A government halfway done

Last week was the halfway mark of the Albanese government’s first term in office.  It’s far too early to say its ‘first and last’ term but yesterday’s Newspoll did have Labor and the Coalition in a dead heat at 50-50.  If that result was repeated at a federal election the ALP would would lose half a dozen seats and be pushed into a minority government relying on the support of the Teals…and/or the Greens.  The Newspoll result mirrors other surveys such the Morgan poll that actually has Labor behind the Coalition.

The Canberra press gallery is struggling to come to terms with Labor’s failing fortunes and its declining popularity.  But as we saw during the Voice referendum when Canberra voted 61% YES compared to the country overall that voted only 39% YES, if you’re living and working in the nation’s capital your affinity with the rest of the nation is limited.

What’s happening to the country’s politics is about something bigger than the parliamentary to-and-fro with which the media is obsessed.   The result of a YouGov poll from a few weeks ago is revealing.

‘Generally, do you think Australia is heading in the right direction or wrong direction?’

Wrong Direction – 54%

Right Direction – 46%

Perhaps it’s surprising that the 46% number is as high as it is.

Here’s three facts I’ve come across in my reading just in the past week which helps explain the YouGov poll:

• In 1991 the average Australian home cost five times the median income of a 25-39 year-old working full time.  In 2006 that figure was seven times.  In 2021 that figure was nine times. (Source: The Guardian, 23 November 2023)
• A traffic controller holding a ‘Stop/Go’ sign working on the Melbourne Metropolitan Tunnel Project is paid $126,200 a year.  The qualification required for the job is completion of a two-day training course.  The starting salary for a state school teacher is $78,000 a year.  The qualification required for the job is a minimum of two years of tertiary education and in most cases four years of tertiary education. (Source: John Lloyd speech to the HR Nicholls Society on 17 November 2023 reported in The Australian Financial Review, 22 November 2023)
• In 2004 the Australian economy was ranked as the 4th most competitive in the world behind the United States, Singapore, and Canada. In 2023 our economy was ranked the 19th most competitive in the world behind Denmark, Ireland, Switzerland, Singapore, Netherlands, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Sweden, United States, UAE, Finland, Qatar, Belgium, Norway Canada, Iceland, Saudi Arabia, and the Czech Republic. (Source: Dr Kevn You, Institute of Public Affairs Parliamentary Research Brief ‘Australia’s economic competitiveness in continuing decline’, November 2023; International Institute for Management Development)

Writing on the weekend Greg Sheridan said ‘the wheels are coming off’ the Albanese government.  That’s true.  Labor’s inability to competently manage the day-to-day issues of Canberra is becoming obvious.  For example yesterday the Australian public was told it will cost a quarter of a billion dollars for the authorities to monitor former detainees released into the community following a decision of the High Court.

But something bigger is going on.  Until a few years the biggest policy challenge Australia faced was the question of how to spend our prosperity.  Kevin Rudd won the federal election of 2007 when he presented himself not as an alternative to John Howard, but as his successor.  The prosperity that was assumed to continue indefinitely was going to pay for things like the NBN, the ‘Gonski’ education reforms, and the NDIS.

After eighteen months in office Anthony Albanese is getting found out and it’s becoming clear he has little understanding – or interest – in what confronts the country.   It might be that the Australian public are slowly coming to the conclusion he’s not that good.  There might be a reason while he’s been a member of parliament for 27 years many people would struggle to name anything he’s done – other than leading his referendum proposal to an ignominious defeat.

Becoming Labor leader and then prime minister has Albanese has done is notable.  But that’s all it is.  For Labor the 2022 federal election was like 1983 – a ‘drover’s dog’ would have won it.  When Scott Morrison committed the Coalition to net zero he destroyed the ability of the Coalition to critique any aspect of the ALP’s energy policy.  Labor’s energy policies helped the Coalition win the 2019 and the same thing could have happened in 2022.  It might have all been different had Morrison explained Labor’s climate change policies would potentially lead to blackouts, would be hugely expensive, and would require 3,500 wind turbines and 28,000 kilometres of new transmission poles and wires.   (To put that into perspective, the coastline of the Australian continent is 34,000 kilometres, and that of the United States 20,000 kilometres.)

In any case Labor squeezed into office last year.  It’s primary vote of 32.6%  was its lowest since 1903.  In 1972 Labor under Whitlam had a primary vote of 49.6%, at Bob Hawke’s first victory it was 49.5%, and Kevin Rudd got 43.4%.

Labor Party supporters are fond of quoting the left-wing economist Paul Krugman, ‘Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run, it’s almost everything.’  That was meant to be the financial justification for Labor’s massive increases in spending on education and childcare.  Across the media today and yesterday is a story about the science syllabus in the national curriculum – ‘Australian students were learning 44 science topics in their first nine years of schooling compared with an average (in England, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, the US, and the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Quebec) of 74.’

[OECD test results] confirmed a continuing long-term decline in Australian students’ reading, mathematics and science skills, with 10 countries now with ‘significantly higher’ results in reading than Australia, 23 in maths and 12 in science.

Compared with students in the highest performing country, Singapore, Australians were more than a year behind in reading, about three years behind in mathematics and almost two years behind in science.

Back in March 2020 at the very beginning of COVID and all its consequences, I wrote in The Australian Financial Review – ‘Virus crisis signals end of the road for the ‘lollipop economy’ ‘.

However this crisis ends, the era of Australia’s ‘lollipop economy’ is over.  Not in our lifetime will a worker ever again be paid $180,000 a year to stand hold a traffic sign at a construction site.  (Which is the amount traffic controllers can earn under the Queensland government’s minimum labour requirements on state-funded infrastructure projects.)

If there’s one thing that sums up what’s happened to the Australian economy after 29 years without a recession, it’s the symbolism of someone holding a Stop/Go sign being paid twice as much as a school teacher.

[After COVID] there’s the very real possibility that the public might realise that many of the things that politicians have spent the last decade talking about are in fact utterly irrelevant.  Climate change being the most obvious example.

That doesn’t read so well today.  Instead of the COVID crisis demonstrating the limits of what the government can do, and revealing that the government can often get things very very wrong, COVID had the public demanding more from the government – not less.  And when the government failed the popular response more often than not was that government hadn’t done enough, early enough.  To reassess the role of government and to ask why in Australia someone holding a traffic sign is paid what they are questions so big our political class is afraid to ask them – let alone try to answer them.

During COVID the more politicians talked about how ‘We’re all in this together’ the more obvious it became we were not.  The young and the old weren’t ‘in it together,’ nor were the self-employed and public servants working from home on taxpayer-funded guaranteed incomes.

The YouGov survey I mentioned highlighted just how stark is the difference in attitude of the two halves of Australian society.  Only 30% of those who voted ‘NO’ in the Voice referendum believe Australia is heading in the right direction, whereas of those who voted ‘YES’ 70% believe the country is heading the right direction.  That’s a big difference.  Two halves of Australia want very different things.  The extent to which Australia is ‘one’ is a very real question.  As flawed as the concept of the Voice was, and despite it being overwhelmingly defeated in every state, it shouldn’t be forgotten nearly 40% of Australians nonetheless voted for it.

It’s not unreasonable to ask what a Bob Hawke or a John Howard would have done in the wake of the Voice vote and after looking at the numbers revealed in the YouGov poll.  They would have talked about what as Australians we can all agree upon.  Admittedly these days those things are harder to find – but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look for them.  But that’s not what Anthony Albanese is doing.

At his press conference the night of the referendum he couldn’t help himself.  He didn’t blame ‘misinformation’ by name for the defeat of the Voice (although Labor MPs did in the days following) but it was clear what Albanese was talking about.  So for example there was this question and his response at his press conference on the night of the referendum:

JOURNALIST – Prime Minister, you said, ‘Because Australians are a fair, compassionate, and courageous people and we are ready to take this step together’.  Does tonight’s result tell you otherwise, that we aren’t a compassionate, fair, and courageous people?

PRIME MINISTER – I think Australians are fair and compassionate.  I think during this campaign, we have had a clear proposition of just two things – recognition and a non-binding advisory committee.

But we have had, including in outlets represented in this room, discussions about a whole range of  things that were nothing to do with what was on the ballot paper tonight.  You all know that has occurred.  Debates about the length of the Uluru Statement from the Heart that no-one serious, in this room – is there anyone in this room that thinks it was more than it was?  But we had pages and pages and weeks and weeks in which those issues were portrayed.

In other words – it’s someone else’s fault.  And the implication is that somehow 60% of the Australian public were fooled into voting NO because of ‘discussions about a whole range of things that were nothing to do with what on the ballot paper’.

That’s not leadership.

On the Saturday last year as Albanese was giving his election night victory speech a friend of mine bet $100 with his nephew that Albanese would not last as Labor leader to the next election.  As remarkable as it sounds it wouldn’t entirely surprise me if my friend won his bet.  For there’s no indication the prime minister can change the trajectory of his government – or of the country.