ESSAY

Still a Party of National Government?

Australian Labor’s Challenge

DAVID REEVES

The Labor Party makes the heroes of Australian politics, so taught us Paul Keating. The villains too. The saints, sinners, rogues, and do-gooders — if Labor writes the stories of Australia’s political landscape, it sets the characters.

Ask most Labor historians, as well as your average party activist, and they will tell you Labor is also the party that shaped the critical aspects of our country — both its past, as well as its modern iteration. While there are notables of the less noble visage in the history annuls — think the White Australia Party and our ‘Faceless Men’ — those of modernity and progress are more numerous.

Medibank and Medicare, the Apology, the beginnings of the American Alliance, school funding reform, banishing the last vestiges of White Australia and the cultural cringe, leadership through World War Two, HECS, the rights of all working peoples, and a leading role in the end of Apartheid - all Labor legacies. This is to say nothing of the creation of Australia’s modern economy — a global miracle that delivered heights in standards of living and growth for decades uninterrupted.

Yet for all its guiding hand over much that is envied across Australian society, Australia’s oldest political party finds itself at a tortuous cross-roads. Put bluntly, it is rarely in power at a national level, and even more rarely for longer than two successive terms. Indeed, apart from the 13 years of Hawke and Keating, Labor hasn’t spent more than two terms on the Treasury benches since Curtin defeated Robert Menzies in 1940 and Chifley lost to him in 1949. Whitlam — a mere three years; Rudd and Gillard — two terms, one in minority, for just six years.

The Liberal and National Coalition, in contrast, has been in power for 20 years since 1996 only. That’s only four less than Labor since 1972.

The romantics of our movements say this makes Labor all the more attractive. That, somehow, we make it matter: Labor governs for purpose, makes the changes, and implements the policies that shift how the people of this marvellous nation live in prosperity and for egalitarian outcomes. Excuse me while I dismiss this as utter tosh, a poet’s pretence to impotence. It is also a grossly reductionist reading of history.

The age-old rule of democracies is that it is in power that we make change. To wield the authority and reach of the state is to nurture, craft, and envisage a country as we wish it to be. For all the challenges of governing, it is how you make change. And if Labor is about policy and change, then we must hold government, and it must be nationally.

Hence, this cross-roads we face may be an existential challenge to Labor — are we still a party the people of Australia trust to place in national government? Majority government all the more.

When the electorate put a question mark against your name

Past the halfway point of the first term of the Albanese Government, and the talk is of hung parliaments and minority government. Yes, Labor would be favoured to form that government, with the Coalition under Peter Dutton having stabilised but with little evidence to-date that a mass recovery of both the right flank, the Teal tide, as well as seats from Labor. However, minority is still seen as likely.

That isn’t positive for Labor. Having been out of office for nine years between 2013 and 2022, a measly single term of majority administration. The people of Australia, despite a clear pronouncement lacking faith in the Coalition in 2022, are already reconsidering their options. Perhaps this is the new norm, with post-election honeymoons not what they used to be. Yet it still challenges Labor to present as not just an alternative, but a truly viable one set in the knowledge that the electorate is ready to trust it.

We don’t have to look far to see what happens when a major political party’s successive failures builds a case to their electorate that undermines their position as a logical, viable, and readily electable alternative. In Victoria, the Liberal Party is most often an afterthought. With election after election delivering opposition, and those periods in government incredibly brief, the public in Victoria now expect to see the Liberals in the opposition. Psychologically, the Victorian electorate do not imagine the State as one governed by the conservative forces. A similar argument may be made in South Australia, pointing to the single-term Marshall administration, though more evidence is needed there. Globally, Keir Starmer is about to be just the fourth Labour Party leader since the 1940s to lead his party from the opposition to Treasury benches. A good argument can be made that such disparity has hurt the cause of good government and governance, though that may be picked up elsewhere perhaps.

In each case above, and many others, there are specific reasons. These are disparate and align to the unique circumstances, challenges, issues, and general ideological predilection of the electorates in question. Incompetence is a regular theme. Likewise, those who maintain government in each case count among them fine talents repeatedly. Nonetheless, in each jurisdiction, it has become the norm to see one side of the political debate take the reigns of power. For those perennially in opposition, the challenge becomes not simply having to win the argument and mount the electoral coalition required; before all that, you have to shift perception as being capable of attaining government.

For Albanese and Labor, various forces mount a further push towards minority, and once more undermine Labor as a ready government in the eyes of the people. 

Populists from the left, more from the right, and an unencumbered centre

If polling pointing to minority is to be believed, the forces at play are a tricky mix. Albanese, his ministry, and the Labor machine faces pressures from the left, a populist, ‘rightest’ streak that speaks to many old Labor types, and an unencumbered centre group that may have come for the Coalition last time but will set their sights our way. Add in a lack of natural allies in the media (the ABC is Greens-friendly, can we stop pretending please). Also, throw in the turmoil in the Middle East to the bargain.

However, populism is perhaps the biggie in this discussion. From the left, it is hard to argue the Greens are anything more than populist rabble rousers, that brief interlude of pretending to be a party that saw itself as a mainstream governing alternative having given way to their natural state. Witness the temperature and volume raising pronouncements on everything from the Budget, to housing, and the Middle East. For a party that decries misinformation so loudly, one may be forgiven for thinking they disseminate a voluminous amount of it — as has become a theme in the federal debate of late. Pot, meet kettle.

Over at the Coalition, this current push and pull over inbound migration has all the hallmarks of populism. And it is understandable, if not a good thing. Facing increasingly restless rightwing movements, many of which have grown with ex-Labor voters it should be noted, and energised in a post-COVID environment where old mantras of civic behaviour and general sensibilities don’t apply, the Coalition is doing what it sees as staving off further losses to the right. Don’t be fooled, there is a war within the Coalition over whether to be populist or pragmatically conservative, and which side wins is a guess open for all.

Finally, in the centre-ground, no-longer a competition between wings of the major parties, but with their own forces in well financed independents, Teals, Pocock etc.

The path to take

So where to from here? Not wishing to be another of the multitude of free advice pedlars presuming upon National Secretariat, I shan’t wade into that. But I would merely point to two factors central to this matter.

Firstly, and I applaud the Labor machine and government for how it presents on this matter, the clear statement that Labor is the Government, and is going to the next election to be re-elected as its own administration. The journalists and panellists on too many god-awful commentary programs may love the stupid gotcha games of ‘will you rule in or out’ blather, but it is a trap. A simple and infantile trap, but a trap either way. The public needs to hear that Labor is about winning government in its own right; and keeping it that way. This is a competition to have Labor ministers occupy the Treasury benches, not divide with some minor party or another.

Secondly, and related, if after the election we find ourselves facing minority administration, let us not repeat the mistakes of 2010. Strength is the theme of the point above, and the same here. Any minority government, for Labor, must be one truly led by Labor, not Labor as a figurehead for another’s agenda. Looking back to the UK for a moment, the smartest political aspects of the Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition was how the Tories managed to implement their agenda, and even have the Lib Dems defend it. That would be our job. And as such, how much a better look and positioning to the public a confidence and supply agreement over any new policy agenda. Yes, it is better to be in government, always, for that is where you make change — but do it on our terms and to our own agenda.

Ultimately, I don’t write this piece under some illusion that questions over future psycho-social perceptions of Labor in the national electorate should be at the forefront of thinking for election strategy. I am not daft after all. Likewise, we aren’t the Victorian Liberals, and there is much distance and many elections before we speak in those terms.

But as a movement, it is worth being alive to recognising the narrow line between a party that spends less time in government but still a natural party of government, and a perennial opposition only occasionally thrown the keys. If we were to ever slip to the latter, it would make becoming the former once more all the harder. 

David Reeves is a strategic advocacy and public policy expert, with a background in the public and private sectors across a range of portfolios. Currently leading federal government engagement and policy for one of Australia’s leading universities, he is also pursuing a PhD, and is active across Labor Party forums. 

You might also enjoy reading Daniel Gerrard on Challenges to Labor's Theory of Changes here.