While Scott Morrison and the Coalition can get their feet back under the desk and get on with governing, Labor MPs have to settle for doing the only thing losers can do post-election — pick a new leader.
Except, after a tortuous process of foreshadowings, announcements, immediate withdrawals and, in Joel Fitzgibbon’s case, a confusing failure to explain exactly what he was doing, there won’t be a contest: Anthony Albanese will be elected unopposed. There will be no repeat of the 2013 party and caucus vote process that saw Labor members, for the first time, having a say in who would lead the parliamentary party.
Labor members back then strongly supported Albanese over Bill Shorten, only for caucus to reverse that and then some. More than one member of the Right pointed out at the time that Albanese would have won if he’d gotten all the votes of his Left caucus colleagues.
Chris Bowen knew he’d have to pull off the same trick to defeat Albanese, and as one of the authors of the platform the party just saw put to the torch by voters, it was always going to be tough, especially with senior figures like Penny Wong backing Albanese. Queensland’s Jim Chalmers, heir to the Labor tradition that the seat of Rankin must be held by a former senior staffer and ANU PhD holder, decided not to carry the standard of the Right into battle. Victoria’s Richard Marles, best known for starring in a WikiLeaks cable, will pursue the deputy’s job.
A restive Right looking to mobilise for an Anyone But Albo campaign doesn’t augur well for Labor unity in the next three years. They just did six years of discipline and look where it got them — running second to a mob that churned had three PMs and three deputy PMs. Stability, plainly, isn’t quite at the top of voter concerns despite what they might say. What’s the old political saw? If you can’t govern yourselves, you may as well govern the country. And Albanese will only be given one term. Failure in 2022 will usher in a new generation entirely.
Unlike Scott Morrison, or Malcolm Turnbull, or Bill Shorten, Albanese has at least done a long parliamentary apprenticeship, having been around since 1996. That’s no guarantee of success — Tony Abbott was a parliamentary veteran and the worst PM we ever had. What Albanese shares with Turnbull, however, is something rare in politics. “What you see is what you get,” Albanese said earlier in the week about himself, and he’s correct.
Along with Turnbull and the now long-retired Lindsay Tanner, Albanese is the only senior politician of recent years who speaks exactly the same way in public as he does in private. Nearly every politician adopts a persona when they speak in public, and usually go from charming, thoughtful and human in private to robotic, tedious and focused only on talking points. Julia Gillard didn’t do it until she became prime minister, but it removed in a moment one of the most compelling parts of her political identity.
Albanese, who is open about his delight in “fighting Tories” is also happy to go anywhere, any time to do it, readily appearing in some the most fetid corners of Sky News to argue with reactionaries and fascists, or emerging from his office to confront a pack of far-right anti-climate-action extremists who’d trekked to Marrickville to abuse him (led, hilariously, by the shortly-to-lose-her-seat Sophia Mirabella).
All of that plain-spoken enthusiasm for the fray only goes so far, of course. Nationally, Labor and the Greens together managed only 43.5% of the national vote on Saturday. In Queensland, the total was 37%. The broad progressive vote in Australia got belted, mainly via the swing against Labor. When John Hewson lost in 1993, the media assumed Paul Keating had won a two-term victory, so there’s always a tendency to catastrophise unexpected losses, but Labor has a serious task of determining not merely why it repelled so many Labor voters, but why so many of them in Queensland (and the Hunter Valley) went not to the LNP but to fascist parties.
Particularly concerning is that for all the genius-of-hindsight criticism of Bill Shorten, his goal of making the election a referendum on wages was the right one, but the party of working Australians failed to achieve that. And Labor’s losses were particularly severe in seats and states with a strong mining industry.
Mining has, over the last three years, been the private sector industry with the lowest wages growth of all, even lower than construction — in the period since 2016, wages grew on average 0.37% per quarter in mining compared to 0.51% per quarter across the private sector. And yet mining communities turned their backs on the party wanting to increase wages.
This was a defeat that went to the very heart of Labor, which is from where Albanese will have to rebuild.
How can Albanese get Labor back on track? Send your comments to boss@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name.
“get on with governing” Is this some sort of joke?
Other than making people on the dole pee in a jar, sending out letters of demand on AFP/Dept. of SS letterhead to pensioners…killing innocent refugees who came by boat while accepting those of questionable character that came via the USA. Deporting peaceful migrants while importing young AuPairs. Encouraging (if not engaging in) water theft and impregnating their staff….exactly what governing has this mob of drongos done?
Well RH – they are still having a red hot go at implementing the full IPA agenda.
Thank Dog we have the senate to stop them succeeding very much.
RH, I know that you wear your heart upon your sleeve but, as I have endeavoured to point out in copious posts to you and others, such laudable objectives never take us very far. The research of the Webb’s (Sydney and Beatrice) went nowhere; the detail of the research notwithstanding.
The sats for the UK are quite comprehensive and I’ll warrant the same trend exists in Australia and NZ. During the mid 80s the size of the lumpen prols (families of institutionalised unemployment : i.e. never have had a job) was in the order of 40,000. Over the intervening interval the number has increased ten fold+.
The options are either some Huxleyian “solution” (separated from drugs except those prescribed etc) with their not influencing (i.e. segregated from) the mainstream at all or potassium cyanide mixed in with the (delivered) pizza and coke.
In the mean time, those with a job (even at $40,000 pa) don’t give a damn; the election refers and, for the younger set, their behaviour is identical in a cafe or a restaurant even among themselves.
Also, appealing to the result of the election, I think you’ll find that NOT using the front door in regard to immigration will have consequences and the electorate is quite ok with those consequences – whatever is written about infant mortality or whatever.
As to “impregnating staff”, that luminary of fair mindedness, Thomas Jefferson Esq., is a salient exemplar here (and by no means alone – over the centuries). It was only by a preference for oral that a former president omitted to follow Jefferson’s example. The list goes on.
What have you been smoking Kyle, that is quite an exotic rant….
“exotic” is your word but are you able to identify errors of process of logic? If not then the reply”sands”.
” And Albanese will only be given one term. Failure in 2022 will usher in a new generation entirely.”
This sounds about right.
If things go really badly for him and some younger MPs like Chalmers and O’Neil perform well in what will presumably be more prominent shadow cabinet posts, it might not even be one entire term, but we’ll see.
“Stability, plainly, isn’t quite at the top of voter concerns despite what they might say.”
Yes, although the degree of media opprobrium aimed at Labor for rolling Rudd (and then the continual obsessive coverage of when Gillard may get challenged in turn) was orders of magnitude greater than the opprobrium aimed at the Coalition for their changes. and the level of coverage of a potential challenge to Turnbull was practically non-existent until it actually happened (unlike the coverage of Gillard which drowned out coverage of policy).
To some extent this just reflects the degree to which the media sets the agenda more than media likes to admit to.
“A restive Right looking to mobilise for an Anyone But Albo campaign doesn’t augur well for Labor unity in the next three years.”
A case in point. Already looking to shit-stir with Labor instability stories. Of course people were looking for alternative candidates to Albo, he’s not such a brilliant candidate you’d say “why even consider anyone else?”. But assuming nobody else suddenly nominates before Monday, there’s no reason to believe Labor factions will be mobilising to undermine the new leader before he’s even got the chair warm.
“When John Hewson lost in 1993, the media assumed Paul Keating had won a two-term victory, so there’s always a tendency to catastrophise unexpected losses,”
Indeed. The 2004 election marked Howard having one of the clearest victories of his entire tenure, finally gaining a Senate majority along with it, and it was the next election where he got dumped. The Coalition’s majority remains slim, and the idea that this is a two-term victory is ludicrous. I sincerely doubt any Coalition strategist is thinking that way.
For Labor, the fact that the swing against them in Queensland went mostly to minor parties and then to the Coalition only on preferences is a strong sign that those voters can be won back- they didn’t go straight to the Coalition, they were more “you both suck, but at this election Labor sucks more”. Also the fact that many of them, you know, voted for Labor- with that horrible Bill Shorten as leader, even- in 2016. The right messages can get through. Is Albo the man to get them through? Let’s find out.
Excellent, measured response, as always Arky. Despite the shock of this result, Labor are still knocking on the door. One thing I’ll be interested to see is the final percentage of informal votes, and of those the estimates of deliberates. Deliberate informals are correlated with youthful electorates apparently and are growing. Is there a pool for the Greens and Labor there, given the right messages and the right spruiker.? (“Is Albo the right person?” – as a quibble.)
Now, apparently, leadership change doesn’t matter. This is another aspect of the result that I find confounding. Despite misgivings about Latham, I voted (Greens then) Labor in 2004 rationalising that I was voting for a local candidate and that the parties were entitled to change their leaders in a non-presidential system, if they saw fit. The reaction to Rudd-Gillard-Rudd and then Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison convinced me that in future that rationalisation, all very well in theory, could not apply in practice. Now? Yeah, you are right. What Rupert says. One set of rules for Labor, we’ll make them up as we go for the LNP.
Re the lack of wage growth in the mining sector, I have the impression (maybe wrong) that they are still on pretty good money by community standards, read an average of $125K somewhere and of course many on more than that, notably the bloke tackling Shorten about the tax rate. Maybe, they thought they wouldn’t get a wage increase if they didn’t have a job?
In any event, to get these people back on side, alternatives to mining need to be high-wage, high-skill jobs, not throwaway lines about working in tourism- as what, handing out brochures for Daintree tours? Contrary to some left elitist views, some people actually like manual jobs, are good at them and want to keep them if possible: not everyone wants to work in “service” industries. This point was routinely lost on Keating, ironical given that his father was a boilermaker.
Hard to believe at times that the Labor party had its origins in country Queensland.
I meant to add a comment about the hypocrisy of the conservatives pretending to be worried about miners’ jobs while not giving a rat’s about the destruction of jobs in the car industry; marginal seats explanation perhaps? I suppose in that part of Queensland, crocodile tears are to be expected.
The car industry was not at the forefront of union bashing like Rio, Western Mining and BHP. They didn’t offer big enough bribes via donations either. Worse still they employed all these migrants. The Conjobs certainly don’t care about the miners’ only about the companies. It would not surprise me to see iron ore almost workerless in a few years.
“not everyone wants to work in “service” industries”
Yes, including a high proportion of those actually doing so.
Teachers know that some are happiest, and healthiest, and learn best, by physical activity; others by reading listening and talking; and most of us by some mixture. Education systems don’t always respond well to those realities. The economy, in creating jobs and working conditions, doesn’t bother responding at all.
The jobs (perhaps “jobs”) created by the economy are not designed to match the profile of the population’s dispositions and skills. We expect people to adapt, to somehow alter themselves in response to market forces, and we don’t always notice the damage they suffer. Keating’s boilermaker dad may have been keen for his son to not “have to” work with is hands.
With the miners, their wages got a boost during the boom so its not surprising they’ve stagnated for a while, and as you say, their focus might be on having a job in their area of expertise. If market forces and/or the exigencies of climate change remove their jobs, a humane and actually truly efficient society would make good use of the skills that their dispositions and aptitudes have produced. But we are unlikely to do so, even with the best of intentions, and even for such a relatively powerful group.
Miners in the Hunter earn considerably more than $125 000, if they have a permanent job that is. These days companies hire new workers as contractors. Zero conditions and a lot less money.
“A collapse in the progressive vote.”
A claim supported by a single statistic.
Hmmmm. Still cheering for the Libs, Bernard?
Yes. That statistic was the actual vote. What else is needed?
It was the ALP vote not the progressive vote in total, the two are not necessarily synonymous. Same for the Liberal party, their total first preference vote doesn’t begin to cover the total Conservative to reactionary vote. It was the vote beyond the Liberal vote that gave them the win and the power that goes with it.
Labor repelled voters? Oh please, Bernard, give it rest. The lie-packed LNP and UAP scare campaigns up here in Queensland were relentless and almost saturation, across all media, along with the rampant and disgraceful media bias which I might add is continuing.
Too true, you would like to be sympathetic to nervous Queenslanders, but obviously not many of them bother educating themselves by watching the ABC instead of mindless drivel on commercial stations.
Although the ABC itself has been nervously slack in exposing MSM media bullshit, only Media Watch has a decent go.
People are bombarded by advertising every day. I accept that many made decisions based upon erroneous assumptions (mining being good for jobs and climate change taking jobs – and the like) but to the extent that the advertising had an effect is by no means clear.
If the advertising can be considered a salient factor then the country is ripe for Moonie-ism or Scientology. Relatively uninformed as the electorate is (voting boots ought to be unattended save for the electoral officials) with NO advertising or leaflet distribution 48 hrs prior) the electorate is more robust than what you tend to presume.
Do you expect Scientology or Moonies to unleash advertising on the scale of Clive Palmer? No chance.
Interesting thought but it would appear advertising for “cults” isn’t that effective… I think most Australian’s BS detector go off when confronted with that rubbish… Why it doesn’t go off when confronted with the idiot in the baseball cap I don’t know….. Something to do with “wanting to believe” maybe?
Dostoevsky made just that point in “The Brothers Karamazov”..”he has no greater need then to surrender to someone [an idol] that gift of freedom …. “