The impression left by the authors was that of a busy outfit. Sometimes, as with energy and climate change, policy pulls in different directions, the decarbonisation of domestic energy supply combining with new and large fossil fuel projects and expanded exports of coal and gas.

On housing, the array of measures is so wide that you could be deceived into imagining that, even if only some of them work, the housing crisis will be over within a few years. The reality, of course, is that they do not match the scale of the challenge of finding homes for all.

On industrial relations, the government has tilted the laws a little in favour of workers and there has been some much-needed wages growth. But the country’s labour laws still provide vast incentives not to join unions, allowing free-riders to receive benefits won on the backs of workers faithfully paying union dues to support enterprise bargaining. There are other legal barriers to organising workers, too, as well as wider changes in the economy, such as the rise of the gig worker, that provide few opportunities for unionisation.

At the time the special issue of JAPE was published late last year, Labor remained committed to the third tranche of income tax cuts that were a legacy of the Turnbull and Morrison governments and were supported by Labor while it was in opposition. These would have offered big breaks to high-income earners as well as flattening the income tax scales to make the system less progressive. Labor’s refusal for well over eighteen months to modify or overturn them contributed to a belief that the government was too cautious on fiscal policy, too haunted by its defeat in 2019, too willing to allow the decisions of a previous government – one that some would regard as the worst in the country’s history – to shape its course.

Other policy areas contributed to the same impression. There was AUKUS, and its risky and expensive plans for a nuclear-powered submarine fleet whose strategic purpose is so fuzzy that not even its most enthusiastic proponents in government will tell us what it is to be used for. Morrison’s AUKUS was designed to wedge Labor, annoy China, and make him look big on the international stage. It lacked detail, but it did nail Australia’s colours to the mast as a faithful member of the Anglosphere. In that sense, it was good Liberal Party stuff. The Albanese government has invited us all to squint so that we might see it as good Labor stuff. It is an invitation that many have declined, including former prime minister Paul Keating. 

Foreign affairs and defence are matters for Canberra, but it is arguable that the Albanese government operates rather like a good state Labor government. That was certainly how it was elected. There was no great wave of enthusiasm such as had propelled a Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke, or Kevin Rudd into government. No one proclaimed ‘It’s Time’; there were no catchy jingles or slogans in which the Opposition leader promised to go about ‘Bringing Australia Together’; there was no neat rhyme, à la ‘Kevin07’. There were commitments to higher subsidies for childcare, to tackling housing, and to encouraging wage growth, but it was hardly a big-target strategy.

Anthony Albanese slipped into office quietly on the back of a wave of personal hostility to Scott Morrison, as well as a wider disillusionment with traditional party politics that saw the election of independents and Greens. State elections have frequently been won – most commonly by Labor – in just this way. Narrow victories and minority governments have been carved out of the unpopularity of the incumbent and the inoffensiveness of the challenger. Sometimes, these are turned into larger majorities and long-lived governments, such as those of Bob Carr, Steve Bracks, Mike Rann, and Annastacia Palaszczuk.

Albanese was perfectly suited to this role. He had been in parliament a quarter of a century and in politics, as a political staffer or party official, all his working life. He was familiar to large numbers of Australians. Even if not wildly popular, neither was he unpopular in the way that Bill Shorten became. The Australian Election Study, in fact, had Albanese as the most popular major party leader to contest an election since Rudd in 2007.

Albanese’s promises were mainly about service delivery, in the style familiar from state government, and their lack of extravagance probably contributed to his credibility in an era when political trust was low. Once those of a firebrand, his image and demeanour were now more like a suburban accountant, although one with a quirky nostalgic weekend hobby as a DJ. He probably did ‘ordinary bloke’ better than Morrison; the performance seemed less contrived.

The honeymoon was a long one. Labor’s victory in the Aston by-election on April Fool’s Day 2023 was a remarkable triumph for a government, a solid swing that took a recently ‘safe’ seat away from the Opposition. Labor increased its share of the primary vote by over eight percentage points from the 2022 election held less than a year before, and it achieved a two-party-preferred swing of 6.4 per cent. While one outer-suburban seat in Melbourne was not Australia, there were no signs that voters more generally were inclined to blame the still-new government for their woes, which included a cost-of-living crisis.

That forbearance was never going to last. The second half of 2023 was difficult for Labor. Inflation declined, but the cost-of-living crisis did not go away. The Reserve Bank paused interest rate increases for all of the second half of the year except November, but the succession of hikes since the one during the election campaign itself, in May 2022, was creating mortgage stress for some households and increasing the cost of living for anyone with a loan.

The defeat of the Voice referendum in October, while devastating to those who had worked for a Yes vote, also contributed to a loss of momentum and prestige for the government. The extent to which the Albanese government had committed to the referendum and to the full implementation of the Uluru Statement inevitably produced a perception that this was the government’s failure to own. Peter Dutton and his many friends and supporters in the media developed the narrative that Albanese had allowed himself to become distracted by a folly while neglecting the more important task of dealing with the economy. That an argument is ridiculous does not lessen its effect. This one helped take just a little more gloss off a government that had every reason to consider that it was doing a good job in difficult times.

By the end of 2023, even the government’s closest friends were beginning to worry about the ground that Dutton and the Coalition had made up and the government’s seeming lack of direction. Albanese himself seemed all over the shop. There had been a narrowing in the Newspoll two-party-preferred vote; the parties were even in late November. Albanese was still easily preferred prime minister, but Dutton’s standing had improved.

It wasn’t just the polls: there was a sense that the terms of national politics were being set by Dutton and that Labor was, at best, responding – and often not terribly well. The government had implemented its major election promises and seemed to have little more to say for itself. Dutton had used the previous winter to help sink the Voice. Would he use this summer to sink the government?

The early months of 2024 have seen a remarkable shift in the atmosphere of federal politics. The crucial change was Labor’s announcement shortly before Australia Day that it would redesign the income tax cuts due to come into force on 1 July. Continuing its basic fiscal caution, the government’s proposals did not increase the size of the cuts but redistributed them so that there were to be larger benefits for low- and middle-income earners, and smaller ones for the highly paid, than under the Coalition’s 2019 legislation.

If Dutton and the Coalition saw this coming, they gave few signs of having done so. Their response was a mixture of outrage – at Labor’s broken promise – and confusion. Slow-moving Liberal deputy leader, Sussan Ley, gave the impression in a media interview that a Coalition government would roll them back. In the end, the Coalition voted for the changes in parliament, which made the outrage seem performative if not hypocritical. Polling indicated a clear majority of voters favoured the change.

The Albanese government’s selling of this backflip said much more about the nature of the government than the changes themselves did. The government framed the cuts as part of a wider suite of measures to deal with cost-of-living pressures. Circumstances had changed, Albanese and his treasurer, Jim Chalmers, explained, and when that happens, good governments change their policies. What was notably missing here was any sense of a wider vision of tax policy and its relationship to Labor’s vision for the nation. A social-democratic defence of progressive income taxation was at least theoretically possible. But Labor had little to say about where their changes fitted into any wider vision of society, the role of government, or justice and equality.

Does it matter how a government explains its policies, as distinct from what it actually does? Well, yes, because the stories told about policy act as enablers or constraints according to what they imply about the purposes and possibilities of politics. If we have political and media élites unwilling to talk about creating a more equal society, the ability to carry on meaningful debate about equality and inequality across a whole range of domains – such as policy on education, health, and housing – is accordingly reduced. All the space is filled up with technocratic talk of the kind favoured by policy wonks, who have been thick on the ground in and around the present government; or, much worse, by right-wing populists, racists, and opportunists of the kind that increasingly infest the Liberals and Nationals. The Coalition now mainly steers clear of policy at all, unless it is to advocate nuclear power for the 2040s (or thereabouts), as a means of helping their fossil fuel industry friends while we wait for the reactors to appear.

The Dunkley by-election of 2 March saw right-wing populism out in force. The ready resort to rhetoric about foreigners assaulting Australian women – as in a notorious tweet by Ley – is a stark example of how the Dutton-led Opposition, and well-funded third-party supporters such as the lobby group Advance, will pursue the so-called suburban strategy. That the Liberals failed so miserably in a contest for which they had so many apparent advantages – their two-party preferred swing of 3.5 per cent is unexceptional at a by-election – might prompt some self-examination. Or it might not: the Coalition has no obvious pathway back to power, and its organisation in most states and territories is in something close to utter disarray. Talk of foreign rapists and nuclear reactors is probably as good as anything else they are likely to come up with for the time being.

Labor’s fairly comfortable win at the by-election suggests that the narrow and fragile coalition of support which saw it into office in May 2022 remains intact. Labor will likely continue to pursue what political scientists such as Rob Manwaring have called ‘thin labourism’ in relation to state and territory governments. There will be no radical economic reform or redistribution, no expansion of the state at the expense of private service provision, no welfare revolution, and no dramatic transformation in how we are governed. There will be a gentler bending of the neoliberal state and market economy to alleviate the ordeals of the present. That might well be enough for a second term in government. It will not, however, be sufficient to make much headway in solving the country’s serious problems, the most pressing of which concerns our contribution to ensuring the survival of a habitable planet.

This article is one of a series of ABR commentaries on cultural and political subjects being funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.