For all his talk of kindness and the accusations of weakness during the election campaign, Anthony Albanese is a political hard man. When the Right factions from Victoria and New South Wales axed long-time frontbencher and current attorney-general Mark Dreyfus and industry minister Ed Husic from the new ministerial line-up, Albanese could’ve stepped in to influence their choices. But he didn’t.
Despite the bitterness this will likely engender in both demoted men, Albanese is sticking firmly to the party’s traditional frontbench selection process because it serves his interests, those of his key backers and ultimately, he would argue, Labor as a whole. That’s party politics. There are winners and, even among them, there are losers.
Proportionally reflecting the geographic and factional spread of seats, the NSW Right had to forfeit a ministerial spot and Husic’s factional colleagues voted him off. He also happens to have the least warm relationship among them with Albanese.
The Victorian Right was entitled to one more position but its key figure, deputy prime minister and putative future leadership aspirant Richard Marles, wanted to elevate two people: Sam Rae, from the seat of Hawke, and Dan Mulino, from Fraser. The only way he could have two more frontbenchers was to lose one. So Dreyfus, a senior cabinet minister, got the chop. Brutal.
Marles is close to Albanese and part of his praetorian guard. Even a prime minister who’s won as big as Albanese needs to look after those who protect him. It is maintaining these kinds of loyalties that has held the party together under Albanese’s leadership.
The prime minister effectively acknowledged as much in his address to a newly expanded Labor caucus on Friday. Along with welcoming the new members, he thanked those who’d backed him as leader — and given him “extraordinary support and confidence” — through three years in opposition and another three in government.
“I was never looking behind, always looking forward,” he said. He spoke of “the importance of unity.” The importance “of not getting ahead of ourselves, of being focused not on ourselves — because I’ve seen that happen too. We know where that ends. Focus out, on the Australian people, on the people who voted for us. That’s got to be our focus each and every day. How do we improve their lives? How do we make a positive difference for them?”
But Albanese’s freedom to focus out comes from focusing in.
The manoeuvrings around the new ministry highlight the challenges and opportunities that such a whopping victory presents.
Winning a second time changes a prime minister. The first win usually comes after the other side has been in power for a stretch and voters have tired of its policies or its leader or both. Mixed in with the exhilaration of elevation, the new PM hears a niggling little voice that maybe it wasn’t all about them. But the second win is an affirmation. When voters have sized up the alternative and found it wanting, they bestow a precious commodity: confidence. With confidence, you can do big things. You can change Australia.
It was evident in John Howard back in 1998, when he very nearly lost office after championing a new tax and returned with a reduced majority but greater assurance. Albanese has been returned with his majority greatly increased and he will have confidence to match.
There are upsides and downsides to the size of that triumph. With a count that could exceed ninety seats, Albanese has the electoral security of an enormous backbench. Barring some political calamity gigantic enough to deliver the Coalition an extra thirty-plus seats at a single election, he’s probably in government for two more terms.
It gives him huge policy and political authority. A caucus full of people now incidentally beholden to him also represents an enormous talent pool from which he can foster future leaders and entrench Labor in long-term government in a way it hasn’t been for more than thirty years.
He has crushed the opposition and been delivered a refashioned Senate with a single progressive party, the Greens, holding the balance of power, instead of a bunch of disparate independents pulling him in different directions. No matter how the Greens try to spin their election result as a positive because of a strong Senate vote – their leader lost his seat – they’ve clearly lost their Lower House numbers following their aggressive politics and obstruction of a progressive agenda. They’ll need to think carefully about how they approach legislative negotiations in future. Albanese would seem to have the upper hand.
But the giant Labor backbench also means some new MPs who weren’t necessarily expected to win. Maintaining the determination and discipline of the past three years will be exponentially harder with such a sizeable group, as the prime minister acknowledged as much in his caucus address.
“Going forward we need that same discipline — the same unity, the same sense of purpose, the same making sure there’s no overreach,” Albanese said. “We have a mandate for what we took to the Australian people. That is our mandate.”
That message is about managing expectations inside the room and out — a second potential pressure point for this second term. He’s warning those demanding greater boldness not to push his government to extend too far beyond what it said it would do. Albanese got ahead of the community on the proposed Indigenous Voice to Parliament. He does not want to do it again.
Then there’s the risk of succumbing to the regular companion of confidence, hubris. Albanese is not going to replicate his persistent critic, Paul Keating, who held a victory bash in Parliament House’s Great Hall after his own surprise success in 1993, with the words “I knew we’d win” projected onto the walls. Still, when the current prime minister reminded the doubters on Friday, including some sitting before him in the caucus, that he’d had a plan for majority government all along, he was effectively saying exactly the same. He’ll need to let the confidence settle on him lightly, not wave it around.
Albanese returns to office with enormous challenges beyond parliament, not least the state of the economy and ongoing cost-of-living pressures.
He leads in a time of staggering global uncertainty, with an unreliable and unpredictable ally across the Pacific and an assertive, manipulative major customer in north Asia. He is the first prime minister in more than two decades not to have troops deployed on operations and that provides scope to think broadly and strategically about Australia’s security. He will need all of that confidence while traversing those fields.
His opponents are meanwhile in disarray, leaving no natural external bulwark against the overreach he wants to resist. In choosing their new leadership team, the Liberal Party faces an existential crisis after the comprehensive rejection of both their policies and their leader.
Elevating deputy Sussan Ley, possibly with Dan Tehan behind her, would at least allow the Liberals to trumpet their first ever female leader — indeed the first female opposition leader from either side — and try to start talking to women again. Facing a female opposition leader might also be a bit trickier for Albanese than if he was faced with one of the blokes more associated with their party’s defeat, even if it is yet another reminder that women routinely only get a chance when there’s hard work to be done and the blokes stand back.
The Liberals have their own issues with unity as they scrap with Coalition partners the Nationals. The defection of right-wing NT Country Liberal Party senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price from the Nationals’ party room to the Liberals only underlines the role of personal ambition in the whole unfortunate contest.
The values drift in the Liberal Party played no small part in the situation the Australian people have delivered.
But that’s not to take anything away from Anthony Albanese. He and his closest confidantes designed a strategy to turn the polls around, centred on addressing financial pressures through health — an issue affecting all Australians around which they could unify the electorate. The Trump factor only helped underscore their argument about steadiness, continuity and the risk of an unprepared coalition alternative.
All together, it worked. Like John Howard in his second-term victory speech, Albanese has promised to govern for all Australians. Now the often-emotional political hard man has to set about delivering. •
