How Albanese plans to make his run for the big league

July 31, 2021 â€" 5.00am

For federal Labor to win power from opposition is a rare and difficult feat. So when Tony Blair led British Labour into office in 1997, his Australian comrades were keen to learn the secret of his success. Blair told a visiting delegation of ALP parliamentarians that there were three priorities to keep in mind â€" reassurance, reassurance, reassurance.

Many voters had unhappy memories of trade union radicalism and a suspicion of old-style socialism, explained Blair. His advice hit home with one of the ambitious Australian MPs in his audience. And it guided Kevin Rudd’s successful campaign to bring down John Howard in 2007 after four failed Labor efforts.

Illustration: John ShakespeareCredit:The Sydney Morning Herald

After Gough Whitlam in 1972 and Bob Hawke in 1983, Rudd became just the third Labor leader to win power from opposition in postwar Australia.

Anthony Albanese absorbed the lesson. He is guided by the same overarching priority to reassure the electorate as he works to become the fourth. This has frustrated many Labor true believers.

It frustrated them during the first full year of the pandemic. They wanted Albanese to take a daily meataxe to Scott Morrison. Instead he refrained from strident criticism and offered only constructive advice.

Only in the past few months has he taken a consistently critical stance. Labor has hammered home the critique: “The government had two jobs this year â€" to roll out the vaccine and fix the quarantine system and it’s failed at both.”

Albanese’s restraint has been vindicated. The Morrison government has been seen to fail on its own terms, unhindered by an abusive opposition. As the old adage would counsel: “When your opponent is destroying himself, don’t interrupt.”

And Labor’s recent attack line has developed traction. Now when Albanese addresses groups and begins, “the government had two jobs this year”, his audience sometimes finishes the sentence for him.

A poll this week by Utting Research showed that 57 per cent of respondents are dissatisfied with Morrison’s handling of the quarantine system and 62 per cent with his handling of the vaccine rollout, even though state governments share responsibility for both.

Five state and territory elections have been held during the pandemic. Five state and territory governments have been returned. A time of national emergency requires careful political handling. When governments are seen to be making credible efforts, they will be returned. Oppositions that are seen to be unhelpful or vindictive will be punished.

Albanese appears to have judged the situation well. Public sentiment in recent weeks has moved decisively against the government in every published poll, and Labor has positioned itself to benefit from the growing disenchantment.

Albanese’s cautiousness frustrated many true believers anew this week when Labor dumped a five-year-old plan to curb tax concessions for negative gearing and capital gains. This policy pair had been designed to cool overheated housing price rises. Albanese Labor this week also agreed to accept the Coalition’s third tranche of income tax cuts, already legislated and due to take effect in 2024.

Labor partisans complained bitterly that the party had surrendered its principles. Whitlam would be rolling in his grave, said one.

Albanese is unapologetic about dumping the negative gearing and capital gains tax changes. He told me this week: “When Labor won under Whitlam, Hawke and Rudd, none of them was arguing for new taxes.”

“One of my Labor principles,” says Albanese, “is for Labor to win elections.” The Labor leader likes to say that he is determined to take Morrison’s “roads to victory and turn them into cul de sacs”.

Morrison used Labor’s negative gearing and capital gains tax plan under Bill Shorten as the basis for a scare campaign at the 2019 election. It would collapse the housing market, it was anti-aspiration, it was class war. He did the same with Labor’s plan to curb franking credits for some self-funded retirees. Albanese Labor dumped that policy months ago.

Scare campaigns are easy to prosecute, hard to defend against, and very, very effective. “We are looking to the future,” Albanese said this week, “we don’t want to re-litigate the past.”

One of the most potent of the traditional Coalition scare campaigns against Labor has been closed off by the Coalition itself. The time-honoured accusation that Labor “can’t manage the nation’s finances” won’t work coming from a government that’s racked up a trillion-dollar debt.

The opposition needs to do more than critique the government and close off obvious vulnerabilities. It needs to set out an alternative.

Labor went to the 2019 election with 280 policies, no narrative and a leader who was distrusted by the electorate. Albanese needs to go into the 2022 election with a handful of core policies, not to spell out everything a Labor government would do but to convey the character of government it would form. He also needs a narrative and the trust of the electorate.

The core of Labor’s offerings is visible already. Its first offering, paradoxically, perhaps, is what it’s just decided it won’t be offering. By removing the planned increases in taxes for investors, Labor is signalling that it is not the enemy of aspiration.

This is a meta-message, beyond any particular policy. It’s an indicator of political character, of world view. It’s designed to reassure anyone with a mindset of aspiration, including investors, small business owners, the self-employed, sole traders, immigrant communities looking to build better lives, anyone who wants to invest and prosper. No class war here, is the subtext. Albanese’s tagline: “No one held back, no one left behind.”

Second is the more conventional set of policy commitments. In a time dominated by a pandemic, the alternative government has to demonstrate it has a better plan for dealing with it. Especially now that the NSW outbreak is proving so intractable.

Albanese has sketched out a four-part plan, necessary but insufficient. The first element is establishing dedicated quarantine facilities. Second is increasing vaccine supply. Third is stepping up public information campaigns. Fourth is urgently manufacturing mRNA vaccines in Australia, the type that can be quickly gene-edited to deal with future variants.

But this plan is vague and not demonstrably superior to the government’s. It’s also likely to be leapfrogged by Morrison’s next national cabinet plan, due in coming days. As the election approaches, Albanese will need to make a series of major statements to the nation developing each of his four key points, amounting to a long-term strategy for Australia to live safely and freely in a covid-saturated world.

Next are Labor’s priority themes beyond COVID. Again, Albanese has set out his central offerings; in a time of pandemic priority, most people will not have heard of them.

First is his overarching economic theme of national reconstruction, redolent of postwar reconstruction. Albanese will talk of “an economic recovery that works for everyone”. It will encompass policies for secure work, higher wages, investment to make Australia a renewable energy superpower, and infrastructure.

The contrast will be with eight years of Coalition governments with stagnant wages and “no big infrastructure projects to show for it”.

Universal childcare is to be a hallmark of Albanese’s campaign. He presents it as an economic productivity measure, allowing more women to work, lifting output and incomes, as well as a social reform to create opportunity. The contrast will be with a Coalition government that has shown a studied indifference to the concerns of women. “Fixing the aged care crisis” will be another central theme, appealing to a different demographic.

One of Albanese’s most resonant policy pledges will be one of his least expensive â€" a national anti-corruption commission.

Perhaps Albanese’s biggest problem is winning the trust of the electorate. Not because he’s untrustworthy but because he’s been largely invisible. Australia needs to get to know him a lot better in the scant time left before the next election, which Morrison needs to call by May at the latest.

On the personal level, the Labor leader’s greatest asset is his perceived authenticity. His personal story of growing up in public housing, raised by a single mum on an invalid pension, is part of it. His former leader and close ally Kevin Rudd has a suggestion for campaigning on it.

“In political leadership, authenticity is fundamental, and this is where Albo has it in spades over Scotty from Marketing,” says Rudd. “Look at their team affiliations. Albo has been with the Rabbitohs from the year dot, in good times and in bad. Whereas Morrison â€" when was it again that he jumped on board the Cronulla Sharks?”

Morrison is a performative loyalist of the Sharks rugby league team since moving into the Shire, Sharks territory. But he’d earlier declared himself “more of a rugby fan” and a follower of Easts. Is this a bit of stretch? It might seem obscure, but not to footy fans in NSW or Queensland, which happen to be the main electoral battlegrounds for the next election. Diehards will consider Morrison an opportunist blow-in.

Albanese likes to say he “came out of the womb red and green”, the colours of the South Sydney Rabbitohs. “Even when News Corp tried to eliminate the Rabbitohs from the league,” adds Rudd, “Albo was there, addressing public rallies to defend his club. And he won.”

How’s that for reassuring?

Peter Hartcher is political editor and international editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

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