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ANGE:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ange McCormack. This is 7am.

This time last year, the government was confident, popular, and getting its agenda through without controversy.

But a year later, the Labor government has slumped in the polls, it’s lost a historic referendum and it’s facing stronger opposition – both inside and outside the Parliament.

So, is this all a temporary blip or an urgent warning? And does the Albanese government need to change course? or is it better to persevere with its existing agenda?

Today, contributor to The Monthly, Sean Kelly, on the story of Labor’s year and what it’s taught us about Anthony Albanese’s style of leadership.

It’s Tuesday, December 12.

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ANGE:

Sean, the government has wrapped up its parliamentary year. The final few weeks have been a bit of a slog for the government, though. Do you think it's been the kind of end to the year that the government would have liked?

SEAN:

Absolutely not. I think there is a bit of a sense of the widely used word is drift. And I think that that is fair. I think you would have to take really the last two or three months, there's been a series of events that was the end of the referendum, obviously, that ended in defeat for the Yes campaign.

Audio excerpt – News Reporter:

“Good evening we have breaking news tonight, the referendum for the Voice to Parliament has been defeated…”

SEAN:

There are two wars that are receiving a lot of media coverage.

Audio excerpt – Anthony Albanese:

“Australia unequivocally condemns the terrorism of Hamas, we grieve for the loss of every innocent life whether they be Israeli or Palestinian.”

SEAN:

There is debate around the government's position on the war in Gaza.

Audio excerpt – News Reporter:

“A delegation of Labour rank and file have come to Parliament to pressure the Albanese government to call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. They claim their voices are being ignored by the Prime Minister.”

SEAN:

There was the outbreak of bushfires. There was the High Court decision on detainees. That has spiraled into a series of problems for the Government.

Audio excerpt – News Reporter:

“The Government has a new headache tonight after a landmark High Court ruling on the fate of unsuccessful asylum seekers.”

SEAN:

There looks to me no sign of that ending any time soon. There was a rate rise and inflation is still an issue.

I think if you bundle all of those things together, what you have is an overriding mood, which I think is creeping into a sense of uncertainty.

And that is an incredibly difficult thing for a government and so there is this sense of wanting somebody to step up to the plate and lead. But actually, the government's hands are a little bit tired. And I think that's a very difficult place for a government to find itself in because there really is a sense that the government is not in control of events.

ANGE:

And Sean, I want to talk about how the government ended up in this quite tricky spot as we come to the end of the year, because it really wasn't that long ago that the Albanese government was riding quite high and the Opposition wasn't cutting through at all. Beyond some of those recent events. How did we get to this moment?

SEAN:

Look, it's interesting, isn't it, when you think back to the start of the year and this is all within these 12 months there was the Aston by-election. For the first time in a century, a government took a seat off the opposition in a by-election. There was this sense that the Liberals were washed up. And the polls have crept back towards the Liberals or more accurately, away from Labor, there's been a real sense of that mood changing.

Some of the recent polling has been really quite negative for the government and for the Prime Minister, not necessarily putting them in an election losing position, but certainly polls that they should be paying attention to. You had an essential poll that showed Anthony Albanese's disapproval overtaking his approvals for the first time.

You had a Newspoll showing the Liberals pulling even with Labor on two party preferred. That's 50-50. So I think after the Government's very strong start to the year, that would be a bit of a shock.

ANGE:

And the polls, I guess they're a picture of how voters say the government. But I'm wondering, how does the government see itself? What kind of assessment would it give itself, do you think, in terms of what it achieved this year?

SEAN:

Government often have a private view of things and a public view of things. But in terms of the substantive achievements, the government actually has a pretty consistent view on this privately and publicly,

Audio excerpt – Speaker:

“Mr Albanese Good Morning!”

Audio excerpt – Anthony Albanese:

“Good morning Neil!”

SEAN:

and that is that it has made significant strides forward in a number of areas.

Audio excerpt – Speaker:

“Polls are bad. The Government's stumbling. You look tired. You could be chopped liver as well. What are you doing wrong?”

Audio excerpt – Anthony Albanese:

“I'm absolutely fine, Neil.”

SEAN:

And, you know, it does have a reasonable list to point to.

Audio excerpt – Anthony Albanese:

“Where we've implemented cheaper childcare. We've implemented now, now there's almost up to 300,000 fee free TAFE places. Wages are going up. Real wages are going up in the last two quarters.”

SEAN:

They would say they passed the climate safeguards expansion, they boosted Medicare, they announced industrial relations changes. Those are still being negotiated. There were important changes in migration. There are cheaper medicines. The tax on gas and petrol, Reserve Bank reforms, paid parental leave finalised, look, the list really does go on. I don't want to bore everybody, but it is absolutely not an insignificant list, especially not an insignificant list when you compare it to the last term of government when there were really long stretches where the Parliament seemed to be struggling to find things to do.

So this is a significant shift, but at the same time, there is a real feeling that those achievements have not really been noticed by the public. And this comes back to a really broad and I think quite interesting question about the government style.

The government tries very hard to get things done quietly. It often tries to snake them through a little bit. I think it kind of sets the threshold for policies just below where they will attract significant public attention. They try to avoid fights. Now, the advantage of that is you get things done without frightening the horses. That is a phrase I've heard the government used. But the downside is exactly the same. You get things done without anybody noticing.

And this is part of what, you know, I would turn to the Albanese experiment in my mind, it is exactly this. It is incrementalism, it is gradualism, it is trying to get things done in a fairly quiet and steady fashion in the belief that those changes over time will add up to something significant. And because you are going about them slowly and accustomed the public to them, you will be able to embed those changes in the national framework.

But if you say that that is the Albanese experiment, then is it working or not? if you look at this month for these couple of months, no, you know, there is a real sense of it not working.

So I really think that this is a potential danger for the government that it is deluding itself into thinking that its actions are proportionate to the challenges that the country faces.

One of the things that I've been thinking about is, you have a lot of problems in this country, undeniably on education and health. Everybody knows it's harder to see a bulk billing doctor than it was a little while ago. I think what the cost of living crisis has done in a way is acted as a bit of a proxy for those things as people begin to get a sense of doing it harder than kind of looking around. I suspect I'm thinking, Ah, these things haven't been working well for some time. And that pressure from the public on the government to do more than it is currently doing could easily build. But this depends on, on what happens to the national mood. The national mood is more volatile than perhaps it has been in the past.

ANGE:

After the break - how much blame is on Anthony Albanese for Labor’s drop in the polls?

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ANGE:

Sean. We're talking about Labor's year, how it's navigated so many different challenges and the leader of a party will always cop the most scrutiny, I think. How much blame is on Anthony Albanese himself for Labor's drop in the polls?

SEAN:

I think when people look at polls, when commentators look at polls, they tend to look for the drama and they tend to do one of two things. They either look at recent events and say these changes in the polls, of course, entirely like this thing that happened last week and this thing that happened a fortnight ago, or they say here is a thing I've been banging on about for a year. Well, now the polls are against the government. Turns out I've been right all along.

Audio excerpt – News Reporter:

“Let's look at the Newspoll today. 50-50 It's been quite the fall in the primary vote for Labor.”

Audio excerpt – News Reporter:

“It's the toughest week for this Government yet after this, newspoll has Anthony Albanese losing his majority, if there were an election now.”

Audio excerpt – Speaker:

“So Dennis, what do you think's behind this shift? I would hazard a guess that the embarrassing failure of the Prime Minister's Voice referendum would be a key part.”

Audio excerpt – News Reporter:

“Soft swinging voters from Queensland and South Australia called the Prime Minister weak and ineffective. They said he was a beta male. This particularly on cost of living issues.”

SEAN:

One of the things that I've been really interested to discover when I tried to look at factors that drove polls during inflation spikes is that inflation spikes can have lasting effects on a government's fortunes. That is not limited to Australia. That is a global phenomenon.

There's a group called the Eurasia Group that compiled a database of elections across the world. They found that 40% of the time an election a government will lose. That figure doubles to 80%, 80% of elections a government loses. If you are within two years of an inflation spike. So given that, I don't think it's any surprise that we're seeing a downturn in the government standing.

And the other factor is length of time in office, the longer you are in office, the lower your numbers go. And we know from Australian political history that that does tend to happen to Australian prime ministers. In fact, Albanese's polling honeymoon was longer than most prime ministers. So you combine time and inflation and it is possible that all of the polling downturn we're saying against the Albanese Government is defined by those two factors.

And if that is the case, then all of this discussion about what the Government's doing wrong right now, important, important discussions because of course they might be doing things badly that are not picked up by the polls, but we shouldn't connect those to discussions as easily as we do.

We shouldn't extrapolate from polls to say the government is necessarily doing a bad job. But likewise, the government needs to be careful of extrapolating from the fact the polls don't necessarily mean anything about their performance. I think, well, everything's hunky dory and we're doing well and nothing needs to change. 18 months in is a pretty good time to look at what's happened in the government's life and decide what does need to change.

ANGE:

So Sean, the government can’t be blamed for absolutely everything going wrong right now in the economy – but on the other hand the public might want a government that is doing more. So how fatal could it be for the government if there is a disconnect between it thinking it has done a lot, but a public who don’t see it the same way?

SEAN:

Look, it could be absolutely lethal for the government. I think something really interesting happened recently when the government announced new renewables policy. And that was essentially an admission that the climate policies to date had not quite stacked up. They weren't doing as much as the government wanted them to do.

And you could argue that's exactly how incrementalism is supposed to work. You know, government announces policy. Perhaps it doesn't work exactly as intended, so it announces something else. It makes adjustments. That arguably is good government. But it could be appointed to something else, which is that the government announces policy, believes it's excellent. And actually, it's not quite as significant as it thought it was.

ANGE:

If we can try to take a step back a little bit and try to think about this year as a whole and whether we're going to look back on it as being a forgettable year, kind of a the middle of the Labor Government's term, or will we look back on it as an unforgettable year in a positive or a negative sense for the Government? Which how do you think we might reflect on this year?

SEAN:

I think it's a year of two halves. I think the first half of the year was definitely forgettable, pretty bland in political terms. The second half of the year has been more dramatic, more bleak. The referendum defeat, the war in Gaza. I think they're really affecting people's sense of the atmosphere and we may have more significant bushfires to come.

Overall, I think it depends on what the government does next. If there is a chance the government will look at its current political troubles and think, well, we really need to change things, in which case the second half of the year could be seen as a real turning point in the government's approach. This will be very, very interesting to see.

Will this year end up being a timid year in a series of timid years? Will it end up being a pause before the government changes its approach entirely and accelerates dramatically to bold change? Or will it be exactly what the government has, I think so far suggested it will be, which is one more block in a wall of policy changes. It is slowly, steadily building. That's certainly what the government would like us to think. The future will define that.

ANGE:

Sean, thanks so much for your time today.

SEAN:

Thanks so much for having me.

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ANGE:

Also in the news today,

Queensland Health Minister Shannon Fentiman has announced she will be contesting the leadership of Queensland’s Labor party, following Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s resignation announcement on the weekend.

Shannon Fentiman is contesting the leadership along with Deputy Premier Steven Miles. Treasurer Cameron Dick is also a possible contender.

And

The federal government has unveiled an overhaul of Australia’s migration system - which includes a scaling back of student visas and some major adjustments to give higher skilled migrants easier access to Australia.

The government will introduce a new ‘skills in demand visa’ - intended to attract highly skilled workers from sectors such as energy and technology.

I’m Ange McCormack, this is 7am. We’ll be back again tomorrow.

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