Nothing now stands in the way of Labor and ambitious, progressive reform
What the Liberal Party does next is important to them and irrelevant to Australia.
They attracted the lowest ever primary vote for a ‘major party’ since 1943. They have their fewest House of Representatives members since 1946 (when there were half as many seats to win).
What remains is a party even more dominated by Queensland MPs than it was before the election.
The Liberals hold only a small handful of seats in Sydney and Melbourne, and none in Adelaide or Hobart. Indeed, the Liberals hold no seats in Tasmania at all. The National Party seems to have succeeded in its reverse takeover of the Liberals.
But who cares.
Labor has a thumping majority in the lower house in its own right.
Throw in the Greens and the so-called ‘teal’ independents and progressive representatives hold close to 100 of the 150 seats in the House of Representatives.
If the Liberals want to continue their anti-science, anti-democratic culture wars, no one should worry, or try to stop them. Their future is a “them problem”.
For progressives, the news is great in the Senate as well, with Labor increasing its Senate representation, the Greens upper house vote solid and independent David Pocock winning a thumping mandate in the ACT, where the Liberals’ Senate vote collapsed to just 15 per cent. And with 42 per cent, Pocock even outpolled Labor’s Katy Gallagher.
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It’s not uncontroversial to suggest Anthony Albanese’s first term was a cautious one, but the interesting question now is whether the second term Labor government will make the big changes that Australians clearly want or need.
Or whether, despite the Liberals’ desultory performance, Albanese keeps giving them a veto over energy policy, the structure of our National Anti-Corruption Commission or whether Australians get a fair share from all the fossil fuels we export.
For decades, progressive voters have been told that Australians can’t have the nice things people in other developed countries take for granted because the Liberals and the Murdoch media would never accept such a progressive challenge.
But the weekend’s results make clear that the hard right of Australian politics is a busted flush. It’s all hat, no cattle.
The news for progressives in the Senate is also good. Photo: AAP
The big question for those inside and outside the Labor party who want to set Australia up for the enormous challenges of the 21st century is whether to push hard in parliament to deliver what the overwhelming majority of the population want, or to tread cautiously and, at best, waste precious time or, at worst, let a new, worse, right wing politics emerge.
The best way to restore Australians’ faith in democracy is to deliver the material outcomes that voters want.
Voters aren’t clamouring for Albo to find bipartisan consensus with the next right wing leaders, but they are clearly yearning for a government that will act on their very real concerns about climate change, Trump’s new world order and the rapid rise in wealth inequality in Australia, linked overwhelmingly to the tax subsidies for investment housing.
Luckily for Labor the policy to-do list has been largely written by Labor oppositions and governments, of which Anthony Albanese was himself a member.
Labor’s plan for a super profits tax on the mining industry was a good idea in 2010 and an even better idea now. If Albo wants to be less ambitious than he was back then, he could always start with a super profits tax on the fossil fuel industry.
Taxing gas, for example, is so popular that 71 percent of Coalition voters supported Peter Dutton’s thought balloon.
Back in 2019, Bill Shorten proposed a bold raft of tax reforms that would have closed tax loopholes, simplified the system, reduced inequality and collected a lot more money.
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Again, Albo doesn’t have to embrace all of Shorten’s agenda, but it’s hard to believe there will ever be a better time for Labor to spell out a plan for public health, education and housing systems that so many of its voters, and its caucus, clearly want.
And let’s not forget that just last year Labor’s Tanya Plibersek had negotiated a raft of new environment laws with the Greens’ Sarah Hanson-Young, reforms that Albanese torpedoed, as he felt at time that strengthening environment laws was too big a risk given his (mis)perception of the power of the mining industry.
The weekend result, combined with Kate Chaney’s resounding victory in the WA seat of Curtin, is clear evidence Labor was jumping at shadows.
There is no need to be scared anymore.
The right wing of the ALP, including voices like Joel Fitzgibbon and Stephen Conroy, has already cautioned the most successful PM in modern history not to be too ambitious. Indeed, Conroy has already said a third Labor term is a better time for reform.
Any new government should be cautious of hubris, but they must be just as wary of ignoring the priorities of those who put them there.
The Labor right has used the fear of electoral irrelevance to control the Labor left for decades, but now that it is the Liberals who are irrelevant, the biggest danger for Labor, and its left in particular, is that it is afraid to use the power voters have given it to drive.
We are indeed in scary times.
The climate science makes clear the extent of the catastrophe that will occur if countries like Australia continue to expand their gas and coal exports.
The United States makes clear what will happen if we let Australian voters lose faith in the ability of governments to improve their lives and protect them from existential threats. And the volatility in our electorate makes clear that, for even the most senior politicians, there is no such thing as a safe seat.
Bravery is the best antidote to fear. Australia is one of the richest countries in the world, and we can afford to do anything we want, but not everything we want.
If Labor is determined to keep Australia one of the lowest tax countries in the world, then it will have to keep making excuses about why it can’t invest more into housing, domestic and family violence services, public services and climate adaptation.
But there is no doubt that if Labor proposed scrapping fossil fuel subsidies, taxing the gas industry properly, reining in tax breaks for housing and extending the super profits tax on banks, it could afford to transform the lives of millions of Australians. And if it scraps Scott Morrison’s AUKUS deal, there is almost nothing it can’t afford to do.
Scrapping AUKUS would allow us to afford almost anything. Photo: AAP
Labor’s threat to unions, environment groups and even the branches of the ALP that ‘Dutton would be worse’ was highly effective in keeping progressive pressure off the first-term Albanese Government to do more. But that threat has passed.
The Liberals and Nationals will be fighting with each other for the next few years, and the numbers in the Senate mean the only thing holding back progressive reform is a lack of ambition.
Albanese famously said his job was to fight Tories. Well, he has won. The question is what does he do now? The small primary swing to Labor has delivered a huge parliamentary majority.
The Liberal-National vote is so low that in every state and territory but Queensland and the NT, the vote for independents and minor parties exceeds the vote for the Coalition, and they hold no seats in Tasmania, the ACT or the NT.
Dr Richard Denniss is the executive director of the independent public-policy think-tank, The Australia Institute.
