Populism Defeated and Triumphant

By Scott Hargreaves

In Australia it seems that populism has failed, but it is in fact triumphant. This apparent paradox is the key to understanding both the outcome of the 2025 federal election and the objectives and tactics of the Albanese Government.

What people have in mind is that a decade-long attempt to enliven the centre-right parties with a stirring dose of populism in the Brexit/Trump/Meloni mould, foundered in the Liberal Party’s election result.

However, there is another, much older populism that the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, has been channelling, and which has been all the more successful by denying its existence.

We all know or think we know that ‘populism’ means questioning globalisation, mass immigration, ‘woke’, DEI, gender confusion and so on. Its avatars are hard-working Australians, particularly those in the suburbs and the regions who miss out on the economic and psychic benefits of elite obsessions like climate and gender and various forms of victimhood. Ever since Brexit and the first election of Donald Trump, there has been an active but nevertheless unsuccessful effort to foment in Australia a similar populist moment. It is also the case that when academics and the arbiters of cultural taste talk of the dangers of populism, it is clear they mean the populism of the right.

But as the American historian Victor Davis Hanson has written, there is another variety of populism which can be traced back to the Romans and the elected Tribunes. These were ‘largely urban protest movements focused on the redistribution of property, higher taxes on the wealthy, the cancellation of debts (and) support for greater public employment and entitlements.’

If we check that list against Albanese’s agenda, we might say: tick, tick, tick, tick.

We might add to the list of the ALP’s relentless expansion of measures that privilege the role of organised labour, in ways that override competing rights, including freedom of association, freedom of contract, and the rule of law, when it comes to construction unions. Let alone concerns with ensuring prosperity for all.

Endless favours for unions are a uniquely Australian contribution to progressive populism, in contrast to the UK and New Zealand where union domination of the Labour parties was sundered in the 1990s, and also that of the USA where the AFL-CIO will support any populist willing to back tariffs and handouts for favoured industries.

On election night in May, Anthony Albanese spoke in code to reinforce the successful bracketing of the Liberals with the populism of Donald Trump, remarking, ‘we do not need to seek our inspiration overseas.’ The PM’s real rhetorical work though was earlier in the speech when he said his mission was to ‘build our national unity on the enduring foundations of fairness, equality and respect for one another.’

Equality is the unifying concept of what Victor Davis Hanson calls progressive populism, which returned with a force in the French Revolution when ‘modern mobs wanted government-mandated equality of result,’ and ‘believed egalitarianism should encompass nearly all facets of life.’

Fairness is a perversion of the traditional Australian concept of the fair go, and even the worker’s concept of a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work. In modern progressive populism, the call for fairness is often associated with the politics of grievance, characterised by ceaseless demands for taxpayer-funded reparations or other forms of restorative justice.

In Argentina, Peronism ran the economy into the ground in the name of the descamisados, the shirtless ones, and it is absurd and historically ignorant to refer to the current Argentinian President, Javier Milei, as a ‘populist’, when that term definitely belongs to the left in that country. His program is libertarian and for limited government, and can be usefully compared to and contrasted with that of Donald Trump.

Albanese in his speech also highlighted as another example of Australian values ‘the strength to show courage in adversity and kindness to those in need.’ This is an allusion to and a perversion of the words of the Australian poet, Adam Lindsay Gordon, whose memorable lines ran: ‘Life is mostly froth and bubble, Two things stand like stone. Kindness in another’s trouble, Courage in your own.’

Rather than the individual virtue that Gordon extolled, Mr Albanese’s speechwriter is utilising kindness in the manner of former New Zealand Prime Minister, Dame Jacinda Ardern, whose approach was dubbed ‘the politics of kindness’. In practice, this means not action by individuals, as in Gordon’s day, but action by the state. It is license for the government to seek to address any and all instances of distress, and its apotheosis is an out of control National Disability Insurance Scheme which now has more than 700,000 beneficiaries and which consumes more of our GDP than defence.

As Hayek pointed out in The Fatal Conceit, there is of course virtue in kindness but it belongs in the realm of the immediate and personal. It co-evolved with humans in the context of the prototypical hunter-gatherer band. But:

The ALP’s use of rhetoric is effective precisely because it disguises itself. Albanese did not itemise the virtues as his values or the ALP’s values; he asserted that they were Australian values.

We see this in the way in which any attempt to challenge the various arms of the progressive hydra is to paint them as wishing to fight ‘the culture wars.’ A fine recent example was the address by the ALP’s Federal Campaign director, Paul Erickson, who told the National Press Club that ‘the federal election campaign was the ultimate indictment of the Coalition’s focus on culture instead of the cost of living.’ He said this, even though Peter Dutton mounted no discernible challenge to any aspect of the left’s ascendancy in cultural matters, with the Coalition’s education policy being largely buried and other cultural flashpoints being evaded altogether. Muttering something about ‘woke’ education policy in the middle of the campaign, whilst also asserting there would be no significant changes if elected is hardly the behaviour of a frothing-at-the-mouth populist. This reticent approach was in contrast to the clear messages of the campaign against the Voice to Parliament, with the referendum providing a decisive verdict on the most purely cultural issue which Australians have ever had the chance to debate.

Erickson was firing shots across the bow of the Liberals’ ship; he does not want the right talking about culture at all.

Albanese began as a student activist more than forty years ago, and he knows more about the contours of progressive populism than anyone in parliament, perhaps anywhere. However, he knows that whenever it moves to centre stage, it is defeated, as it was in 1975, 2013, and 2019. It is more effective if couched as something from the centre ground, while painting the opponents as extreme.

If there is a lesson for the centre-right, it is that the association of populism with radicalism is a turn-off for Australians. It was not the specifics of Trump’s action but the perception of chaos that impacted the Federal election. In a complex and uncertain world, mainstream Australians seek certainty and continuity.

It also reinforces the demographic reality of Australia – one very different from the America that Victor Davis Hanson describes, where duelling populisms balance on the urban-rural divide – that we are an overwhelmingly urbanised country. As I wrote in 2017, ‘Due to the historically very high concentration of population in the capital cities in Australia, populism in its classic form is likely to remain a minority position at the national level, unless it can form a bridge to the discontented in the cities.’

To discard the radical approach is not to discard the heritage of a more conservative vision of populism which Hanson as a classicist traces all the way back to the mesoi or ‘middle guys’ of Ancient Athens, who signature ideas ‘were preserving ownership of a family plot, seeing property as the nexus of all civil, political, and military life, and passing on farms through codified inheritance laws,’ while ‘offering stability to an otherwise volatile political order’.

Unlike Athenian citizens, the typical mainstream Australian does not own a farm, but the vision of individuals and families with their property secure, able to live in stable and thriving communities, enabling wealth creation and the transmission of property to loved ones, still has lasting appeal.