Opinion: Is Australia’s Labor Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, a vanishing comet or will he win a second term?
With a general election due by May next year, the phoney campaign is under way. Albanese, holding power with just a three-seat majority in Australia’s 151-seat parliament, unleashed a fire hose of policy in mid-September: a bold, if woolly, plan to ban young people from using social media, new restrictions on hate speech, and a brave attempt to crack the massive intergenerational costs confronting Australia by forcing the better-off to pay more of their own aged care.
Finally, Albanese, 61, and his youthful Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, 46 (Labor’s leader-in-waiting), appear to be showing the policy bottle and political muscle they have long needed.
Chalmers abandoned etiquette and vented against the nation’s central bank – and by extension its mild-mannered governor, Michele Bullock – when he said out loud what many cash-strapped Australians suspect: the bank’s decision to maintain interest rates at a relatively high 4.35% is “smashing the economy”.
It was a much-longed-for piece of red meat to Labor’s base, a stark message that sheeted the blame for the country’s current cost-of-living crisis off the government and onto the Reserve Bank – never mind that record government spending may be helping to fuel still-rising inflation, now at 3.8%.
Cost-of-living worries top Australians’ concerns. Recent surveys show more than 70% of voters count it as their most pressing issue.
Unsurprisingly, more Australian households – which have one of the highest concentrations of variable rate mortgages in the world – are struggling. More than two in five homeowners (42%) reported difficulties in paying their home loan in August.
With the economy growing by just 1.5% in the year ended June 30 – the weakest since the early-1990s – Australia now looks less the perennially lucky country, currently sucking in many young New Zealanders.
Given the feeble economic growth, it is possible the country could be in recession before the May election; certainly the unemployment rate, which grew to 4.2% in July, suggests that’s where it may be heading.
Were the dreaded “R” word to materialise, then Albanese’s chances of leading his second majority government would be much diminished; he might scrape back as a prime minister leading a minority government that relies on independent MPs for support.
Polls show the Labor Party locked at 50-50 with Peter Dutton’s opposition conservative coalition, suggesting a hung parliament is a strong possibility.
If the election does produce that result – or, indeed, the ousting of Labor – the heavy defeat a year ago of the nationwide referendum to give Aboriginal people a Voice to Parliament will be seen as the beginning of the Albanese government’s unravelling. The Voice referendum was the Labor prime minister’s earliest and grandest initiative – he promised it within minutes of his election victory – and he invested enormous effort and political capital to try to make the referendum succeed.
By itself, the humiliating result was not an irrecoverable disaster. But what followed was a kind of collective shock and grieving inside the government, which paralysed Albanese and his ministers for months.
It seemed they lost their nerve and allowed Dutton’s relentless appeals to Australia’s basest fears – migrants and crime – to crowd the political and media space the Albanese government largely vacated for too long.
Labor’s supporters must hope that strange hibernation is over – for polling shows more and more voters have given up on a too-timid Albanese and instead want to listen to the crazy-brave Dutton.
