Now that the danger of a Dutton Government has receded, a good many left-of-centre people would rather that Labor had less than an outright victory.

An absolute win is quite possible, even likely, but would be the ruination of the Labor Party, at least while it was under the leadership or influence of Anthony Albanese.

Albanese, they say, is still entrenched in his timidity and limited vision. He would see a Labor victory as an endorsement of his approach, rather than a popular repudiation of a virtually unelectable Peter Dutton. The critics would prefer a minority government, not a smug and complacent one more focused on the spoils of office than improvement of the lot of working Australian men and women. Minority puts Labor under real pressure to be more radical, more focused on lasting outcomes, and with more respect for traditional Labor values. More of a genuine Labor Government in the style of Whitlam, Hawke, Keating and even Rudd and Gillard. More focused on developing and implementing good long-term Labor policy than election-winning public relations stunts.

A government depending on Green preferences and the support of moderate community independents would press an agenda for real change. It might be — is — a bold agenda, but it is essentially a Labor agenda, one aimed at the centre ground rather than leftist extremes. Indeed, the boldest parts — honest government and committed action on climate change are rather more the invention of the teals — are right-of-centre politicians in revolt about abuses of power by the conservative wings of the coalition.

The second Albanese Government need not be on a suicide mission. Albanese should look ahead to the day when he retires. One can be certain that he will, in his dotage, be very critical of the limited aspirations of his successors. The missed opportunities. The pathetic excuses for deviations from fundamental values.

He will become a legend, now genuinely more leftish than he ever was. But out of sorts, sympathy and solidarity with the new suits, feeling, sadly that the party doesn’t have room for people like him anymore. And which doesn’t listen to his advice. Now an outsider and a nuisance, like Paul Keating, given to inconvenient criticism at inopportune moments. And needing to be put down by party statespeople of the calibre and standing of Richard Marles. An outsider like Keating, who apparently, has nothing left to offer. And Rudd and Gillard – all of them far more successful leaders, with lasting monuments, than Albo.

Albanese is heading to the sort of irrelevance of a Malcolm Fraser and a Malcolm Turnbull, and a host of other decent and honourable old Liberals such as Neil McPhee and the recently departed Petro Georgio, all of whom ended feeling they were strangers in their own party.

Albanese, his internal critics think, should be changing personality to become the sort of Labor leader that he will later imagine he was. Not the captain of a party seeming to live in thrall to big gambling and alcohol lobbies. Nor to media interests which, as ever, actively campaigned against Labor. Nor to a defence and intelligence establishment now even more out of touch with reality and Australia’s needs and circumstances.

Labor’s own systems have ceased to generate and promote good ideas and drive out bad ones 

Voters want a government which will do more to protect the Australian, and the world, environment, and take stronger action against climate change. They want a government that will seek a leadership role and be an international citizen in helping to remake a world trading system from which the US appears to have completely dipped out. A world in which Australia can navigate a firm, but respectful, economic and political partnership with China.

China will become, by default, the most important nation in the neighbourhood. But if Australia plays its cards, it can help to evolve a regional, rules-based system that will strengthen our security and economic relations with China, India, Europe, Japan, Indonesia, ASEAN and South Korea. Indeed, we can probably do so in a way that lowers the security temperature, renders a good deal of military acquisition redundant and which liberates money for multilateral regional development.

The pity is that no one expects that a mere Labor Government can deliver such matters. It is too entrenched in its bad old ways and has become irrelevant to Australia’s future. It is not necessarily doomed, but it needs to re-invent itself with a new relevance for modern constituencies. And to become a new forum of ideas with modernised plans for action. Now it seems to need outside ideas and action to motivate, galvanise and revive the shell of a party established for different purposes long ago.

If we are to have minority government, it will be one with which Australia has very little experience. Normally, big parties without the numbers pay the price of being constrained and held back if they need the support of the crossbench. They must agree not to proceed with some of their stated intentions. Often, they must agree to allow some policy, program or bee in the bonnet of those now supporting them. Their answer, at the following election to those who have accused them of having failed to deliver, is that they were handicapped by the brakes put on by those whose support they needed. Or, sometimes, that they were pushed too far by their colleagues of convenience and made to do things they did not want. The latter is one of the reasons that Labor in Tasmania (but not the ACT) has sworn never to go into coalition with the Greens again.

This time about, however, the crossbench would not be looking for favours that are outside Labor’s character or values. They would not be asking for Labor to be anything else than what it claims to be. Even the community independents who are, at the end of the day, right of centre. Some may promote aspirational policies Labor has never adopted. For example, the Greens’ agenda for putting dentistry in Medicare is not part of the formal Labor platform. But they are not matters to which Labor is opposed. Implementing them, whether as part of the price for support over supply, or as part of a deal for support on some other policy proposal, would not frustrate Labor’s capacity to do something far more worthy. Nor would it cause problems in Labor’s own constituencies.

Those who imagine that minority government would be a serious handicap for Labor must imagine some other embarrassing circumstances. The fact is that minority Labor would be rather more like a Labor Government of old than a majority government under present management.

The Teals, the Greens and at least some other independents would be likely to demand that Labor reform its anti-corruption legislation, so that it was in the form endorsed by the electorate at the last election. The idea of a strong National Anti-Corruption Commission was Labor policy. But it was watered down in an unexplained and unconscionable backroom deal with Dutton. That was not done due to political necessity, because Labor and the independents at all stages had the numbers for the tougher and more effective model. It is now plain, if it wasn’t all along, that Albanese walked back because he feared that a potent and effective NACC could make life lively for Labor politicians, just as it had done with old friends and colleagues in NSW.

Anti-corruption legislation was championed by community independents and the Greens, and Labor was a late and reluctant convert to the cause. Only half a decade earlier, both Albanese and his then shadow attorney-general, Mark Dreyfus, had denied there was a substantial corruption problem. There is. It is as great a systemic problem in Labor as in the Coalition. But it is also now entrenched in the bureaucracy. The big parties repeatedly act as if the exposure and punishment of those who abuse power for their personal advantage is a greater risk to good government than having honest players in the game. It is as if Labor understands that some of its players are incapable of acting honestly.

One can see further signs of this philosophical cancer in the present Labor Government in its determination to find and punish bureaucratic whistleblowers and media contacts, and in the bureaucratic resistance, with ministerial encouragement to resist implementation of FoI legislation. Albanese, despite the party’s platform commitments to open, transparent and accountable government, is compulsively secretive, and not inclined to consult outside the circle of his cronies and privileged lobbyists.

Ginger group pressure would keep the blowtorch on Albanese’s belly

The real value of a ginger group of community independents, Teals and Greens, in short, would be to hold Labor to its promises and pretences. Not to take reform out of Labor space, but to make it fair dinkum. Labor, moreover, has sometimes hijacked the rhetoric of reform — for example, about taking the power of big money out of electoral funding and creating an even playing field — to entrench corrupt advantages for the big parties while causing disadvantages to the smaller parties. There’s a long and corrupt bipartisan history of such rorting, but it needs people not part of the rort to prise public dollars from the big machine players.

Three years of experience has made it clear that neither the Albanese Government, nor the public service governance structures have any intention of making systemic reforms to governance which would make repeats of scandals such as Robodebt impossible. Those ministers who think they are doing so, listen to the wrong people and are being hoodwinked by management-speak. Nor changes which would prevent partisan abuse of grants programs and the patronage system. This term has seen diminished ways of holding malefactors to account. There have been successful attempts to use public service legislation as a curtain concealing corruption, misbehaviour and illegality by public servants. The public service commission, assisted by senior bureaucratic management structures, does more to enable and potentiate mismanagement than prevent it, and has a dubious record in bringing bad behaviour to notice. Its role is significantly less important and effective than the media, the reason, perhaps, for the intensive efforts in attorneys-general to criminalise journalistic inquiry and disclosure.

Most politicians go into Parliament with sincere intentions of effecting real changes to people’s lives. Some are ambitious for the noble purpose of getting closer to where real power is exercised so that they can push for change. Securing change is a crab-like process, often involving much compromise along the way. But many of those in the major parties find that achieving aims involves much more than compromises in the battle for ideas and priorities. They become hostage to the faction chieftains, and their pragmatic priorities, and, often, their intrinsic conservativism and opposition to rocking the boat. Rocking the boat, moreover, affects ministerial aspirations.

Those who go into politics as independents, or in small parties such as the Greens often have different views of the world. They may not have whole programs of government in mind. But they have strong views on a few subjects, while being prepared to defer to reason on the other. For most of the crossbench, the environment, climate change and good government are the primary issues. There are also strong concerns about human rights, justice, and a sense of stewardship over programs to help the aged and people with disabilities, children, Indigenous Australian, migrants and refugees. Luckily for those being canvased for support by Labor, nearly all of these are right up Labor’s tree, fitting comfortably into its policy platforms.

Fitful, perfunctory and unenthusiastic implementation of signature policies

But Labor’s efforts, even on policies on which it campaigns strongly have been unenthusiastic in practice, even fitful and perfunctory. Labor has made little secret of the fact that its climate targets are more focused on doing a little bit more than the Opposition, than about being of the right dimension for the problem facing the world. Its targets on hydrocarbons and coal miners are subject to state and regional pressures about keeping the coal industry going, at least for the (indefinite) time being. Likewise, targets are subject to change depending on the lobbying of state premiers, mining unions and multinational miners, many of whom pay no tax.

Albanese might well resent the pressure and the constant criticism from the crossbench. He may even consider it impertinent, ill-informed and lacking any understanding of all the other pressures and demands upon his time. But the fact is that these politicians are demanding that he implement his own announced policies. And even at their loudest and most unpleasant, they are probably not putting anything like the same pressure or getting anything like the same return on their efforts as the well-heeled lobbyists on the other side. All the more so, usually, when much of the advice coming from government departments openly favours anti-environmental causes, seeing any “concession” to environmental considerations as a blow against economic rationality, inspired by political cowardice.

Small wonder when traditional Labor supporters fear that a re-elected Labor government will be as disappointing as in its first term. Prone to look for excuse for minimal performance. Anxious about criticism. Terrified of criticism from the Murdoch organisation or multinational businesses. Fearful of adding to government spending or adding to public debt. Addicted to patchwork solutions invented by public relations and advertising people, which, as often as not, only make the particular problem worse. There are solutions to housing finance problems, for example. But finding them involves policy work, hard thinking and the willingness to contemplate unpopular choices. Implementing such policy involves courage and political risks. The days of thinking that good policy is good politics have passed. That’s why Labor itself needs outside fingers in the pie for its own good.