Albanese is the conservative who mugged the Liberals. Let's hope he seizes the moment

The Age

3 days ago

Anthony Albanese is a man who likes props. In the 2022 election campaign, he regularly brandished a one-dollar coin to emphasise his support for a pay rise for workers on the minimum wage. And in the lead-up to this year's election, he employed his Medicare card as a talisman to ward off Peter Dutton's supposedly evil plans for the nation's healthcare system. Clearly, his approach has worked.
Everyone has a Medicare card and Albanese was wise to embed in the public consciousness that Medicare is a Labor Party creation, implemented by Bob Hawke's government in 1984 against the fierce opposition of the Coalition. Because Medicare, for all its shortcomings, is an entrenched and popular feature of everyday Australian life, the Labor Party of today has been able to leverage Hawke's long-ago policy success to its great advantage.
There's upside for the ALP in portraying itself as a defender of institutions, as it can make the party look less risky, and Albanese leant into this heavily during the election campaign. At his recent post-election address at the National Press Club, he outlined the reasons Labor had won a second term. Electors, he said, had voted for Australian values and for doing things 'our way' – that is, not like Donald Trump and Trump-wannabe Peter Dutton. He also cited Labor's 'commitment to fair wages and conditions, universal Medicare and universal superannuation' that 'set us apart from the world'.
In some respects, it's a conservative formulation for a centre-left party: preserving what's already in place. And that signals some potential downside for the government. Universal super was the joint brainchild of Paul Keating and the ACTU's Bill Kelty as part of the union movement's Accord agreement, which also gave rise to Medicare. The historically transformational nature of universal super has been brought into sharp focus this week, with the attainment of the compulsory 12 per cent super contribution and the wider discussion about super balances in the millions of dollars.
Inevitably, talk of that achievement invites comparisons between the current Labor government and the all-conquering five-term government led first by Hawke and then Keating.
Hawke and Keating wasted no time in office. The Albanese government is 38 months old. Inside the same timeframe, the Hawke government had held two summits – on the economy and on tax – and introduced Medicare, a new incomes policy, an assets test on pensions, floated the dollar, changed the banking system, begun the march on super and produced a comprehensive new package of tax measures.
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Somewhere within the Labor Party, people will eventually start to ask what a Labor leader 40 years from now will be fighting to preserve from the Albanese years. The course that the prime minister is pursuing – backed strongly by Labor's national secretary Paul Erickson, who has definitely earned his status as the nation's campaigning guru du jour – is the one that secured the government's second victory. In short, the government's first priority will be about delivering methodically on its promises, namely reducing HECS debts, building 1.2 million homes, continuing the push towards renewables, increasing the number of Medicare urgent clinics, and continuing to keep inflation down.
That makes sense, especially since the national political scene is now a bunch of players who have, to an extent, been mugged by reality. Everyone is a smartie after the event, but no one expected a Labor landslide. The government wasn't geared up for it. The Liberals had even less of a clue. None of the polls predicted it. YouGov got closest; its central projection was 84 lower house seats for Labor – a mild increase on its majority but still 10 short of the actual, stratospheric result.