Albanese triumphs but promises nothing for the working class

Labor has won a smashing victory in the lower house and, with the backing of the Greens, looks set to control the Senate as well. The Coalition has done disastrously, losing its leader and scoring the lowest vote in its history.

Peter Dutton—one of the last relics of the Howard government and one of humanity’s most embarrassing specimens—has been roundly defeated. He lost a record number of seats, including his own (the first opposition leader in history to do so). The main reason for Dutton’s drubbing was the comprehensive rebuking of Trump style politics in Australia. For all Dutton and his team tried to distance themselves from Trump, the association is just too organic to hide. This is the thug who relished locking up and torturing refugees as immigration minister under Tony Abbott, and as Home Affairs minister under Scott Morrison. He made his mark as opposition leader by whipping up anti-Aboriginal racism.

Of course, it is a qualified victory. The right-wing Labor government is not going to defend workers, refugees or Indigenous people and, rather than living his days out in a cell on Nauru, Dutton will likely be gifted a lucrative corporate board position and become a Sky News commentator. But it is for good reason that so many people want to take a moment to celebrate this monster’s political failure.

The Liberals and Nationals needed to gain nineteen seats to win office; they lost fourteen. In the Senate, they are reduced to just 27 seats out of 76. Trends that became apparent in 2022 have only continued. The Coalition is increasingly a party of rural and regional Australia. No state escaped the carnage. It failed to advance in targeted outer suburban seats in Victoria and went backwards in Queensland. At the time of writing, it now holds no seats in Adelaide. In Melbourne, it has just three. In Tasmania, it was wiped out.

The Liberals failed to make any ground against the teals, who now dominate traditionally blue-ribbon Liberal electorates in Sydney and Melbourne. In many cases, teals topped the polls rather than coming second and relying on preferences, as they did in 2022.

It was not a good night for the Greens in the House of Representatives. They entered the contest with four seats and hoped to pick up four more. Instead, they will likely hold only two. Leader Adam Bandt, who previously appeared to have a lock on his seat of Melbourne, is fighting to stay an MP. In Brisbane, the Greens lost two of their three seats and one of their most high-profile figures, Max Chandler-Mather. Whatever criticisms socialists might have of the Greens, their loss of seats is a setback for progressive politics in Australia

The Greens’ failure in the lower house was cause for celebration by the political class, who treated the party as a threat to the Lib-Lab consensus and were dreading a minority government dependent on Greens votes in the lower house. They said it would cause “instability”. They meant that the Greens might have held back some of the ALP’s more right-wing legislation in its second term.

You only had to have witnessed Queensland LNP Senator James McGrath’s extraordinary spray at the Greens on the ABC’s election night coverage—in which he called them “a nasty, horrible, racist, antisemitic party” and got no push back from ALP treasurer Jim Chalmers nor any of the show’s hosts or panellists—to get some idea of the hostility the Greens arouse in the establishment.

Less reported than the Greens’ losses in the lower house is the party’s record-high Senate vote. The Greens will maintain Senate spots in every state. So, while the establishment wants to paint the Greens as beyond the pale and its lower house failure as an indictment of left-wing politics, more people than ever voted for the party.

The desire for a progressive alternative was also evident in the vote for the Victorian Socialists, who recorded a big jump in their vote in the Melbourne electorates of Cooper, Scullin and Fraser, while the Socialist Alliance also increased their vote in highly contested Wills. These are the best results for a clear socialist alternative for decades and were notched up in inner-city and mid-suburban booths. In multicultural, working-class Scullin, the Victorian Socialists scored between 15 and 20 percent of the vote in Thomastown, Epping Views and Campbellfield booths.

Independent Arab and Muslim candidates backing Palestine also scored decent votes in Western Sydney, helping to break the stifling pro-Israel consensus of the major parties.

The other bright spot is the failure of the hard right to break out. Polls were suggesting One Nation could potentially win up to six Senate seats. It fell short. The party’s lower house primary vote went up partly at the expense of Clive Palmer, whose Trumpet of Patriots was more shambolic than its United Australia Party predecessor. But One Nation’s lower house vote increased by just over one percentage point, to 6.2 percent.

In the Senate, it picked up one to two percentage points in most states, taking its vote to around 5-6 percent. The party might gain one or two extra spots, but its vote went backwards in Queensland. Given the Senate’s likely composition, One Nation will have zero leverage to pursue its racist agenda.

Explaining the results

The defining feature of the Albanese government’s first term was the dramatic drop in living standards: household disposable incomes fell to their lowest in a decade. Other government positions angered those who had hoped Labor might enact progressive change—the approvals of more coal and gas projects, the promises of massive spending on nuclear submarines and its do-nothing approach to the housing crisis, for example.

Beginning in late 2022, the government’s fortunes fell in the polls for two years. In the first few weeks of this year, though, the situation began to turn around. Several things have gone its way.

First, there has been some relief from the squeeze in living standards because of falling inflation, increased wages, the first interest rate cut in nearly five years and the prospect that more will follow. Unemployment remained low even as interest rates shot up in 2022-23, mitigating the worst effects of the cost-of-living crisis. There is a sense that things might finally be getting better.

Second, Labor was helped by the ruling class’s willingness to give it another go. Under the ALP, the economy continued to grow on the back of high immigration, the stock market and property prices climbed­—so the investor class did magnificently—and the fossil fuel industry, the banks and the supermarkets reaped super profits. Meanwhile, the prime minister attacked the construction division of the CFMEU, one of the few unions with a reputation for delivering higher wages for its members.

Third, Labor’s job ruling for the rich was made easier by the trade union leaders who sat back and watched as the cost-of-living crisis ravaged workers’ pay packets. The union leaders’ apathy was not because workers did not want to fight for higher wages. Time and again, workers voted to strike for inflation-busting wage increases, only for union leaders—many of them ALP-aligned—to accept some rotten deal that left workers further behind.

Fourth, the Albanese government was helped by the uncharismatic, untalented and charmless political hacks who made up the Opposition front bench. Many were holdovers from the Morrison government, which voters enthusiastically dispatched only three years ago.

The Coalition did capitalise on government weakness for a while. In 2023, it began to reduce Labor’s early polling lead when Peter Dutton took up the fight against the Indigenous Voice to Parliament and defeated the referendum. Given the string of defeats of incumbent governments worldwide last year and the impact of the cost-of-living crisis, Dutton may have thought things would just fall into his lap. Instead, once the federal election approached, support for the Liberal leader began to evaporate.

Dutton’s former Queensland cop/property investor/right-wing head kicker image may have warmed the hearts of Liberal loyalists but won him few friends elsewhere. Dutton promised an even more right-wing version of the unlamented Morrison government. If the cost of living was the most pressing issue for people, Dutton never made a convincing case for how he would address it. Anti-immigrant rhetoric may have poisoned the political atmosphere, but it wasn’t going to make Dutton prime minister. As public opinion hardened against the opposition leader, the media, who had given him a free ride, began to sharpen their criticisms.

Finally, there was Donald Trump. Trump has never been popular in Australia, and it didn’t take long in his second term for anti-Trump sentiment to revive. But Dutton initially seemed to believe Trump’s election would work for him. Albanese would be seen as out of favour with the White House, and Dutton, a fellow conservative, would be the man to cut deals with the new president. And so, Dutton described the US president as “a big thinker and deal maker ... shrewd”.

Fairly quickly, however, the Coalition realised that blindly following Trump would come with an electoral cost. So recent months have seen a consistent pattern of Dutton grabbing some element of Trumpism and then dropping it or shunting it to the sidelines—whether that be nuclear power, Jacinta Price’s DOGE-like government efficiency unit and her MAGA hat, scrapping working from home in the public service, or sacking tens of thousands of public servants.

With two-thirds of respondents to a mid-April Resolve poll stating that Trump’s victory at the US election had been a bad outcome for Australia, Dutton’s identification with Trump seriously hurt the Coalition. It didn’t help him with the Liberals’ capitalist backers either. Few were enthused by Trump’s apparent determination to blow up trade with China, which the Albanese government had successfully restored after the Morrison government had sabotaged it. The ruling class didn’t love the Albanese government, but they opted for “better the devil you know”.

These broad trends came together at the election to demolish the Coalition.

What can we expect from Albanese’s second term?

The Labor camp was overjoyed on election night. With a sizable majority government and a two-party preferred vote of nearly 55 percent, Albanese has been elevated to the ranks of Labor heroes, for now at least. But the rest of the country is hardly cheering; mostly, there is just relief that Dutton wasn’t elected.

Labor has promised next to nothing to reverse the decade-long stagnation in living standards. All the things that have pissed off Labor supporters will continue—environmental vandalism, support for Israel, refusal to tackle tax breaks for the rich, rising inequality, denial of Aboriginal rights, billions for nuclear submarines and US bases and so on. The government will not say or do anything that will seriously antagonise business nor do anything to give workers the power to go on strike or fight for their rights.

Labor may have won, but Essential polling one week before the election showed that half the population believes Australia is on the wrong track, compared to less than a third who think it’s heading in the right direction.

This is all the more reason for the working class and oppressed to fight.

The resistance we need means demonstrations and strikes that mobilise the working class where they have power. More than anything, if we are to push back against the sustained, decades-long ruling class attack on living standards, the working class must rediscover the strike weapon.

But demonstrations and strikes rarely happen of their own accord. They need leadership. The problem is that the traditional organisations that might lead, most importantly the trade unions, have gone into hibernation. The union leaders’ refusal to call strikes has allowed the capitalists to grab more and more of the wealth produced by the working class. The Greens are no alternative either. They prioritise parliamentary games over campaigning.

We need to rebuild grassroots leadership that is not beholden to the ALP. Leaders who aren’t simply waiting for an appointment to a plum political position, as so many in the trade unions are. Leaders who aren’t compromised by dependence on government funding and contracts, as so many in the NGOs are. Leaders who resist all the arguments to go easy on the government for fear of giving the Coalition any advantage. Leaders who are serious about fighting for workers. That means we need more socialists agitating for class struggle, defiance and mass action, not polite lobbying.

A good place to start is joining the 24 May National Day of Protest demanding the government cut ties with Trump’s America. The protests have been called by Students for Palestine. They are backed by local Palestinian solidarity groups, the Independent and Peaceful Australia Network, the Campaign against Racism and Fascism and Labor against War. In this election, millions voted against a party identified with the Trump agenda. We need to turn that rejection of Trump into a movement on the streets.