All we’ve got from the Albanese government is Peter Dutton
Another year on, and the dismal government of Anthony Albanese has continued to deliver nothing much. Having begun its life with about as much mojo as a koala, the government has spent 2024 as Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s yes-man. Albanese’s political strategy resembles a 1-2 combination of Joe Biden and Mike Tyson—rule for the rich, screw your supporters, throw the match and walk away with a $4.3 million mansion.
Albanese came to power in 2022 on the back of the unpopularity of the dysfunctional Scott Morrison Coalition government. In contrast to the Coalition, which was plagued with infighting, obsessed with culture wars and losing seats to the Teals, Labor presented itself as the “sensible centre”, the “adults in the room”. To the ruling class it promised, in Albanese’s words, an “unashamedly pro-business government”. At the same time, most workers hoped Labor might do something to make life a little easier, and progressives hoped for some sort of progress on climate action.
The Liberal Party was in disarray, but the 2022 election was far from a smashing victory for Labor. The ALP recorded one of its weakest results in history, with a primary vote of just 32 percent. In the years since, Labor’s support has steadily eroded, and the government has become increasingly weak and inclined to run for cover. Dutton, the man whose wife once had to clarify to media that he was in fact a human being and “not a monster”, is now competitive in the polls and setting the political agenda.
Living standards have gone backwards at record rates under Labor
The main factor in all this has been Labor’s failure to take any serious measures to address the cost-of-living crisis.
High inflation has reduced real disposable household incomes by a whopping 10 percent since 2021, more than any other OECD country and the worst fall in Australia in more than 50 years. While supermarkets and energy companies price-gouge their way to soaring profits, Albanese has done nothing to rein them in. While banks and landlords make the cost of housing impossibly expensive, Labor introduces tokenistic schemes like the Housing Australia Future Fund, which after more than a year of operation will have contributed to just 700 new “affordable” homes.
Worse still, the government has presided over a range of measures to increase the squeeze on working-class households. These include scrapping the low to middle income tax offset, which was worth up to $1,500 for people earning up to $90,000, keeping minimum wage growth below the rate of inflation, and huge interest rate rises. Following the playbook of governments around the world, the interest rate rises were explicitly designed to cut the income and spending of the population, while slowing economic growth and driving up unemployment, in order to combat inflation. In other words, making the working class pay for the economy’s problems.
Meanwhile, Labor governments at federal and state levels have maintained a hard line on public sector wages. And if workers step out of line, demand proper pay rises and take industrial action, as Woolworths warehouse workers have been doing, they soon come up against draconian laws, upheld by the Labor government, restricting and banning strikes and picketing.
It’s not as though Labor weren’t throwing money around when it wanted to. Military spending increased to a record $55.7 billion in this year’s budget. Tax cuts, which mostly benefited the rich, are forecast to cost $100 billion over four years. Another $50 billion is given away every year in the form of capital gains tax discounts and negative gearing concessions, mostly to wealthy investors and property developers. A further $14.5 billion went in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry last year. This is 10 times the amount the government spent to give everyone a measly $300 rebate on their energy bill.
By January 2024, polling was showing that a big majority (71 percent) considered the cost of living to be their main concern, followed by housing (41 percent). Eighty percent believed the government had failed to address the cost-of-living crisis. More than half thought the country was heading in the wrong direction. While inflation has now come down, the damage done over the last few years has by no means been reversed.
While workers have gone backwards, Forbes reports that “despite a weaker Australian dollar, Australia’s 50 Richest on the 2024 list are better off from a year ago. Their collective wealth rose by US$9 billion to $222 billion, from $213 billion in 2023.” The overall share of national income going to profits, instead of wages, remains at record highs. This explains why the ruling class, and the media, have not turned against the Albanese government.
No progress, only spin, failure and regression on social issues
Labor’s progressive supporters have experienced another year of being kicked in the teeth. On climate policy, Albanese has approved another 28 coal and gas projects since being elected. This has exposed the big scam that was Labor’s flagship “safeguard mechanism” climate policy in 2023, which was touted as “ending the climate wars”, and even celebrated by the Greens, whose leader Adam Bandt claimed that “coal and gas have taken a huge hit”. In fact, the policy was adopted from the Business Council of Australia, and backed by the mining and gas companies, which, in 2023, exported the equivalent of another 1.15 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.
Albanese ended 2024 by tearing up a separate deal with the Greens on “nature positive legislation”, at the behest of the Western Australia Labor government, which in turn was doing the bidding of mining companies, and rushing through approval for another three coal mines.
The Albanese government’s climate policy has been based on giving the mining and gas companies whatever they want, while trying to deceive the public that some progress on tackling carbon emissions is occurring, through industrial-scale greenwashing, accounting tricks and fake carbon offsets. Meanwhile energy bills soar. This fuels the cynicism and resentment that Dutton capitalises on to deride the “green agenda” and to blame it for high energy prices.
Labor’s pro-business approach has been matched by a general political strategy of wanting to avoid any fight with the right about social questions. From his small-target strategy in opposition, Albanese now wants to lead a small-target government.
Labor supported the Voice referendum only because the proposal was backed by big business and, initially, seemed uncontroversial. The success of Dutton’s racist “no” campaign, which Labor couldn’t stand up to, weakened Albanese further and reinforced his determination to avoid any controversy and, in particular, criticism from the right.
This has led to Labor jumping to adopt increasingly reactionary policies. One particularly pathetic example was Albanese’s move to break an election promise and scrap questions about sexual orientation and gender identity in the national census, only to backflip two weeks later. Here was Labor pre-emptively capitulating to a right-wing culture war that didn’t even exist.
The government’s extreme response to the construction union, the CFMEU, after allegations of corruption aired in the media, probably fits somewhere in Albanese’s Venn diagram between servitude to big business and terror of being criticised by the right, in this case for being too close to the unions. Labor’s complete government takeover of the union and sacking of officials, including in branches not subject to allegations of corruption, is a major attack on one of the few unions perceived still to use workers’ industrial muscle to win decent wages and conditions.
Then we have Labor’s despicable lurch to the right on questions of immigration and refugees, even to the point of trying to out-compete Dutton as “tougher” on denying human rights and deporting people. US President-elect Donald Trump’s electoral success will only encourage Dutton to adopt even more extreme racist, anti-refugee and anti-immigrant rhetoric. Rather than blaming the billionaires, immigrants have always been the perfect scapegoat for cost-of-living pressures, unemployment and non-existent crime waves.
Labor has gone along with this argument, culminating in its rush to pass a trio of hideous new anti-refugee bills, in agreement with the Coalition, in the last sitting days of parliament for 2024. In spruiking the bills, Albanese attacked Dutton from the right, saying, “On Peter Dutton’s watch, there was a huge spike in the number of protection visa applications onshore”.
These extreme new laws allow the government to bribe countries to accept deportees from Australia, regardless of their human rights credentials. They make it harder for asylum seekers to get protection visas and allow the Australian government to ban new visa applications from countries that do not accept forced deportations from Australia, which many have labelled a Trump-style travel ban. And they ramp up the isolation and hellish treatment of those in immigration detention, with bans on phones, and more powers to impose ankle bracelets and curfews on anyone released.
After the laws passed, shadow immigration minister Dan Tehan boasted that the Coalition is now “basically running the immigration system for the government”. And he is not wrong.
Albanese punches down
While cosying up to big business and out-competing Dutton on racism, there have been some fights Albanese has embraced with passion and verve—against anyone to his left.
Lashing the Greens has become Labor’s favourite pastime. They have labelled straightforward housing proposals like a rent freeze, which the Greens advocate and which have majority support, as “absolute pixie dust”. They have denounced Greens MPs for “grandstanding” by supporting the CFMEU. Most of all, they have attacked the Greens for supporting Palestinian rights. In language you never see Labor politicians use against the right, Foreign Minister Penny Wong, without any evidence, said the Greens “engage in violent and aggressive protests and incite them”.
This from the government that is continuing to back, including militarily, a state that is committing what even Amnesty International now describes as genocide, led by a prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has an arrest warrant issued against him by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. You won’t find any strong words of condemnation or denunciation from any Labor politician of Israel or its actions in Gaza. Indeed, the only Labor politician who did begin to offer such criticism, Fatima Payman, was driven out of the party. But there’s been plenty of moral outrage, and repression, directed at those who have protested these crimes.
Albanese won’t fight the right, but he will bravely take on children. Labor governments at federal and state level have either led, or gone along with, hysterical law and order campaigns, often directed against Aboriginal children. And now they are banning social media access for under-16s, while doing nothing to actually regulate or take on the big media and social media barons.
Where to from here?
The Labor government is leading our society into a very bleak situation. It has carried out the ruling class’s wish to get inflation under control by sacrificing working-class living standards and job security. The resentment felt by millions, combined with the government’s right-wing stance on issue after issue, is helping pave the way for Dutton.
Around the world similar stories have played out, whereby centrist governments, overseeing growing inequality and pursuing anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies, have fuelled the right and far right. Most recently, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris led to Donald Trump. In the UK, the Keir Starmer Labor government is already tanking in the polls, with a huge growth in support for the Conservatives and the far right. In several countries in Europe, social democratic parties have collapsed and far-right governments have come to power.
The Labor Party may still cling to power in the next election, propped up as a minority government by the Greens, which seems increasingly happy to play this role. Despite Albanese’s best efforts, Dutton is still widely unpopular. But whether it’s Albanese screwing the working class and championing right-wing policies, or the monster Dutton, it remains the case that what is desperately needed is stronger socialist opposition to the rotten Labor Party and the system it represents.
