Photo by kylie De Guia on Unsplash
By Mark Kenny
A version of this article was originally published by The Canberra Times.
Ever since the industrial age spawned unions and their political arm, centre-left parties have understood that gaining power required them to park radicalism to avoid frightening voters.
This reality may have dampened dreams of an egalitarian paradise, but progressives learned to live with it. Perhaps too well.
In common with its international counterparts, the Australian Labor Party has treated the electorate as instinctively conservative, suspicious of change, and easily spooked.
Some scholars, such as Rob Manwaring, have characterised this self-editing as "thin labourism" through which the operating scope of policies and foundational values is constrained.
Spectacular instances of (mis)adventurism have validated this acceptance of electoral inertia. It became a truism - even within Labor - that Gough Whitlam's big-swinging government (1972-75) "tried to do too much and did it too quickly".
A similarly reductive wisdom was therefore close at hand to explain Bill Shorten's traumatic failure to convert solid public enthusiasm for Labor in 2019 into an election victory when proposing a modest shift of the tax burden from workers to assets and discretionary trusts.
Scarring setbacks such as these have curtailed the modern Labor Party in profound ways.
Since Whitlam, Labor governments had tended to be radical mainly in the other direction - floating the dollar and deregulating the banking sector, selling off state-owned instrumentalities, removing trade protections.
Until now.
There is a particular piquancy in the fact that the short story of Shorten Labor became the long-form blueprint for an emboldened Labor renaissance less than a decade later.
What had changed? Crucially, Labor is now in office - and with a thumping majority. But the balance of voter expectations has also flipped from fear of change to fatigue with the status quo.
The asset-class tax increases Albanese Labor announced last week were essentially the proposals Shorten took unsuccessfully to the 2019 contest.
To belabour the point, proposed investor taxes which were blamed for the 2019 loss, have now been embraced as a pathway to victory. Shorten's kryptonite has become Anthony Albanese's spinach. Same policy, different times. Labor's revelation is that modern voters bring different demands.
This has happened quite fast. Across the democratic world, incumbent governments languish somewhere between unloved and loathed. More recently, however, what has become clear is that it is not incumbency per se that was toxic but the learned helplessness of governments after four decades of neo-liberal consensus.
Through their play-it-safe incrementalism, left-branded governments had basically written themselves out of the role that newer voters quite reasonably installed them to play - that of active problem-solving.
The signs of this ennui are widespread.
Despite his own record majority, Keir Starmer's two-year-old prime ministership is on life-support not because he tried to do too much but because he set out, deliberately, to tinker, to do the bare minimum. Few, even within cabinet, know what it stands for beyond the paralysing fiscal rules it loudly swore to from opposition. More evidence of its battle plan, apparently, to hit the ground retreating.
One of its earliest disasters saw some 10 million pensioners denied the Winter Fuel Allowance - its own people, in one of the world's colder countries.
Though considered inevitable, Starmer's defenestration is a bureaucratic ordeal because, as one commentator chortled, the party has more detailed rules than policies.
If Starmer Labour is vulnerable to the allures of Reform UK, Albanese Labor faces its own tests.
One Nation's success last weekend in a "safe" Liberal seat showed this clearly.
Regional Lib-Nat voters flooded into the One Nation column, eager to install a grievance outfit that has never balanced a budget, never delivered a dam or bridge.
We don't know what Labor voters did because the party chose not to run. But the recent SA election showed its backers are also open to One Nation. Even among self-describing conservatives, the appetite for institutional demolition is growing.
Angus "change or die" Taylor, whose roiling ambition had touched off the byelection loss, had no trouble reading his party's cataclysmic 31 per cent primary vote drop.
The new Opposition Leader's budget reply on Thursday night favoured attention-grabbing policy - some of it costing plenty. Bold pronouncements included a promise to entirely repeal Labor's assets and discretionary trusts taxes.
He also flagged automatic inflation-adjusted indexation of income tax thresholds to stop people creeping into higher brackets without the extra purchasing power. This will be a popular idea and removes a political lever for treasurers by delivering tax cuts automatically. But it is also a radical change if measured in revenue foregone with some modelling suggesting downgrades of $200-plus billion over a decade. Thus, it brings new pressure for cuts elsewhere. What this means for health, education, aged and childcare (including in the regions) matters.
Taylor's ire was directed as much at One Nation's insurgency by aping its pledges to end to "mass immigration", restrict crucial assistance to Australian citizens, and emphasise (ironically) Australian values.
On the plus side, the case for creative governing is gaining confidence against the tinkerers on the one hand, and the despairing populists on the other.
But prepare to learn some confronting things about "Australian values" as this all plays out.
Mark Kenny is the Director of the ANU Australian Studies Institute and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.