The Coalition has walked away from evidence. Labor still listens – but only up to the point where action becomes politically uncomfortable. That may prove just as dangerous.

Michael Keating’s examination of the Liberal Party’s abandonment of evidence-based policymaking is quietly devastating. It dismantles the claims that underpin the Liberals’ new energy and migration postures and exposes a party that no longer troubles itself with reality.

But Keating’s piece also invites a broader reflection: if the Liberals have drifted into open hostility to evidence, what is the position of evidence within the political party that now governs the country?

Labor, unlike the Coalition, does not reject evidence. It consults modelling, listens to departments, speaks with experts, and frames itself as a party of competence. But evidence in modern Labor politics is not sovereign. It is a participant, not a driver. A source of guidance, but rarely the final word. Evidence counsels; politics decides.

The party’s ideological journey helps explain this tension. From Whitlam’s state-building ambition, to Hawke and Keating’s technocratic economic rationalism, to the managerial centrism of the Rudd and Gillard years, Labor has repeatedly balanced evidence against an evolving sense of what is politically “safe.”

Under Albanese, that instinct for caution has hardened into a governing style. Labor listens to the experts, but the real arbiter of policy is risk management and the permanent calculation of what might alarm voters, provoke business and media hostility, or trigger an unnecessary wedge.

This shapes the way evidence is used. When it supports the narrow ground of electoral safety, it is embraced. When it points toward more transformative, disruptive or imaginative reforms on climate, tax, housing, or long-term investment it is softened, deferred, or absorbed into a modest version of itself. Evidence is rarely denied, but neither is it allowed to fully set the trajectory.

Consider the three areas where the evidence today is clearest. Climate modelling says the transition must accelerate, and that renewables are the cheapest path. Yet climate policy remains incremental and careful, framed more around bill relief than about economic transformation. Housing economists agree that without major public construction, affordability cannot be restored. Yet public housing remains constrained by a political fear of breaching fiscal “discipline.” And on revenue, virtually every independent analysis shows Australia cannot sustain advanced services with one of the lowest tax-to-GDP ratios in the OECD. Yet the words “tax reform” remain unsayable.

In each case, evidence is present but politics decides what portion of it can be acted upon without jeopardising the fragile architecture of electoral trust. Labor behaves as though the true danger lies not in the problems themselves but in proposing solutions more ambitious than the median voter is assumed to support.

The party lives in the afterglow of 2019, still convinced that caution is the price of survival.

This is not to equate Labor’s position with that of the Liberals. What Keating exposes in the Coalition is not caution but collapse and a policy process so hollowed out by factional grievance that evidence scarcely registers. But the broader danger is that the space for evidence to shape national direction is shrinking from two sides: a Coalition that repudiates it, and a Labor Party that filters it through the narrow lens of political risk.

This dynamic leaves Australia in an uncomfortable position. We are living through an era that demands long-term, structural, sometimes disruptive responses. Climate instability, demographic ageing, productivity stagnation, housing system dysfunction, and the geopolitical reordering of our region all require politics to think beyond the next election cycle. Evidence is becoming more challenging, more urgent, and more insistent yet the political system is becoming more cautious, more reactive, and more defensive.

Keating is right to highlight the danger of a major party operating in defiance of basic facts. But there is a different danger in a major party that listens to evidence only to retreat from its implications. Evidence can warn, but it cannot compel. It can inform, but it cannot force courage. When the political system treats evidence as advisory rather than authoritative, the result is a country that remains well briefed and yet insufficiently prepared.

The deeper question Keating’s analysis raises is therefore not confined to one side of politics. What happens to a nation when one major party abandons evidence altogether, and the other accepts evidence only up to the point where action becomes uncomfortable? For a country confronting transformational challenges, that may be the most destabilising policy setting of all.

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

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