Deposed Labor cabinet minister Ed Husic threw down the gauntlet to the Albanese Government last week when he challenged it to “burn through the timidity that has shackled us in the first term”.

It came immediately on the back of an election deemed by most commentators to be the worst in living memory for its near total absence of substantive policy ideas or discussion about Australia’s future; and a campaign with almost no outward reflection on the global strategic challenges that prompted so many voters to seek the safest harbour.

The telling question now is whether the Albanese cabinet and its leader are equipped to grasp the nettle of serious reform around productivity in a world where, to quote poet Ted Hughes, “the whole landscape is imperilled, like a tarpaulin with the wind under it”.

Labor heads still spin at the prospect of its swelling caucus. Comparisons with Whitlam, Hawke and Rudd are regularly tabled.

But there is enough evidence in the public domain now to question whether Labor is adequately prepared for the challenges that lie before it. There are grumblings about the lack of contestability in some policy discussions and the shutting down of others, especially on the supposedly sacred ground of AUKUS, as ministers fear the vindictiveness of the prime minister if they challenge his line. Some in Canberra allude to a difficulty in getting Albanese to focus on the tectonic plates shifting in regional and world politics.

Labor’s win is historic. But the reality check comes with how the election reveals the further atomisation of Australian politics, a trait common to other Western democracies.

Look no further than Britain for a sobering comparison. Two weeks ago, Albanese improved on Labor’s primary vote by just over 2 percentage points: from 32.5% in 2022 to 34.6%.

Even with the differences in voting systems, that’s roughly comparable to the small improvement Keir Starmer made in British Labour’s vote at the UK general election last year on that recorded by former leader Jeremy Corbyn in 2019: Starmer’s 33.7% to Corbyn’s 32.1%.

Bear in mind, too, that in 1993 Paul Keating improved on Labor’s primary vote in 1990 by a whopping 6 percentage points, and this on the occasion of Labor’s fifth election win.

The London Review of Books’ James Butler describes Starmer as a “besuited void”, while the Guardian’s Marina Hyde observes that “these days, Starmer can’t encounter two stools without falling between them, with the problem entirely of his own making”, and that “listening to any Starmer speech simulates the feeling of incarceration in a medium-security prison”.

Starmer’s pleas for stability were jolted in recent English local elections by Nigel Farage, who gained 30% of the national vote share. Farage is already declaring Reform to be the “main opposition party”. As Butler makes clear, British Labour has “pointlessly squandered the popular goodwill that accompanied its return to office”.

Albanese has spent more time since the election warning of overreach and hubris, than developing a narrative or platform for what may ultimately turn into a nine-year Labor period in office. Insiders describe a prime minister concentrated on the management of daily political tactics, rather than the hard brainwork of developing strategies for the longer term.

On the world beyond, the prime minister also appears comfortable in continuity.

At the National Press Club just days before the election, Albanese was asked whether the Defence Strategic Review of 2022 was in need of a refresh given the Trump shocks.

His response captured the very paralysis that many hope does not come to define his period in power: “You don’t need a refresh to tell any Labor prime minister, the party of John Curtin, that we need to defend ourselves.”

But the times require more than reheating the corpse of a Labor legend. Never mind, too, that Albanese has countersigned Scott Morrison’s Cold War-style “forward defence” policy, where Australia’s external role is still largely spurred by the expeditionary impulse to assist its great power ally in a war against a rising Asian power.

The prime minister has nothing like the task Curtin faced. As opposition leader in the 1930s, Curtin spent years hauling his ragamuffins towards a respectable foreign policy: his ranks contained a mixture of international socialists who saw in the Soviet Union a model of world leadership, Catholics who hated communism as the enemy of religion, liberal internationalists clinging to the League of Nations, and isolationists who wanted to turn their backs on the world altogether. Curtin succeeded in doing so, but only in the nick of time.

Subsequently, it was his political opponents who were, fairly or not, then saddled with the charge of leaving Australia militarily unprepared at the outbreak of World War II.

The risk for Labor today is that its foot-dragging on defence spending and strategy may well leave it stained with a similar legacy.

If it is accepted that the military balance in Asia is tilting in Beijing’s favour and that Xi Jinping’s confidence is growing each year; and if the unthinkable happens and a hot war erupts in the 2040s, what could the Australian Defence Force realistically contribute? There may well be an inflated idea in the Australian community, and in some parts of the bureaucracy, of what the ADF can do.

Labor has to navigate a path that eschews alarmism, yet avoids complacency. It will not get there by quoting speeches from 1941. It will get there by working with Japan, Indonesia, South Korea, the EU and Southeast Asian nations to influence and moderate the behaviours and inclinations of both China and the US.

Republished from the Australian Financial Review, 18 May 2025