RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am.

After a year of pandemic, the Labor Party is preparing for the possibility of an early election. Scott Morrison is leading in the approval ratings, and Labor is shifting it’s strategy from one of collaboration to one that is more combative. Some in the party, though, believe they are still likely to lose.

Today, chief political correspondent for The Saturday Paper, Karen Middleton, interviews Tanya Plibersek about what’s next for Labor.

RUBY:

Karen, you interviewed Tanya Plibersek last week. How was she?

KAREN:

Oh, she was good. She was positive.

Phone call -- Karen Middleton:

“Hello.”

Phone call -- Tanya Plibersek:

“Hello. I can hear you perfectly.”

KAREN:

And talking about Labor's strategy going forward, she was sounding optimistic.

Phone call -- Tanya Plibersek:

“How are you, Karen?”

Phone call -- Karen Middleton:

“Good thanks. Happy new year.”

Phone call -- Tanya Plibersek:

“And you.”

KAREN:

She was keen to talk about both her education portfolio and Labor's general approach, politically speaking, in 2021.

RUBY:

Mm. And when you spoke to her, Tanya Plibersek had just been in the news as a result of this confrontation with Coalition backbencher, Craig Kelly, in the press gallery corridor. So can you tell me about what happened there?

Phone call -- Karen Middleton:

“I just wanted to ask you what your responses to that incident with Craig Kelly, you know, how it played out...”

KAREN:

Tanya Plibersek had been doing a television interview and came out into the corridor in the press gallery after that interview. And there were cameras waiting for her there, asking her a range of questions.

Phone call -- Tanya Plibersek:

“The last question was, you know, what about Craig Kelly? And I said the Prime Minister should tell him to toe the line and they said, Well, you can tell him yourself he's right behind you.”

KAREN:

One of the last questions was about Craig Kelly, the Liberal backbencher who's been becoming notorious for posting a lot of conspiracy theories about covid-19 on his Facebook and other social media and also about anti-vaccination messages, which is unhelpful to the government when they're trying to make sure that people have confidence in the upcoming mass vaccination programme for Covid-19, which is the biggest vaccination programme Australia will ever have embarked on.

Phone call -- Tanya Plibersek:

“We need to be really careful in every part of Australia that these theories don't get a foothold. There's so much misinformation and disinformation on the Internet. It's really important that leaders, members of Parliament speak with one voice on this…”

KAREN:

She was asked about that. She started to criticise his approach and then he approached down the corridor, coincidentally. It was a pantomime situation where the journalists called out: ‘he's right behind you’. And she turned around and then took him on in person. And they had a stoush in front of all the cameras while the cameras were rolling.

Phone call -- Tanya Plibersek:

“The government’s spending $24 million of taxpayers’ money urging people to get vaccinated. It’s just not acceptable that one of their own MPs is undermining that programme.”

KAREN:

Tanya Plibersek made the point that her own mother lives in his electorate.

Phone call -- Tanya Plibersek:

“My mum was in his electorate. She's almost ninety. I really don't want her going to the shop and running into people who refuse to be vaccinated because their local MP tells them that they should be careful about it...”

KAREN:

And she was worried that her mother was being fed this conspiratorial stuff that was really unhelpful and making people anxious.

Phone call -- Tanya Plibersek:

“It is a really serious issue to have a member of the federal parliament undermining the government’s message on vaccines and Covid-19 treatment…”

RUBY:

Hmm. And that confrontation with Craig Kelly, why is it important?

KAREN:

Well, I think it typifies a bit of a shift in Labor's approach. They've been gradually changing their approach, their political strategy. As we move into a different phase of the pandemic, we've kind of left the emergency phase, the sense of national crisis. And we've moved into this management idea, maintenance idea that we have to live with this virus. We have to have our behaviour changed permanently. And so that is changing the politics.

Labor has been very cooperative to this point. They've tried to support the government. They've criticised bits and pieces of the government's approach. But on the whole, they've been quite compliant. Now, that's sent them some criticism from their own constituents in some respects, because people who are strong Labor supporters are wanting them to go hard against the government. But they've sensed, generally speaking, that there is a desire in the wider population for Labor to be cooperative, collaborative, and for this to be a unified approach. So that's been their general attitude

Phone call -- Tanya Plibersek:

“As an opposition we have really been trying to work constructively with the government. We suggested wage subsidies and that became JobKeeper. That's a good thing.”

KAREN:

But with things calming down a bit, they now sense that there is an expectation that they will more firmly hold the government to account.

Phone call -- Tanya Plibersek:

“But it shouldn't stop us now starting to look at the areas where the government could have done better.”

KAREN:

And I think that process has begun. And what you saw with Tanya Plibersek challenging directly Craig Kelly's ideas was that perhaps a sign that the politics is getting a little more aggressive and that this kind of thing will occur and it will occur more generally and more regularly as Labor starts to challenge particular policy decisions that the government has made.

Phone call -- Tanya Plibersek:

“And I think things like aged care, the failure of the Covid tracing app, the design of, uh, JobKeeper, which has allowed some companies to claim millions of dollars in subsidies at a time where they’re achieving record profits.”

KAREN:

JobKeeper and who got that and who didn't, the money that was spent on the Covidsafe app, that hasn't really worked all that terribly well. The fact that Australians are still stuck overseas

Phone call -- Tanya Plibersek:

“These types of issues, we do need to hold the government to account on.”

KAREN:

A number of different issues that they see as issues that should be investigated a bit further. And they now feel that the time is right to do that. She's arguing that she believes and that Labor believes that the government hasn't done enough to execute these things properly, that there are things that the government should have done better, that they've got off a bit lightly. That's Labor's argument.

RUBY:

We'll be back in a moment.

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RUBY:

Karen, we're talking about the Labor Party and the posture it intends to take this year after being largely quiet during the pandemic. What are the issues that Labor faces this year?

Phone call -- Tanya Plibersek:

“I definitely think that there's a national mood, that we're all in this together and people don't want to hear about politics. And they don't want politics as usual. And they don't want nitpicking…”

KAREN:

Well, Labor is very much behind in terms of the electoral race. They don't know whether the election will be held this year or next year.

Phone call -- Tanya Plibersek:

“That doesn't absolve us from looking at the areas where the government has failed and holding them to account, uh, for failures where they exist.”

KAREN:

It's officially supposed to be in 2022, but it can be held any time from the second half of this year into the first half of next year. And the prime minister has repeatedly said he will wait and run the full term and go next year. But prime ministers notoriously will go whenever they think they have the best chance of winning and his chance of winning right at the moment is pretty good.

So you have to think that going in the second half of the year is a possibility. That means that they need to be ready. They have to make sure they are ready, there are reports out this week that they have leased an office building in Sydney preparing for a campaign, that they've got themselves together. There are still some policy positions that are being bedded down.

We haven't heard all of the policy positions in public from Labor. They've tried to say very little about their policy positions and to leave that to roll out sort of at the last minute, they still have to do that in some very big areas. And they're getting questions in a number of areas that they really need to nail down. So, there are a number of challenges for Labor, not least of which is the very strong popularity of Scott Morrison and the fact that they are still at very best level pegging in the two party preferred vote. But their primary vote is very low. It's in the 30s and they would be hoping to get it up a little bit higher than that.

RUBY:

Mm and how seriously is Anthony Albanese taking the polls and the prospect of an election this year?

KAREN:

Leaders always say they don't care about the polls and they don't look at the polls. And on one level, it's true simply because they think longer-term than that. But it would be, you know, completely false to suggest that they don't pay attention to them in the day to day sense because they do.

And they also have an impact on the general mood in the party, the sense of either enthusiasm or malaise, when you're looking at them as a member of parliament who's in a marginal seat and your party is not doing well and you're worried that that means that you're going to lose your marginal seat then people get very agitated and they put pressure on the leader.

So the polls do have a role to play, even a psychological one in either pulling a party together and making it enthusiastic and positive and optimistic, or in seeing it start to fragment and get get frustrated and feel like it's losing

RUBY:

Leadership is always the question when the polls are bad. What did Plibersek say when you put that to her directly?

Phone call -- Karen Middleton:

“You name’s obviously one that always gets talked about in terms of future leadership, whether it be sooner or later. Is that something that you are thinking about?

KAREN:

She pretty much said that. I'm not going to talk about that.

Phone call -- Tanya Plibersek:

“I'm not going to talk about that, Karen, because the last thing people want to hear when they're worried about their own jobs is us talking about our jobs. That's just not my focus.”

KAREN:

The Australian people want us talking about their jobs. And of course, that's the focus Labor has chosen at the moment - is very much jobs and employment, defending the Australians who've lost their jobs or whose jobs are under threat, focussing on the economy and suggesting that they are on, I think the phrase is a slogan is, ‘on your side’. They are on the side of the Australian people.

Phone call -- Tanya Plibersek:

“A lot of people have looked at the world of work and really been reminded that secure work with decent pay is not just important for the individual who is in the job, it's actually good for our whole society.”

KAREN:

She's saying we want to be talking about other people's jobs, not our own jobs. We can't hope to gain the support of Australians if we're constantly talking about ourselves.

Phone call -- Tanya Plibersek:

“Our economy needs confidence and demand. That means you have to be confident that as long as you do nothing wrong, you'll have a job next week and next month and next year.”

RUBY:

What's the view in the party, Karen, about other contenders, people like Richard Marles or Jim Chalmers?

KAREN:

Well, these things are always ultimately determined on the factional allegiances. And Tanya Plibersek is in the left, as is Anthony Albanese, the left faction. She's also from inner city Sydney like he is. So she's a person that would be considered to be of the same kind of ilk as Albanese as a leader. The other candidates - probably those at the front of the queue - are primarily Jim Chalmers, who's from the right faction in Queensland, and Richard Marles, who's from the right faction in Victoria.

Now, the right has the numbers in the Labor Party. Albanese won on the strength of his achievements and his capacity to marshal numbers for himself, including some in the right. He's from New South Wales. So he managed to garner some of the New South Wales right support behind him, not a large amount of it. But in the future, if he was no longer a candidate, whether that's sooner or later the right would look to a right wing candidate before they would look to another left winger. So that makes it much harder for Tanya Plibersek. The suggestion really would be that the favour would fall probably on Jim Chalmers and Richard Marles and possibly Jim Chalmers first and Richard Marles second.

That's not to say that Tanya Plibersek might not be a future deputy. She's been a deputy before. She was a deputy to Bill Shorten. It would be likely, for example, if Jim Chalmers was elected, that she might well win the deputy's position once again. This is all, of course, hypothetical. It would all depend on when such a vote occurred. She would certainly be a candidate, I think, if there was a vote to be held before the election. Well, I'm assuming she would be: she hasn't said that outright. Whether she would have a better chance before the election than after the election is a bit of a moot point.

So all of these things are a bit unknowable and will depend on how well the party fares in the next probably two to three months, and particularly how well Anthony Albanese seemed to fare, whether he can hold that support in the lead up to the election or whether the party goes wobbly and decides to vote to change the rules that are introduced under Kevin Rudd to make it harder to change leader - and then remove the leader himself.

RUBY:

Mm. If there is an election this year, what do people within Labor think is likely to happen?

KAREN:

I think probably the broad view is that Labor is at this point likely to lose. Even though they have a two party preferred vote that is level pegging with the government, the leader’s support is very low at this point and the primary vote is low. The people closest to Anthony Albanese - and I think Albanese himself - believe that this is ultimately still a winnable election. They think they've got a strategy to get them there. But there are some others in the party who are nervous about that. And that's where the danger comes for a leader in the next few months as they start to contemplate the possibility of an early election. Then the question arises, do they stick with the guy they've got or do they look to try and insert somebody else.

RUBY:

Karen, thank you so much for your time today.

KAREN:

Thanks, Ruby.

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RUBY:

Also in the news...

The five-day snap lockdown in Victoria ended at midnight last night, as planned, after the Premier Dan Andrews said the Covid-19 outbreak in the state was contained. Victoria recorded no new cases of Covid-19 yesterday.
And the NSW and Queensland governments have announced plans for frontline workers to begin receiving doses of coronavirus vaccine. The vaccination program begins on Monday.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am, see you tomorrow.