The Sublime Political Genius of Anthony Albanese

Bernard Keane, politics editor of Crikey, has staked his claim on Albanese’s “subtle” and “disciplined” campaigning. “He has proven a ruthless political warrior who has put his opponents to the sword,” Keane writes of Albanese. “The possibility of dominating a political era, as Howard and Hawke did, is now open to him.”

For the sake of argument, let’s agree that Albanese made some astute campaign moves. As Keane notes, Albanese played a cautious game where Trump and American politics were concerned, to the point of being “boring and banal in his reactions.” Which is to say, Albo noted how Dutton’s Trump imitation was going and decided to let him crash and burn.

The problem, however, with attributing genius to nonaction is that nonaction is a move equally available to nongeniuses.

Instead, to resolve the question of Albo’s genius, we need to look at the positive moves Labor made during the campaign, which was almost entirely fought over the cost of living. Albanese’s strategy was basically to come across as affable and safe, which Dutton absolutely helped with. And beyond that, echoing Queensland Labor’s 2024 strategy — which transformed what looked to be a complete rout into a respectable loss — Albanese promised some very modest cost-of-living reforms.

These didn’t resonate because they are transformative. For one, they aren’t — they will mostly be counteracted by the structural problems underlying the crisis. Rather, they resonated because when everything is getting noticeably worse constantly, and when you’re given a choice between rapid, chaotic decline or slower, somewhat ameliorated decline, you’re obviously going to choose slow decline.

In this regard, Albanese’s campaign was a straightforward continuation of his first term. Whether or not it was the work of a genius is really a matter of perspective.

For example, over the three years leading up to 2024, the homelessness rate grew by 22 percent. By March this year, Labor’s $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund had built only 358 homes. In April, it lost money as the stock market crashed. Meanwhile, landlords increased the rent by 9.5, 8.1, and 4.8 percent in 2022, 2023, and 2024 respectively. Property hoarders — sorry, investors — continued to drive up house prices, while Labor defended tax concessions for them worth $20 billion per year.

For landlords and property investors, Albanese’s first term was a roaring success. This helps explain the flood of Liberal votes to Labor. For renters and mortgage holders, Albanese’s first term was not a roaring success — life got much worse.

So during the election campaign, Albanese appealed to them by promising to fund the construction of 100,000 homes earmarked for first-time homebuyers and to allow all first-time homebuyers to access a 5 percent deposit. He also pledged a “Help to Buy” scheme, where the government will loan people with incomes less than $90,000 30 percent of the value of a house, on the condition they pay the money back upon sale.

By design, these schemes won’t reduce house prices or rents. Rather, they were designed to appeal to those hurt by them. It’s like a real estate agency that hands out free mold treatment kits.

Winners and Losers!

The same is true of Labor’s other center-left economic reforms. Cutting student debt by 20 percent only undoes gratuitous increases caused by a few years of indexation linked to inflation. It’s welcome, but it won’t stop Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) debts from weighing people down for decades. Similarly so with Labor’s promise to fund more bulk-billing GPs. It’s fine, but the real financial damage is the fact that virtually every medical service — from a scan to an appointment with a specialist — comes with an out-of-pocket cost not covered by Medicare. In other words, Labor’s HECS relief and Medicare boosts maintain the status quo while appealing to people suffering under it.

As for wages, although they have grown slightly in the last twelve months, as of November last year, the average full-time worker had lost $8000 in living standards compared to three years prior. To compensate, Albanese offered voters an automatic, one-off tax deduction of $1000 and a $5 per week tax cut for low-income earners. That’s the good thing about poor people — you don’t need to spend as much to make it seem like you care. At least, certainly not as much as Albo spent on tax cuts for high-income earners when he passed former Liberal PM Scott Morrison’s “Stage 3” tax cuts early in his term.

When it came to the 1,200 large corporations that pay no taxes, Albanese again wisely played the “no move” card. Business supported him. So did the unions. Yes, membership has increased very slightly over the last few years. But at the same time, the industrial relations system built by former Labor PM Kevin Rudd has kept the rate of industrial disputes at a historic low by making it virtually illegal to strike.

As for one union that did habitually strike — the Construction, Forestry, and Maritime Employees union — Labor suspended its members’ right to choose their own leaders and appointed career Labor hacks as administrators.

As it turned out, this had no negative electoral impact whatsoever, which was a part of Albanese’s goal from the outset. As for the other unions, Labor didn’t need to offer them any concessions because they are run by Labor hacks who celebrate slow decline with idiotic memes about “union wins,” cheerful that their chances of making the jump over to parliament are now a little higher. For union bureaucrats, it was a good first term and a genius campaign.

It was also a good first term for nuclear attack submarines. Less so for higher education, welfare recipients, or the environment. But why bother with students, academics, welfare recipients, or people who care about the environment? Those votes all come back to Labor anyway, albeit some via Greens preferences.

It was a terrible first term for Aboriginal people — at the start of Albanese’s first term, indigenous people made up 32 percent of Australia’s prison population. Now they are 36 percent. But why would Albanese risk making Aboriginal rights an election issue? After all, the Voice to Parliament failed — largely because people suspected it was tokenistic and Albanese refused to clearly explain how it would work or mount a serious campaign.

It was a good first term, however, for Israel supporters. Not so much for those who oppose Israel’s genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza, like former Labor senator Fatima Payman, whom Albanese expelled. But there weren’t many votes in that one either, at the end of the day.

A Triumph of Left-Burkean Conservatism

In a preelection Jacobin essay that almost predicted this outcome, Guy Rundle argued that the key to Labor’s success is that it has successfully become the main party of capital. “Much of business now prefers Labor because it offers a one-stop shop,” Rundle writes,

running the settings for capital while controlling labor through a union movement closely integrated with the state and party. Labor thus supplies what capital wants and what the Liberals cannot supply: an institutional framework, stable over time, for the maximization of accumulation.

This is also correct from a sociological standpoint: Labor’s rank-and-file membership is minute and decrepit. Its army of MPs and staffers is populated by former student politics hacks in immaculate RM Williams boots and dynastic mediocrities who have never worked real jobs. And Labor’s upper echelons are essentially what you’d get if an evil witch transformed a superannuation company into a person.

Albo’s genius reflects this composition. It’s the genius of a student union president who uses identity politics to justify voting down a campaign against subject cuts. It’s the genius of a bank that wants to give power back to you.

No one votes for that because they love it or even believe it. So to explain Labor’s landslide, we obviously need the two other factors — Peter Dutton’s Liberals and Donald Trump.

Even short of Dutton’s disastrous campaign, the Liberals faced an enormous historical and structural challenge. The rise of the Teals — who retained all their seats — represents the loss of a historic wing of the Liberal Party. It’s hard to picture a path to a Liberal majority government that doesn’t pass through Kooyong or Wentworth, and it was harder still to imagine a fabulously wealthy girlboss crossbench including Monique Ryan and Allegra Spender voting to support a Dutton minority government.

But it’s also more than just seats. The Teals are classic bourgeois liberals. They represent and maintain an organic connection with the cosmopolitan, well-educated, urban bourgeoisie. Such people used to be Liberal Party mainstays, and this gave the party an ability to reality check and move with the times. Without such layers, the danger of mistaking ideology and desire for reality — that is, a kind of political psychosis — is much greater.

That’s why the Liberal Party tried to copy Trump, even hiring his campaign manager as a consultant. They didn’t try to read the room. They wanted it to work, so they invented a reality in which they would, which failed catastrophically, in part because there just isn’t a constituency for MAGA in Australia. It seems obvious Trump’s America-first particularism was always going to fall flat with Australians, who dislike America (but not Americans, they add) even more than Canadians do.

This is in part because there is a residual social solidarity and collectivism in Australia’s political culture that overshadows Trump imitators. The COVID-19 pandemic proves this as much as anything. Former Victoria premier Daniel Andrews led one of the world’s longest lockdowns. Despite consistent and loud opposition from an incipient MAGA-esque crowd of cranks, libertarians, and fascists, he won a thumping victory in 2022, before retiring as one of the state’s longest-serving premiers.

And anyway, the Coalition’s repeated policy backflips and Dutton’s cringeworthy media gaffes proves that even if there were an audience, the Liberals weren’t up to the act. An authentic Trumpism requires unlimited self-belief, charismatic rhetoric steeped in the vernacular, and a radical agenda predicated on genuine outsider status.

Bob Katter is perhaps the only politician in Australia capable of that combination — and thanks to the Westminster system, despite winning an impressive 65 percent of the vote, he won’t be spending any time on it.

Questions for the Left

The downside of Labor’s momentum was that it also harmed the Left. The Greens did poorly, not so much in overall votes but in key seats, and not because voters rejected them but because their success depends on Labor’s unpopularity.

The Greens are on track to hold just one of the three Brisbane electorates they won last federal election. In Ryan, the Greens came second to the Liberals in a three-way race and rode to victory on Labor preferences. Brisbane was also a three-horse race. The Green vote remained more or less consistent while Labor’s vote rose at the expense of the Liberals, with Green preferences helping Labor across the line. And in Griffith, Max Chandler-Mather — Greens spokesperson on housing and Jacobin contributor — suffered a relatively minor negative swing of 2 percent. Labor, however, recorded a swing of 5.7 percent at the Liberals’ expense, going on to win a comfortable victory with Liberal preferences.

In Melbourne, the Greens failed to make it across the line in Macnamara. And despite a 2.6 percent swing in their other target seat, Wills, as of Sunday night, they are trailing Labor by around two thousand votes. Even party leader Adam Bandt’s seat of Melbourne is in doubt.

These results raise important questions for the Left, especially given the Greens’ shift toward economic and social justice over recent years. Although a full analysis will take time, a few suggestions can be made. First, the total Greens vote remained basically consistent, at about 1.5 million, or almost 12 percent. Given that the party had hoped to go forward, it’s not a good result. But it’s also not a disaster.

However, in the context of a swing to Labor fueled by an exodus of voters from the Liberals — combined with Australia’s preferential, electorate-based electoral system — these numbers meant a real setback. Australia isn’t nearly as undemocratic as America. But even so, in a more genuinely representative, proportionate electoral system, the Greens’ 12 percent vote share would equal about eighteen seats.

Beyond this, in an insightful analysis of last year’s Queensland election result, Liam Flenady noted a risk born of demographic changes and associated with the Greens’ shift toward working-class, suburban voters. As gentrification and the housing crisis push renters out of the inner city, that cohort of Greens voters is dispersed across many electorates. Even if the working-class Greens vote increases absolutely — which seems to have happened — it will likely remain too thinly spread to win suburban seats in the short term. Meanwhile, the “progressive architect” cohort of Greens voters remains in the inner city. With a vibe more teal than watermelon, they’re more likely to be fair-weather friends.

In short, the problem is that the Greens have two souls — one wears colorful glasses that cost the same as a few months of the other’s rent. Clearly, it’s to be hoped that the most left-wing parts of the Greens are not discouraged by this result, even if they’ve lost a few of their most capable MPs, because the only path to a parliamentary breakthrough runs through working-class suburbs.

And although the example is limited to a few Melbourne electorates, the Victorian Socialists are demonstrating that it’s possible to simultaneously build a left-wing vote in working-class outer suburbs and inner ones.

In Scullin, in Melbourne’s north, Victorian Socialists candidate Omar Hassan won a 4.3 percent swing, bringing the party’s vote to 7 percent. In Cooper, Kath Larkin won a 5.7 percent swing, for a total of 9.1 percent. In Fraser, Jasmine Duff won 6.6 percent, with a swing of 2 percent. And across Victoria, Jordan Van Den Lamb — aka Purple Pingers — won 2 percent. These numbers are obviously not comparable to votes drawn by major parties. But they show that there’s a working-class left that wants an alternative to Labor.

And shy of Albanese surprising everyone — not least himself — by using his commanding majority to actually make things better, things will keep getting worse. So the status quo itself will have to drive change. The more Labor succeeds in defending it, the more it will take its revenge on Labor.