Why is Anthony Albanese so fucking shit?
It’s not like anyone thought he’d be that good. The 2022 election was mostly about driving a stake through Scott Morrison’s heart: that Anthony Albanese was the Chosen One to fulfil this prophecy did not mean he inspired enthusiasm. After all, the premise of his leadership of Labor was about correcting the dangerous radicalism of the notorious extremist Bill Shorten. It’s hard to be enthusiastic about a guy who looks at Bill Shorten and thinks: this guy’s vision is too bold.
Albanese had one big advantage: Scott Morrison’s unpopularity. So, naturally, he tried to make Labor as Morrison-like as possible. He banned rhetorical attacks on the “top end of town”. He promised to be a thoroughly pro-business prime minister. His most noteworthy election policy was to implement the Liberal Party’s planned tax cuts for the rich. What a visionary. When he did win government in 2022, it was with Labor’s lowest primary vote since 1903. The last time people were that unenthusiastic about the Australian Labor Party, Chekhov was still drafting The Cherry Orchard.
And yet, the least successful vote winner in a century of Labor campaigning has managed to be worse than expected. Usually, an incoming Labor government will give you something nice before it starts attacking you. It’ll take something expensive and make it a bit cheaper, build something good or knock down something bad, or something like that—so that, in the years to come, after the full horror of the Labor government becomes clear, it can say: but don’t you remember the good times?
What were the good times of the Albanese government? The Voice. Remember those happy days? When the basically harmless, largely pointless proposal triggered a totally predictable wave of anti-Aboriginal racism from Dutton and the right-wing press? And when Albanese refused to call out the extreme racism of the Liberals’ campaign, thus establishing that its anti-Aboriginal rhetoric was a legitimate policy debate? And when he lost anyway, and we all got nothing out of it except a few weeks of ultra-intense racist propaganda? Well, that was the good part.
In the two years since Albanese was elected, Australian workers have experienced the largest fall in disposable incomes of any OECD country. We have become poorer. Albanese’s government has stood firm in defending the status quo, and savaging anyone who proposes real change in the interests of the working class. When the Greens proposed a policy to address the housing crisis by building high-quality public housing, Albanese’s treasurer, Jim Chalmers, complained: “They quite frequently promise tens of billions of dollars for all kinds of causes”. Labor ministers should try it; maybe then people would like them.
Albanese’s government has been so steadfastly pro-business that he has frequently been outflanked from the left, not by the Greens, but by—if you can believe it—Peter Dutton. By judiciously picking a few unpopular big-business targets, Dutton has, quite incredibly, made the Liberals seem more anti-capitalist than Labor.
Dutton has repeatedly combined nationalist rhetoric with reasonable calls for regulation. Albanese then invariably rises to defend big business. When Dutton called for a ban on gambling advertising, Albanese said he was going too far. When Dutton called for supermarket regulation to deal with spiralling food prices, Albanese roasted him in parliament: “Menzies tried to ban the Communist Party. They want to adopt the Communist Party model. They want publicly owned energy through nuclear energy and now they want, one would assume, publicly owned supermarkets”. It is hard to imagine who the audience for this is, except maybe the CEOs of Coles and Woolworths. Yet the ALP was so proud of this performance that it emailed the clip to its supporters.
It’s not like Albanese is a coward. He will sometimes take a bold stance in defiance of peer pressure and group-think. For example, most people agree that genocide is bad and should be stopped. Albanese takes a more nuanced view. He is willing to sit back, let the genocide happen and see how things play out. Of course, Labor governments have been supporting the dispossession of the Palestinians since party legend Doc Evatt first negotiated the formation of Israel in 1948. But now the process is reaching a new depth, as the Palestinians are consumed in unceasing bombardments and pogroms. Albanese is indifferent.
On 24 August, Albanese issued a statement celebrating Ukrainian Independence Day, in which he marked his “respect for the strength and determination of Ukraine”, the “urgency of its quest for freedom” and “the devastation brought by Russia’s illegal and immoral invasion”, and, of course, “a nation’s right to defend itself”. Bad luck if the guy invading you happens to be armed by Albanese’s allies. Then you don’t get a statement.
Not a day passes without Albanese out-Torying the Tories. His planned destruction of the CFMEU would achieve a decades-long dream of the corrupt, violent, union-busting construction capitalists. John Howard couldn’t kill the union, but Albanese is trying. Labor won’t work with the Greens to build houses, but it happily worked with the Liberals to ensure its anti-union law was even more anti-union.
None of this is entirely new. Labor governments are always worse than they are remembered. Whenever the Liberals are in power, the Labor opposition and its campaign auxiliaries in the ACTU and wishful-thinking progressives rewrite history to make the party seem like a great reformer. Bob Hawke and Paul Keating broke the back of Australia’s unions and introduced Australian neoliberalism; now they are lionised as champions of the workers’ movement. Julia Gillard slashed university funding to the bone, pioneered new forms of offshore refugee torture and adopted an intransigent, official pro-discrimination policy on LGBTI rights; she is now remembered as a feminist icon, the title character in a hagiographic play running in Melbourne’s progressive theatre scene.
The ALP was nominally founded to represent the working class. But its goal was to end the class struggle, not to win it. It has spent more than a century trying to stop workers and the oppressed from fighting back. It was one of the first such parties to form government anywhere in the world—which means that it has accumulated a huge amount of training and experience in justifying betrayals and prettifying oppression.
Albanese was trained in Labor politics at a time when militant unionism and anti-war activism were seen as quaint throwbacks at best, and more likely as electorally dangerous extremism. He has come to government at a time when war and soaring inequality have fully exposed the rotten, anti-worker politics of his party. So he and his team should rightly be remembered as among the worst Labor leaders in history. But they aren’t an aberration. They are just a continuation of Labor’s eternal project to absorb the hopes of workers and the oppressed, and to let them down.
