Pearls and Irritations

One should never feel sympathy for a politician caught in a rule-in rule-out game. Perhaps the period should be after the eighth word, but there is something spectacularly dumb about foreclosing on policy options even when they are not under active contemplation, narrowing the range of debate and allowing its terms to be set by the opposition. All the more so when, as experienced politicians well know, there are formulae of words ready to serve to convert a possibility into a non-story.

That Anthony Albanese has more than enough experience in killing off such speculations almost makes his clumsiness with such questions in recent times suspicious. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that Treasury was considering policy options on negative gearing. It usually is, of course. Along with policy options on a wide range of revenue raising options, and on options for tax cuts. Albanese did not appear to know, at first, whether negative gearing advice had been specifically asked for by the Treasurer.

But he said, mildly, that contemplating future policy options was always an activity by an independent public service, and that he himself had not commissioned it. He left open the question of whether the Treasurer had commissioned it. Within 24 hours of this statement being parsed and analysed by various interests including journalists, Albanese had to appear to rule out changes to negative gearing as part of any housing policy change.

It is just possible, given the government’s lack of political and policy courage, and tendency to collapse in a heap when there is any organised opposition, that no changes were in serious contemplation. But that would have seemed pretty irresponsible on the part of the government embroiled in a debate, inter alia with the Greens about abolishing negative gearing, And even more irresponsible on the part of Treasury, given that the government is probably preparing for a pre-election Budget. The more so given that the government is also looking at its policy options for major initiatives, particularly in housing, as a part of the election campaign. Each would have to involve discussion of the costs to the Budget of continuing with negative gearing, and with capital gains tax concessions, if only to give the government some financial idea of the room it had.

By no means was the government obliged to change the inequitable and unfair way in which it props up middle class housing investment. But it could not have any policy without a free-ranging discussion about the costs of current policies, and the fact that not a single current scheme, particularly those focused at “helping” new home buyers with cash or tax concessions is likely to add a single dwelling to the housing supply.

Albanese haunted by the failure of Shorten’s broad agenda

It is often said that Albanese is haunted by the failure of Labor to win government in 2019. In this he is drawing from Labor received wisdom that it went to the people with too many and too complicated policies. The policies may have been logical and well-thought out, angled particularly so as to show that Labor was brave enough to include revenue measures to offset generous expenditure programs. The whole thing had been a debacle, cunningly exploited by the Scott Morrison miracle. The lesson was that Labor, under its new leadership, should be a small target party, with more modest objectives and promises and that it should never again campaign with a wide-ranging, radical or ambitious plan. Anthony Albanese, the narrow, conservative and unambitious champion of the new strategy.

Inquests of Labor defeats are more common, useful and frank than celebration of strategies and tactics which just got the party over the line. The 2019 post-mortem report, written by Craig Emerson, a former Labor minister, and former South Australian premier Jay Weatherill was a good example. But its reception suffered from a type of confirmation bias, by which players read into the report whatever they already thought, and failed to be attentive to matters that did not accord with their thinking.

Everyone now agrees that one of the reasons Labor failed to cross the line was that people did not much trust the character of Bill Shorten. They were particularly unimpressed by a tendency on the part of the party to be saying one thing to coalminers, or would-be coalminers in northern Queensland and something else entirely to inner city trendies in Sydney and Melbourne.

Before that election, observers, me included, had commented on the extraordinary discipline of Labor parliamentary players, and the fact that there was little overt dissent or personality clashes. Shorten may have had his internal critics (including Albanese and the notional left of the party) but he did not lose because of their disloyalty, sabotage or failure to try. That is why all sides of the party were stunned by the defeat.

In fact, it would have been better had there been more robust debate, sometimes including evidence of dissent about priorities, policies and tactics.

The size and detail of the program put forward was obviously a problem. It turned out that a good deal of it was concocted on the run, rather than carefully prepared, rehearsed, and held back until just the right moment. As a result, there were problems in presentation, in anticipating the type of resistance and counterattack it inspired.

But it was not necessarily too much or too threatening, as we have all now decided. The problem was as much one of strategy and tactics, and of a lack of coordination of effort.

According to Emerson and Weatherill, Labor went into the election with no documented campaign strategy, let alone one that had been hammered out by debate and discussion, whether within the parliamentary caucus, with a tight-knit campaign team (also involving top party organisers, pollsters and advertising agents), or within the party at large. It was top-down leadership, under tight control, but without much in the way of flexibility to deal with the tactics of the other side, or unexpected events.

Likewise, there was no settled group within the party having the authority and power to be monitoring how the campaign was going, to adapt it to circumstance, or to raise with senior campaigning party figures problems with the approach.

The review says that “frank internal discussion was not encouraged.” The campaign “lacked a culture and structure that encouraged dialogue and challenge, which led to the dismissal of warnings from within the party about the campaign’s direction.”

In prospect: a chaotic campaign without a settled strategy

The review notes new spending policies were worked up on the hop, with policies “appear[ing] to have been decided by a combination of the leader and his office, a shadow expenditure review committee and an augmented leadership group” – and that there was no overarching strategy to inform the messaging.

Labor’s national secretary seemed to have been taken by surprise by the number and size of the policy offerings that were announced during the campaign, and there was no campaign committee.

“Unsurprisingly, the Labor campaign lacked focus, wandering from topic to topic without a clear purpose,” the review notes.

The spending announcements, totalling more than $100bn, drove the unpopular tax policies and exposed Labor to a Coalition attack “that fuelled anxieties among insecure, low-income couples in outer-urban and regional Australia that Labor would crash the economy and risk their jobs”.

The review found that low-income workers swung against Labor and the party’s “ambiguous language on Adani, combined with some anti-coal rhetoric, devastated its support in the coal mining communities of regional Queensland and the Hunter Valley.” Labor lost support among Christians, particularly devout, first-generation migrant Christians.

On the flip side, higher-income urban Australians concerned about climate change swung to Labor “despite the effect Labor’s tax policies on negative gearing and franking credits might have had on them.”

At the 2022 election, Albanese offered a narrower range of promises (on most of which he can be said to have delivered). He consciously held back on oppositionism during the Covid crisis, which dominated the last Morrison term, but developed a strong line of attack on Morrison’s style of government. This included issues of corruption, rorting and politicisation of grant programs, the lack of due process in decision making, the cruelty and maladministration of Robodebt, and the slackness of the controls over job program grants going to the private sector. He pushed hard on Morrison’s “woman problem,” and on workplace safety against sexual assault. And he focused his spending promises on improved childcare and better working conditions for the health sector, and those working in childcare, and aged care. The election campaign did not always show Albanese at his best, but the radical new post-Covid environment may have made difficult analysis of how much Labor had learnt, and changed, since the Shorten campaign. The real test of it is in the election coming up next year.

Albanese now has the benefit of incumbency, and the fact that he has a fairly able team, particularly at the health, education and welfare end — supposedly Labor’s big selling point. He made a campaign tactic of being not significantly different from Morrison and Peter Dutton on national security, immigration and refugee matters. But to considerable surprise and disappointment, particularly in Labor constituencies he has not much taken the time for critical review and development of any of these policies. Likewise, on climate change, he has confined himself to setting targets only slightly more ambitious than the now opposition and has seemed entirely unembarrassed about his government’s continuing to authorise more coal production. Some of his policy on this has been frankly political, designed to enrage and infuriate the Greens, whom he has treated more as the key enemy of Labor than the coalition parties.

Some might think that the coalition has been playing into his hands with very little in the way of policy, and that, mostly undetailed, on nuclear power stations. Peter Dutton can be expected to refuse costing details, or serious programming details, and may well refuse to play the game so far as conventional election campaigns progress. He already has polling evidence that many of his supporters “feel” they understand the broad direction and philosophy of firm steady-as-it-goes management, and already rate his party as superior to Labor in managing the economy, managing defence and foreign affairs, and immigration control.

He might well figure that he will gain little by doling out numbers, timetables, and targets for professional critics to nitpick. Some of this is populist, and some Trumpian. But it also borrows from Howard who devoted time and attention to selling himself as an Australian of ordinary, socially conservative but otherwise pragmatic sensibilities. A person voters felt they knew, whose reaction to changing events one could predict. Most voters do not feel they know Albanese in that sense, though they have probably divined that he is neither the person he has pretended to be throughout his political career, nor one whose response to events can be expected to be bold, original or likely to frighten the horses or the big institutions. They have also discounted any economic achievement, particularly over Budget bottom lines, because of the pressure of high interest rates and the cost of living.

If Albanese is to make any lasting impression in history and legend, it must happen in the next six months

Albanese has not been good at the vision thing, either from an Australian perspective, or from Labor traditions and its modern values. Nor does he have a big personality. Most people don’t know him, and he has not yet made a significant dent on Labor legend or history. He shies away from an articulated vision, or the constant reinforcement of policies and programs as responsive to the vision, because he does not want to get into a philosophical contest with the Greens, who now occupy ground once held by the more progressive side of the party. But with or without the Greens, he has a big problem. Asked about where he sits and what he has done, many “traditional Labor supporters” are as likely to mention AUKUS submarines, sovereignty issues and Australia’s partiality to Israel as they are to mention improved pay and conditions for aged-care workers. Most are pained by the feeling that they are not better off than in 2022, in spite of tax cuts and some wage movement. Promises on housing, particularly ones based on subsidies to the private sector rather than focused on social housing programs, are likely by now to be inspiring cynicism rather than any feeling of optimism, hope or belief that Labor has the answer.

The task is to develop a program that will get its supporters excited. That comes out of consultation, frankness and popular adoption rather than as manna from professional experts and development interests who have succeeded, with government subsidies, only in reducing the net supply of houses younger people can afford. It’s not a program that will be devised when politicians are more focused on reassuring everyone that absolutely nothing will change for those who are settled, housed, and already comfortably off.

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