Pearls and Irritations

Increasing numbers of political observers are arriving at the view that Anthony Albanese appears to be doing everything possible to assist Peter Dutton to look strong and visionary compared to his own hesitancy and timidity. Lost for an explanation, Jack Waterford wondered on these pages whether the Albanese strategy might be “part of some divinely appointed mission to save the two-party system”.

In response, many centrist and leftist Labor diehards on independent and social media denounce critical commentary about the Albanese’s Government’s performance on the basis that it undermines the government and risks handing power back to a Coalition that for nine years became renowned for its blundering and corruption.

The reality now is that Albanese’s performance as an appeaser of his enemies, rather than the leader of a political force that has forged its historical reputation as visionary and reformist, has become a central liability. Having been given the power to lead, Albanese has for 2-½ years appeared to be fearful of using it. Instead, he has acceded to almost every Coalition objection, thereby validating the objection and making his opponent look like a respectable leader-in-waiting. Albanese’s leadership style has so undermined the Labor brand that it’s helped build the Dutton brand as a leader by default, so that even a fake “debate” on a nuclear power fantasy is seen as visionary by inattentive voters and a Coalition-friendly Murdoch-led media that Albanese has been too afraid to confront.

Some observers from the centre and left are openly suggesting on social and independent media that the time has passed for Albanese to fix the malaise. He has failed to listen to calls for him to use the power vested in him, and leadership has now become a primary re-election problem. It has revealed itself persistently on minor issues like gambling advertising and CMFEU troubles, as well as on bigger issues such as his comprehensive failure to create a proper anti-corruption body, his equivocation on Gaza and refugees, and his meek rollover on Scott Morrison’s AUKUS. They see a gloomy future in which Albanese remains a wounded leader in an election campaign, with Australia heading into a minority Labor government or one led by Dutton. The commentators have not brought that problem about; they simply describe how Albanese has actively allowed it to happen.

To intransigent Labor partisans, any suggestion that a change of leader might help amounts to heresy. The loss of the Labor Government in 2013 following Rudd-Gillard-Rudd leadership changes caused a long-term chill, but it involves forgetting that in the wake of the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison leadership chaos over the period of 2014-18, the Australian voters in 2019 re-elected a little-known oaf called Scott Morrison.

There may also be a lesson for Australia in the US, where with three months left for a presidential election the replacing of Joe Biden by Kamala Harris has transformed a near-certain Democrat defeat into a better-than-possible win for Harris at the ballot box. The key issue now has switched to whether stacked Republican election boards in key states will refuse to certify the results. Alternatively, the results could be delayed for so long that a Democrat victory would result in bedlam, with a discredited Supreme Court unable to fairly settle disputes that end up being heard by at least five tainted members of the nine-member full court.

Australia is blessed not only with an independent electoral commission and a preferential voting system, but also with one that requires all eligible citizens to have their names marked off a roll at a polling booth by the close of voting.

For reasons best known to himself, shortly after winning government, Albanese decided to neglect like-minded allies within the Parliament, such as the Greens and the Teal independents, the latter having greatly assisted Labor to win office by taking its issues to the electorate with much greater force and eloquence than a small-target strategy allowed Labor to do.

Within the first month, Albanese showed his hand by cutting the staff adviser allocation of the independents from four to one, thereby making it much more difficult for them to do the work they were elected to do. It was a calculated slap in the face.

Labor has had difficulty dealing with the alternative left-of-centre party within the Parliament for many years, and it has become worse since the Greens began to threaten and win inner-metropolitan lower-house seats from Labor. Instead of letting bygones be bygones and finding ways to work with the Greens, Labor has intensified the animus and helped turn it into an open hostility that is now showing itself with critical policies languishing on housing and the board restructure of a recalcitrant Reserve Bank.

The Greens are now demanding that Treasurer Jim Chambers take the unprecedented step of forcing the board to lower interest rates as a price for supporting its RBA Bill. Dutton will not support the bill because he stands to gain politically from a continuing cost-of-living malaise while putting on a pretence of standing up to price gouging by the big supermarkets. The Greens won’t support it unless Albanese decides to do the unthinkable and show enough spine to put an end to the longstanding independent status of the central bank.

The wash-up is that while Albanese is caught impotently bearing the brunt of cost-of-living pressures that are hurting middle-and-lower-income voters, the Coalition and the Greens are positioning themselves as forceful and strong.

A similar thing is happening with Australia’s feeble response to ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the establishment of illegal settlements on the West Bank. Albanese and Foreign Minister Senator Penny Wong abstained from voting on Israel’s continuing illegal occupation of Palestinian territories last week at the United Nations, a vote in striking contrast to the view of the deputy leader of the Greens, Mehreen Faruqi, who declared the Labor Government had “shown itself to be gutless fence-sitters” and voters would “not forgive and forget”.

At the same time, Dutton consistently declares unambiguous support for Israel’s daily slaughter of Palestinian civilians. Taking 7 October as his singular reference point and unequivocally supporting the collective punishment by Israel of tens of thousands of Palestinian citizens, Dutton accuses the Albanese Government of failing “to provide the moral clarity which differentiates civilisation from barbarism, and which discerns the good from the evil”.

The theme forever remains the same. The perception of Albanese is by now fixed in the voters’ mind as an indecisive ditherer on so many issues it hardly matters. Even on the seemingly safe ground of defence, former defence minister Linda Reynolds is now calling on Albanese to appoint an AUKUS czar to take a strong leadership position on Morrison’s policy frolic. And that is happening at a time when Albanese’s dithering on Benjamin Netanyahu’s atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon are less influenced by any loyalty to Israel than on a reluctance to differentiate himself from the increasingly problematic Biden position on the daily slaughter of civilians. This is not a good time for Albanese to be visiting Biden in Washington, but they are there together: a fragile lame duck and his submissive Antipodean duckling.

It’s safe to say most Australians will vote at the next federal election in seven months. Whether they are well informed or not, they will vote number 1 for a candidate and select preferences. A very small proportion of voters in the NSW seat of Grayndler and the Queensland seat of Dickson will vote for Albanese or Dutton. The rest of us will vote for party members and independents who are standing in our electorates, and many of us are likely to consider party leadership when making that decision.

Dutton puts himself forward to the electorate as a leader with strongly worded, but risky policy positions on many fronts. They should make him unelectable. By contrast, Albanese has made every attempt to show himself to the electorate as a leader who was given power, but was reluctant to use it and thus doesn’t deserve to be given another chance.

Albanese may have taken the view that voters for Coalition candidates will receive the preference votes of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party candidates, whereas Labor candidates will receive the preferences of Greens and Teal Independent voters. Such a high-risk re-election strategy assumes voters will forgive his shabby treatment of Green and Teal parliamentary representatives and his neglect of their policy priorities, especially on the critical areas of energy and corruption. It also assumes they will be happy to show him a green light to continue as the nation’s leader for another three years when he has demonstrated that he doesn’t really like to lead.

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