Albanese now realises he’s on a rescue mission to save the sinking ship

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Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has recently established a new rescue service. Its mission is to save his government, his party and his place in history. Don’t underestimate the level of desperation or the difficulty of the task.

As 2024 neared a close, the penny finally dropped for the PM: the government was heading for the electoral precipice. Since then, he’s been all over the country making announcements, appearing in the media, calling a meeting of the national cabinet and generally being busy.

Illustration by Dionne Gain

Compared with the languid, rhetorically diffuse way in which he’s presented himself since taking office, this looks like an all-stops-out effort. Which it should be, because that’s what it will take if the government is to survive. With at most four months to go until we vote, success is far from assured and there’s a decent chance that this more focused approach will prove to have been applied too late.

It took a long time, well before the last election, for the government to get itself into this tough spot. Labor drew lessons from previous moments of difficulty and failure in this century, but it’s not clear they were the right ones. From its previous time in office, all but wrecked by the Gillard-Rudd leadership tussle, it concluded that future leaders should be almost fully protected from a party room challenge.

From its defeats under Bill Shorten in 2016 and more particularly 2019, the lesson was: don’t be ambitious in policy, don’t attract enemies by challenging powerful interests. The combination of making the leader a king and pursuing a small-target strategy has sucked most of the dynamism out of the caucus and, it seems, the cabinet. It’s also sidelined the party at the grassroots; in recent times, it has become common practice for Albanese, members of the national executive and their state proxies to decide preselections. That was fine when things were going well, but not so much when they went awry. Who wants to risk the wrath of the monarch?

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What happened under Albanese was a departure from Labor’s traditional mission as the party that applied an honest critique to society and the economy, and sought to redress the worst inequities once it attained office. It was not afraid of big thinking and ambitious policies.

Often, Labor governments were seen as noble failures. The Whitlam government is the best example, but its attempt to introduce universal healthcare, the forerunner to the Hawke government’s Medicare, stands as a great achievement. So too does the NBN under Kevin Rudd and the NDIS under Julia Gillard.

Should this government fall and cede power to Peter Dutton, what would be its enduring legacy? This is what is concerning a lot of government MPs: are they about to become the Antipodean version of the Democrats in America, who let a poor situation develop into a bad and ultimately irretrievable one?

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