Sooner or later Anthony Albanese or his successor will lead the Labor Government to defeat.

Probably a decisive defeat, with many in the electorate thinking that Labor had had its turn and that it was time for the other side to have a go. As NSW and Queensland show, voters are quite forgiving of parties after they have had a spell, sometimes only a short one, in the wilderness.

When the time for a turnover arrives, campaign warnings of the risks posed by the Opposition, based on old history, will be ignored. When Labor loses, it will be only because Labor’s biggest governing weakness was always its failure to galvanise voters around ideas and ideals, or to unite its supporters around enduring Labor values.

The aftermath of defeat always involves regret and recrimination. We are seeing that now in the Liberal Party as it responds to its May defeat. Leadership ambitions, as much as self-criticism and helpful advice, are in play. It’s a short time of free-for-all before the party, or so its leaders hope, settles down around new leaders and ideas, and redevelops discipline and unity of purpose. Hard to know how it will end, given the pyromania some have brought to the task. But it is instructive to watch it if only as a foretaste of the Götterdämmerung at the end of the next Labor Government.

During the inquest, both insiders and perpetual outsiders will get a run. The party organisation will be stringently criticised. Factions will be denounced, though insiders will take care. The leader and the party will be accused of having done too little, or too much. Of being too bold or too timid. Of having a personality and image that scared off voters, or of being so vapid that voters wondered if they held firm convictions or genuine character. The poor, dim voters who failed to endorse the party will be accused of being too greedy for instant benefits in future and too ungrateful for benefits in the past. Too stupid to see through the lies of the other side, or the irresponsibility of a particular policy promise. The party will have been too far to the right, or too vulnerable to charges of being too far to the left. All will agree that the party must change its approach and its ideas in response to the humiliation. But some will seem to want to redouble the doses of the unpopular medicines and some will want to drop the medicine altogether.

The wipeout will wrench many of the best and brightest young women and men from well-paid political jobs and seats. It will also drag a host of Labor cronies, mates and lobbyists out of comfy patronage sinecures, installing instead the power brokers of the other side. These will immediately change the way that power is exercised, and the new regime will not hesitate to ensure that the flow of government money and discretions goes to their friends, their pet ideas and their ideologies.

Labor has already become smug and comfortable, back to its old vices and feeling secure from voters

For Labor insiders, the sense of loss will be the greater because Labor will be said to have quickly become smug and comfortable in power. Quickly reunited with the old Labor tree people and in the pockets of its old mates in the lobbies, in business, in unions and the non-profit sector. Unembarrassed about returning to the old petty corruptions and abuses, including the improper rewarding of friends and the conscious punishment of enemies.

Astonishingly for a party which initially won office on promises of restoring honesty, transparency and integrity in government, it will be accused of having quickly adopted virtually all the rorts of previous administrations, including compulsive secrecy, politicisation of the public service and the neutralisation of regulatory bodies with watchdog functions. This would include the National Anti-Corruption Commission, operating with so much secrecy, and so little accountability that the public knew only that it was not focused on the big fish, and wasn’t even very good with minnows. A NACC designed to be hopeless, not least by failing to conduct its operations in public, lest mates and cronies of Labor ministers face embarrassment and difficult questions about how and why they got their hands in the cookie jar.

But this time about there’s a dimension of the coming to judgment that is, or ought to be new. In accordance with a trend that must now be called established, about a third of voters failed to vote for either major party. Instead, they voted for independents as part of a conscious rejection of the way the major political parties govern and do business in Australia. Neither of the major parties has seemed to have leaders capable of motivating and mobilising large audiences towards the cause. That’s not necessarily because they are seen as weak or uninspiring, if well intentioned. Rather they are seen as being out of touch with the broader community and addicted to policies the electorate has made clear it rejects. For some voters, exasperation at modern politics is accentuated by the feeling that governments of either stripe are increasingly unable to affect outcomes, and that parties have reverted to the servicing of big donors, such as oil and gas companies, and financial service industries, or gambling interests and property developers.

On one side are the Greens, by now regularly getting about a half as many votes as Labor candidates and critical in the winning of Labor seats, given that Labor is getting a primary vote of only about 33%. The Greens are reliable in giving their preferences to Labor and, generally, in supporting Labor legislation in the Senate. This is while the Labor machine and Albanese personally are always trying to screw them. They try to restrict political resources, including staff, going to the Greens, deprive them of credit for any policy approach or success in putting matters on the agenda. In many cases, they will make concessions to the Opposition, producing weaker legislation than planned, rather than use Greens votes to get legislation in place. The Greens are not a party of government, though it has policies generally across the spectrum of conventional politics. But like independents such as David Pocock and Jacqui Lambie, they thrive in publicity and the perception that they are playing a role in setting the parliamentary agenda and in the shape of legislation. Labor’s mean-spiritedness in such matters makes it look a pragmatic party, always seeming to be doing as little as it can get away with, and kept honest by a party of some principle. It doesn’t help Labor or its image. A day will come when angry Greens members will look to make deals with the other side of the chamber, if only to underline Labor’s dependence on them.

The big parties have made no pitch to small parties and independents, or to the third of the voters who support them. But these are now the source of their power

Labor has not depended on the community Independents, including the Teals, in either of its two terms in power. These members are fiscally conservative, although they are likely to vote for progressive legislation in areas including climate change and the environment, honesty and integrity in government, and a good deal of education, housing, health and community welfare programs. In general terms, they represent middle class seats which once traditionally voted for the conservative side but are now dismayed by the stridently conservative tone of successive Liberal leaders. Labor is unlikely to win these seats, but the other side of politics can, either with moderate leadership looking to the centre of politics, or at an election where voters are particularly polarised between the major parties, something that has not happened in recent years. If Labor wants to deny power to the Coalition, it should be helping these moderates in keeping metropolitan seats almost unwinnable for conventional Liberals.

After the Tampa election of 2001, when Kim Beazley abandoned Labor policy on refugees, fully half its party membership, mostly of the Labor Left, deserted the Labor party. They have not returned and now regularly support the Greens, helping in the process to broaden the party’s appeal on subjects wider than the environment and action on climate change. What passes as being Left in Labor (including in Albanese’s faction) are merely Labor Right lite members of mutual support groups. Gone are active groups, both at parliament and in the broader party, focused on being the engine room of progressive change in politics.

This was, once, the emotional centre of the party, the area that wrote the history, nourished the traditions and worked to sustain a link between working women and men and the sense of a Labor crusade to protect their interests and their rights. They particularly pushed the idea that Labor had a special duty towards the poorest and the most marginalised, including Indigenous Australians. In more recent times, it was from the left that Labor found itself pushed to adopt causes such as the environment, multicultural Australia and anti-discrimination legislation. Increasingly, many Labor professionals have come to see this shift as “woke”, distasteful to many Australians, especially of the working class. In this, they are rather more following international trends, particularly in Trump’s America, than any marked change in the character or personality of ordinary Australians.

On the other side of politics are groups including the One Nation Party, who are collectively gathering about a third of the centre-right vote. These are not, generally, groups looking to stake out grounds in the centre of politics. They are populist, strongly anti-immigration and supposedly focused on law and order. They believe, wrongly, that recent migrants are responsible for most crimes. A sizeable number subscribe to the theory that white Australians are being swamped by immigration from Asia, Africa and the Middle East. The organisation of the No vote at the referendum on an Aboriginal voice has created the conditions for the open expression of sentiments hostile to non-European migration. Labor has been largely silent as this has developed, even as police and some politicians responding to events in the Middle East have shown that they think that the risks of protest and the expression of racial hatred, including antisemitism, come primarily from Muslim Australians.

Australia may follow the UK, US and Europe with new parties and new ways of doing business

If one judges by events overseas, it is quite possible that there may be a fundamental rearrangement of Australian political parties over the next few years. Consider, for example, that the Conservative Party in the UK now appears to have slipped so far behind Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, which is indeed well ahead of Labour in current opinion polls. Labour itself won office in a landslide, but has disappointed British voters and is now unpopular and divided. The British electoral system, first past the post, and the fact that Labour could hold off from an election for another four years gives Labour room to manoeuvre, but Keir Starmer’s leadership has been far from inspiring, and his management of his party even less so.

In the US, the conventional loose party system is in complete disarray. The Republican Party is rather more the Trump Party than a party of big business and sound financial stewardship. The Democrats have scarcely been heard of at a national level since their comprehensive demolition at the presidential election. In any event, Trump, with a tame Congress and House of Representatives, and a fawning and lawless Supreme Court, has breached traditional checks and balances, and so far at least, governs by will without regard to convention or the distribution of powers with the states. He has also broken the electoral system by stacking Congressional districts in Republican states. It may be that Trump will not move to absolute monarchy. He may even retire, as strictly he must, in 2028. But he has so seriously changed the system of government that it would be almost impossible to undo it and return to any system resembling the US polity of old.

In almost every nation of western Europe, at least one new right-wing party, strongly opposed to migration, has emerged, at the expense of other parties, and some have captured government or threaten to do so. Political tumult in Australia may seem small beer compared with such convulsions, but its relations with these countries now must be readjusted to suit the approaches of new parties.

Some in the Liberal Party are contemplating a more ideologically conservative party. Some others, calling themselves conservatives, contemplate what James Paterson called a Trump-lite Party, nationalist, deeply anti-immigration, economically interventionist and protectionist.

That imagines that moderate Liberals will have to form new alliances, possibly with the Teals and, possibly from among right-wing elements in the Labor Party. That the Nationals see themselves as the conservative grouping, and would welcome Liberal defectors, makes the risk of a serious split more likely. But many of the Liberal conservative wings regard the risk of a split with horror and would rather soldier on with present arrangements even with a moderate leader. The last election, after all, told them something about the electoral attractiveness of Trumpism, and of hard right-wing economic ideas.

Labor should be preparing to explain how it blew a record majority and an imploded coalition

Labor is under less risk of atomisation, in part because it makes little pretence of a membership base or internal party management responsive to pressure from its grassroots. But members and voters are restive, not least as they wonder at Albanese’s continued timidity and lack of aspiration, and his unwillingness to risk any of his majority or electoral credit. Labor simply does not have the excuse that it has only limited power, or that it is held back. Albanese understands very well that the first and the last requirement of political parties is that they win and retain. But if he is asking for re-endorsement at the next election, voters will ask what he has done with what he had. He’s deluding himself if he thinks that a brilliant campaign, and his character, style and self-confidence won the last election in a landslide. Albo hardly came into it. Dutton, as the Liberals now admit, was Labor’s vote winner. One cannot even say that this was because Albanese was adroit in making him the issue.

If Albanese will not use the power and authority he has been given, what’s the point of giving him another go? If he lacks the courage or the guts, the imagination or the breadth of ideas, he should get out of the way for someone who can provide more effective leadership and some inspiration. And perhaps some idea of where they are going, and why.

Loyal but despondent Labor voters could well be asking how they blew it as early as 2027.

Republished from The Canberra Times, 16 October 2025

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.