edition of The Saturday Paper:
His considerable skills are largely internal and hence invisible. He is an exceptionally gifted cabinet and caucus manager and the party has had less personal and factional disruption under him than any high-achieving leader since Keating. For a politician, he is unusually devoid of vanity. If he has a weakness, it is wanting to be loved – hence his presence at the wedding of Kyle Sandilands and his toe-curling adulation of Narendra Modi in Sydney.
…Sadly, he fails in advocacy, which had been the great strength of Whitlam, Hawke and Keating. As opposition leader, apprehensive about being “wedged” on national security issues and taxation, he agreed that Labor would support the AUKUS submarine deal, although he must have recognised it as a crock. He also endorsed the stage three tax cuts introduced by Scott Morrison, despite their lack of equity and the fact they would deny essential funds for health, aged care, education, climate change and the environment. Albanese was very resistant to modifying the tax cuts, but when it happened it was strongly supported throughout Australia. He is still uneasy about reforms to negative gearing or tackling the gambling monster. We are stuck with the submarines, which will arrive at an unknown date with an unknown cost, almost certainly after they have become obsolete, and with no repayment of Australia’s investment if the deal falls over.
Jones concludes his penetrating appraisal of Albanese with the advice that he needs to find ambition and make bold decisions, ironically one of which is to ‘bring Tanya Plibersek in from the cold’.
Of course the Labor party is full of policy ambition and most members want the government to make bold decisions. At the end of the parliamentary term in November a raft of 45 Labor bills passed in the parliament. Not among them were anti-gambling laws or new rules for electoral donations. The Prime Minister is also said to have intervened to scuttle the Nature Positive (Environment Protection) Bill 2024 that had been patiently negotiated with the Greens by Environment Minister, Tanya Plibersek.
But there have been significant gains too. The Housing Australia Future Fund and Aged Care System reforms are now in place – as are a number of valuable Education reforms. Increasing funding for public schools, wiping $3 billion of student debt, a 15% pay rise for early educators and the establishment of a Student Ombudsman are all substantial gains. Health care has also improved under the Albanese government with bulk-billing improvements, notable additions to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and the successful establishment of Urgent Care Clinics.
But few voters next year will remember these political wins – or important administrative reforms like the changes to the Reserve bank governance system. They are mostly the work of diligent Labor ministers – but the political dividends are like ice creams on a summer day. They will melt away without leaving a trace in a no-holds-barred election that is likely to be fought on cost of living, housing, energy and immigration issues. Some unions are already running with the old favourite ‘Don’t Risk Dutton’ slogan. It’s defensive, banal and ignores the lessons of Trump’s win over Harris in America. People are looking for change. The best antidote to the dark age of Dutton is a refreshed Labor leadership with a reinvigorated program of action and the ability to articulate it to the electorate.
Central to the Albanese government’s outlook has been the AUKUS pact and the foreign affairs and defence policy settings cloned from the Morrison/Dutton political playbook. Noting the entrenched position of the Coalition, former Foreign Minister Gareth Evans recently summed up the AUKUS predicament within Labor’s senior leadership:
The prospects of a political change of heart in Australia are problematic. Defence Minister Marles’s love for the US is so dewy-eyed as to defy parody. Foreign Minister Wong is far more beady-eyed, and instinctively wary of over-commitment to America’s view of itself, but has been unwilling to rock the boat. And Prime Minister Albanese is still preoccupied with avoiding being wedged as weak on security, has never given great attention to the complexities of foreign and defence policy and seems unlikely to change.
Richard Marles’s stewardship of the defence portfolio is a disgrace. Massive waste and poor asset decisions in defence procurement has become an open scandal in Australia. The Australian Defence Force is undermanned, badly led and in no shape to defend Australia in a hot war. Rampant sexual violence in the services is affecting recruitment. The announcement of the National Defence Strategy in April was an embarrassing misfire best characterised by the nonsense statement from Marles that ‘the strategic cat we are trying to skin is to resist coercion and maintain our way of life’. It was pure PR spin with no redeeming basis in fact. It is disingenuous for him to pretend to the Australian people that raising defence expenditure from 2% to 2.4% of GDP over the next decade will stave off a supposed threat to our way of life. That ‘threat’, of course, is China – our major trading partner and the source of much of our national prosperity.
Penny Wong uses slightly different PR language to explain the muddle that is the Albanese government’s position on our region. Without mentioning our military, or dwelling on the quagmire of AUKUS, she insists Australia wants a geo-political situation of ‘strategic equilibrium where no state is militarily predominant in the Indo-Pacific’. She fails to tell Australians the awful truth. The Labor leadership in fact pursues a policy of active support for the United States to assert its dominance as the major power in our region. Her handling of foreign affairs has been characterised by a strange mixture of caution and doublespeak. Former Foreign Minister Bob Carr has accurately described the result for Australia. ‘It’s not possible’, he says, ‘to continue to play war games with the Americans and trade games with China and hope to live on in blissful prosperity’.
On Palestine there is great shame that has resulted from Australian foreign policy about the war in Gaza. The sum total of Wong and Albanese’s diplomacy is to give aid and comfort to genocide deniers in Australia and the terrorists and war criminals in power in Israel. While Dutton is unabashed in his partisan support for the murderous Israeli Defence Force, Wong and Albanese cloak their support in weasel words about ‘Israel’s right to self-defence’. They vilify and smear as ‘anti-semitic’ those who dare oppose Israel’s brutal apartheid regime. That stain will remain with Labor for years to come. It must be accounted for.
Supporting justice for Palestine, abandoning the waste and stupidity of AUKUS and being even-handed with China are all decent objectives and supported by most Labor members. They should be central to the performance of the Labor government members want to see re-elected in 2025.
Without change at the top our political fortunes will quickly wither on the vine. Dutton is emboldened by his rise in the polls and he knows his relentless attacks on a weak Prime Minister are starting to bite. Combine that with Megalogenis’s caution about Labor needing to be in the ‘future business’ and the warning signs flash red. Proffering tough love and making suggestions for Albanese to improve his performance is worthy advice from elders who want the leader and the party to succeed. But there comes a time when support and encouragement don’t cut the mustard. I know many Labor supporters who would love Albanese to make way for one of the talented Labor ministers who can command the national stage and neutralise the threat Dutton presents.
We don’t want an ugly leadership stoush like the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd shambles. But we do need a Bill Hayden style relinquishment of power to enable Labor to succeed in a second term and beyond. Let the big egos die. A new generation of Labor leaders is required to take the reins of government with fresh ideas, bold decision-making and the ability to advocate for the future business of the Australian people.
Big ideas like including dental care in Medicare, ending the corrosive Capital Gains Tax discount for residential property assets and outlawing gambling advertising should be pursued. And more: extending our environment protection laws, accelerating climate change action and boosting the rate of Jobseeker to fight poverty. These policies alone could be delivered with just half the money saved from abandoning AUKUS – as we should before it fails. Labor should honour the legacy of Whitlam, Hawke and Keating and show Dutton a clean pair of heels.
I have a dream.
Kym Davey
Kym Davey is a human rights advocate and former Commonwealth and State public servant. He is a member of Labor Against War.
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