(Image: Private Media)

With the 2024 budget night in the rearview mirror, the media cycle has quickly moved on for the Albanese government, and attention is focusing on the looming final report of the Robodebt royal commission.

The commission has already completed its primary task of inflicting humiliation on a succession of former Liberal ministers, including former prime minister and now Woodside board member Scott Morrison, repaying the Coalition for its trade union and pink batts royal commissions almost a decade on from the Tony Abbott era.

Former DFAT secretary Kathryn Campbell also came under heavy fire in proceedings, along with a conga line of high-ranking bureaucrats, with their standard responses of “I’ll take that on notice” and “That’s a policy matter for government” useless in judicial proceedings. The humiliation of one former social services deputy secretary, who gamely tried to stick to talking points through a gruelling session with counsel assisting, went viral early on.

The Commonwealth Integrity Commission (CIC), finally established on July 1, 2023, has proven less spectacular — the threatened retrospective investigations have yet to materialise, and the first matters publicly referred, by the Coalition opposition, have been Labor’s targeted election commitments, dismissed by the CIC as not requiring investigation. Rumours persist, however, that a high-profile LNP frontbencher remains under investigation by the CIC into historical matters relating to political donations.

But another Labor commitment, to hold a referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament “as a matter of priority”, is struggling, amid deep and noxious divisions within the Coalition. While some of the few remaining moderates, backed by a section of the The Australian’s op-ed page, are supporting a referendum and a Yes case, the dominant mood within the Dutton-led opposition is ferocious resistance, encouraged by racist think tanks and News Corp commentators.

Some within Labor cynically see the referendum as a tool to split the Coalition, and say the government should proceed with a referendum despite the opposition’s position. Others argue it should be put off to 2027, the 60th anniversary of the 1967 referendum, to limit potential damage to Labor’s 2025 reelection campaign. A growing number of Indigenous commentators, thoroughly sick of waiting for non-Indigenous elites to deign to recognise and listen to them, are urging a boycott in any event.

Another of the issues that the opposition has had success in pressing the government on is the glacially slow rollout of Urgent Care Clinics. Two years on from Labor coming to power, not a single one has opened, while states complain more and more about overcrowded emergency departments. The Allan and Malinauskas governments have openly attacked the Commonwealth’s failure to increase hospital funding, with ambulance ramping and stories of people being turned away from hospitals now a regular occurrence in Melbourne and Adelaide.

On foreign policy, there’s been virtually no change. An initial proposal by China for a “reset” of relations, and its (self-interested) removal of bans on Australian coal as a measure of goodwill, encouraged expectations of a better relationship than under the Coalition. Penny Wong became the first Australian minister welcomed to China in years in November 2022 and there was a steady increase in Chinese student numbers in Australian universities.

However, increasingly public criticism from security agencies of the government’s “softness on China” always kept the relationship from improving further, and the brutal June 2023 crackdown in Hong Kong and the government’s pledge of a special visa category for 30,000 Hong Kong citizens wanting to flee sent the Xi regime into another rage, and relations rapidly returned to the freezer.

More successfully, Wong’s emphasis on more ambitious climate targets and her appointment of Dave Sharma as climate ambassador to the Pacific community have slowed China’s progress in the region. Fears that the Solomon Islands-China pact would pave the way for an increased Chinese military presence have yet to be proven, with Honiara now the most closely-watched piece of real estate in the Pacific.

Anthony Albanese’s successful meeting with Emmanuel Macron on the sidelines of the G20 summit in India in 2023 also provided the basis for renewed Franco-Australian military ties, sweetened by a dramatic tripling of the budget of the Strategic Domestic Munitions Manufacturing agreement with Thales. Macron, smiling in a meeting with the Australian leader, declared that France welcomed the opportunity to work closely with its “fellow Pacific power, Australia, in this crucial strategic region”.

That frees up the government to focus on domestic issues in the crucial run-up to the next election, where an electorate that expected significant change and better leadership than what Morrison had delivered will pass its judgment on a government that has been constrained by tough fiscal and economic challenges.