Appalling Albanese gives Dutton a clear run

With just a few months, possibly weeks, until the next federal election, the Albanese government faces the prospect of being turfed out of office after just one term, an ignominious fate no federal government has suffered for nearly a century. At best, Labor may scrape back into office as a minority government with the backing of the Greens, but even this is less likely as the election draws closer.

In an increasingly presidential political system, Albanese himself only contributes to Labor’s woes, scoring net dissatisfaction ratings well into double digits. Fawning liberal media coverage enjoyed by DJ Albo, the boy from the school of hard knocks who slayed the Coalition monster, has been replaced by damning accounts of his lack of vision and dull managerial style, and despair at his apparent determination to lead Labor to election defeat. And that’s leaving aside the Murdoch media, which are campaigning relentlessly to bring down Labor.

Albanese may be a soulless bureaucrat and a classic representative of the swill that inhabits the upper echelons of the modern Labor Party, but his bland personality is not the main cause of Labor’s problems. The issue is that Labor has overseen a swingeing cut in living standards for the working class and a fair chunk of the middle class too.

Australian workers are not alone in suffering squeezed living standards in recent years, but they have endured one of the most severe cuts to real wages. Household incomes are now back to where they were in 2014: a full decade of stagnation, an exceptional historical event. This has allowed the Murdoch media to win an audience for their anti-Labor bile.

The Albanese government inherited from the Morrison government the highest inflation rate in decades and a string of Reserve Bank increases to interest rates. It has done nothing, however, to rescue household budgets slammed by increasing supermarket bills and mortgage payments forced up by hundreds of dollars a month.

The main effect of the measures the government has taken is simply to channel more public money to the capitalists. Take the $300 energy rebate, which, while giving some relief to households for 12 months, is also a $3.5 billion gift to the energy companies responsible for ripping us off in the first place. Or the expanded childcare subsidy, which will include more households but hands $11 billion to for-profit childcare companies.

Then there’s the government’s signature housing program, the Housing Australia Future Fund, which proposes the construction of 1.2 million new homes by 2032 but entirely depends on private developers, investors and construction firms buying in. Already, construction is falling well short of the government’s target because the private sector exists to make money, not meet public needs. As for low-income renters, the increased rent allowance introduced in last year’s Budget is a spit in the face—just $19 a fortnight when rents have gone up by $100 or more.

Under popular pressure, the government changed the Morrison government’s stage three tax cuts last year, offering some relief to middle-income earners. However, that was outweighed for many by the elimination of a tax break for low- and middle-income households. Even after the rejig, the changes to the tax system still leave high-income earners the main beneficiaries.

The government now points to inflation coming down from its peak as a sign that the pain is over. It is desperately hoping the Reserve Bank cuts interest rates in February. Even if it does so, however, this will do nothing to reduce prices or raise real wages, only slow down the rate at which workers are going backwards.

It doesn’t take too long to think of what the government could be doing to address falling living standards that doesn’t simply funnel public money to those responsible. The government could set price caps on supermarket groceries or on petrol prices. It could impose rent caps. It could lower prices in one fell swoop by reducing the Howard government’s GST. It could introduce gas reservation to prevent the fossil fuel companies exporting gas and charging exorbitant prices at home. It could lift the wages of public sector workers and social security payments to the unemployed and those with disabilities. It could include dental care in Medicare or restore bulk billing for GP visits.

It’s not as though the government couldn’t afford to do these things. Treasurer Jim Chalmers crowed last year about two successive budget surpluses. There’s plenty of room to impose tax hikes on those who have been living high on the hog during the cost-of-living crisis, the property investors, including dozens of federal politicians, Labor and Coalition alike, who have benefited from generous tax breaks for years. The government could eliminate handouts to fossil fuel companies worth billions each year. It could scrap the AUKUS nuclear submarines and halt the billions of dollars already flowing to US shipyards, releasing funds for social needs while reducing the risk of war in the Asia-Pacific.

The problem with all these things is not that they are unaffordable or might be electorally unpopular—polling by Essential Media last year shows that they’d be welcomed by two-thirds of the population or more—but that they’d threaten the interests of the capitalists and the broader moneyed class. Taking serious steps to restore working-class living standards would eat into the bosses’ incomes and profits. Scrapping the submarines would endanger Australia’s military pact with the US, the basis of Australia’s own imperialist ambitions. And it is these things that lie closest to the government’s heart. If the working class must suffer, so much the worse for them—do they think we live in a democracy?

This desire to suck up to the rich shapes the government’s approach across the board. It has waved through more than two dozen new coal and gas projects, giving the lie to its claimed environmentally friendly credentials when it took office. Late last year, Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek vainly attempted to get a piece of relatively ineffectual “nature-positive” legislation through parliament. All it took was a few phone calls by the bosses of WA mining giants to Albanese and WA Labor premier Roger Cook, and the bill was nixed.

Even though the ALP was founded by the unions, this hasn’t stopped it from putting the main construction union, the CFMEU, into the hands of well-paid government-appointed administrators. Labor ministers regularly speak at union conferences, but it’s much more important for the Albanese government to be seen as “tough” on a union with a militant reputation and to avoid being wedged by the Coalition as supposed union puppets.

While millions have been watching in disgust the developments in the US since Trump’s election, Penny Wong headed off to Washington to attend Trump’s inauguration to assure the White House that no matter what horrors the US unleashes on the world, it has a friend in the Australian government.

The Albanese government can’t even follow the practice of past Labor prime ministers who have at times given a nod to some progressive social cause to fend off criticisms of their anti-working-class policies—Paul Keating’s 1992 Redfern speech and Kevin Rudd’s 2008 Apology to the Stolen Generations come to mind. Albanese, however, isn’t interested even in going through the motions. His election night enthusiasm for the Indigenous Voice to Parliament soon disappeared when Peter Dutton came out against it. Since the referendum’s defeat, Indigenous rights have been chucked in the bin. Albanese’s idea of smart politics is now to invite Peter Dutton to join him at Australia Day celebrations in Canberra.

So scared is the government of being seen by the capitalists as in any way hostile to their interests that it has refused to convene a royal commission into the Murdoch media despite their daily outpouring of lies and corruption, their ferocious anti-Labor campaigning and a half-million strong petition calling for one. Albanese is much happier to yuk it up with the media billionaire and attack people who criticise him, like Grace Tame, whom he labelled “disrespectful” for wearing a “Fuck Murdoch” T-shirt to a morning tea at the Lodge.

The icing on the cake of the sheer awfulness of the Albanese government is its leader’s enjoying the fruits of office while the party’s base is getting screwed. This includes attending Kyle Sandilands wedding, his membership of Qantas’ Chairman’s Lounge courtesy of CEO Alan Joyce, or his recent purchase of a $4.3 million seafront mansion on the NSW Central Coast. Everything he does shows how far his former public persona of the scrapper from South Sydney has been pushed aside—even if he does still every now and then wheel out his origin story in an attempt to convince us to go along with his right-wing agenda.

Labor’s record in office is only providing the Coalition with a free run at the Lodge. Albanese has achieved what might have been regarded as impossible in 2022, being more hated than Dutton. It’s not just a federal problem. Labor’s right-wing policies in government resulted in it being swept out of office in Queensland and the NT last year, and the party is heading for a wipe-out in Victoria in 2026.

Dutton is from the Liberal right and rests on support from the party’s hard-right membership base and machine. Together, they have squeezed out most of the party’s so-called moderate wing.

Dutton has promoted a series of right-wing causes his entire career and made his name as a vicious anti-refugee immigration minister. There’s been no change here. As an opposition leader, he has targeted not just refugees but migrants and Indigenous rights. He gave free rein to Warren Mundine and Jacinta Price, who told meetings of riled-up racists that the Voice to Parliament would make non-Indigenous Australians second-class citizens. He has vowed to pass legislation compelling local councils to hold citizenship ceremonies on 26 January and has prosecuted a hard-right, pro-cop, law and order agenda aimed squarely at Indigenous and African youth.

Dutton’s promotion of nuclear power is simply a gift to the fossil fuel industry while purporting to be a measure addressing global warming.

The opposition leader has loudly backed Israel in its genocidal war on Palestine and, with the help of the Murdoch press and pro-Israel lobby groups, has slandered Palestine campaigners in Australia as antisemitic hate-mongers. He has also blamed the Albanese government for encouraging antisemitic attacks at home and for rewarding Hamas by splitting with the US on votes about Israel at the United Nations.

Dutton has pledged to scrap many of the 36,000 new public sector jobs created by the Albanese government and announced unspecified public spending cuts of $100 billion, presumably including Labor’s modest cost of living relief measures, which he describes as “sugar hits”, while at the same time promising $20,000 annual tax deductions for business lunches and golf matches. Dutton has appointed Price as shadow minister for “government efficiency” to add to her existing brief of “auditing expenditure” on Aboriginal services, in a nod to Trump’s appointment of Elon Musk as tsar of a new Department of Government Efficiency in Washington.

Dutton has also stated that a Coalition government would bar the CFMEU from involvement in publicly funded upgrades to the Bruce Highway in Queensland. Everyone who supports the rights of workers and the oppressed must oppose Dutton’s right-wing agenda.

But while Dutton may be scum, he’s not stupid. He knows that aping Donald Trump won’t win him office. He’s not remotely equipped to do so, lacking any of Trump’s brash showmanship and unashamed public vulgarity, which thrill the president’s supporters. Far from positioning himself as an outsider riding into town to drain the swamp, Dutton advertises his life of “public service” and his many years as a cabinet minister (while keeping quiet about his property portfolio and his wife’s childcare centre business benefiting from government subsidies). Dutton is a machine politician, an elder statesman first elected to parliament in 2001; if he were in the Republican Party, he would have been pushed to one side by Trump.

More fundamentally, Australia is far removed from the reactionary political culture that dominates the US. The electoral system, compulsory voting in particular, works against right-wing extremists winning government. So, Dutton has avoided following Trump’s overall “war on woke” agenda, rejecting attacks on abortion or trans rights, for example, and distancing himself from his National Party colleagues on this score. A Dutton government will also remain a signatory to the Paris Climate Accord, which Trump walked away from (again) on his first day in office. Open climate denialism simply won’t wash in Australia anymore.

Dutton may bang on about high levels of immigration and wants to cap the number of international students, but he’s careful not to take this too far. With the ruling class having benefited for decades from high immigration, Dutton is careful not to slam the door on migrants, emphasising the need for more skilled migrants. No mass deportations here. Nor is Dutton backing Trump in supporting the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, advocating the Coalition’s traditional (and farcical) “two-state solution” instead.

Dutton may say he is against woke ideology and spew racist poison against Indigenous people, refugees, immigrants and Palestine supporters, but his main weapon is popular discontent at the destruction of living standards. This is why he is always careful to promote his pet issues—curbing immigration and union power and advancing fossil fuels, for example—as a solution to the cost-of-living crisis: cutting international student numbers will take the pressure off house prices; attacking the CFMEU will cut construction costs and, therefore, bring down the cost of housing; nuclear power will lower energy bills; and so on.

These supposed solutions fall apart as soon as they are interrogated. But they achieve the objective of being seen to care about the pain experienced by millions of households while pointing to right-wing remedies that direct the finger of blame well away from the capitalists responsible. This, and not some electoral embrace of Trumpism Down Under, explains why the Coalition is emerging as a potential winner at the coming federal election. Blame for this lies squarely with the Albanese government. Just as Labor did in 2022, the Coalition could win government in 2025, not for any love of the opposition, but disgust with the incumbent.

What Trump has done in Australian politics is give the right confidence. The right in Australia look around the world—at the US and Canada, at France, Italy and Germany, and at India—and see their side on the march.

Labor, by contrast, does nothing for those who want to push back against this global shift to the right. The government has responded to the Palestine solidarity campaign, the most significant mass movement against war for decades, by joining Dutton in attacking the movement as antisemitic and dangerous. Labor state governments have introduced anti-protest laws to criminalise political activism, whether environmental, anti-war or anti-racist. Labor’s response to the anti-Trump sentiment is not to solidarise with it but to crawl to the orange bigot, promising Australia’s unstinting loyalty to the American war machine and, perhaps vainly, hoping to exempt the country from Trump’s new tariffs.

Dutton may not currently be pushing a far-right agenda like Trump. But that is not to say he won’t begin to do so at some point, especially if he wins office. Australia is not immune to the rightward shift in mainstream politics witnessed in Europe and North America. Labor won’t do anything to resist this trend. The lesson from politics around the world is that centrist governments like Labor’s simply prepare the way for the hard right as they contribute to a general sense of disgust at incumbents. Shutting up about Labor’s crimes in the hope that it squeezes back into office—the preferred strategy of virtually every union and NGO—will do nothing to stop this. Nor will simply holding out for a “progressive” Greens-Labor power-sharing agreement, the goal of Greens leader Adam Bandt.

We must fight to defend the rights of workers and the oppressed, whoever is in office. We need to bring together all those who look at Trump and his ghouls and want to resist, not cower. However, such fights and movements need political organisation and clarity regarding the need to fight capitalism. Labor won’t provide that, nor will the Greens. This is the task and duty of socialist organisation.