Treasury data shows how radically disproportionately the capital gains tax discount, negative gearing and trust arrangements have benefited the top 1 per cent of income earners compared to the median income earner since 2000: about 123 times more. Perhaps nothing better explains the force of the campaign to thwart the government’s objective to claw back this scandalous gift to the wealthiest.

Ever since Albanese won the prime ministership a drumbeat has sounded: “What do we want? Reform. When do we want it? Now!” Yet when Labor does reach for the higher-hanging reform fruit and its opponents ferociously bare their ideological teeth, at least some of those who had been advocates of change have responded fickly or tepidly to the budget measures.

While Labor’s tax plan monopolises attention, another frontier of change conscientiously advanced under Albanese’s leadership risks being overlooked. With ramifications that may prove highly significant, it shows there is more than one way to bring about a new order of things.

This is the Labor government’s deliberate and concerted strategy of appointing women to leadership positions in the public service and other key institutions and agencies. The championing of women under Albanese was something I first wrote about in the days after Labor’s resounding May 2025 election win — a result that underlined the trend of women’s votes skewing to the left-of-centre that had been evident since at least 2010, when the support of women effectively saved Julia Gillard’s prime ministership.

Suggesting that the “feminisation of Labor” was one reason for the Albanese government’s handsome return to office, I pointed to not just the record number of women in cabinet and caucus but also how the government was prioritising the interests of women in key policy areas: by moving towards universal childcare support, extending paid parental leave and supporting wage increases in care industries dominated by women workers.

I am conscious of the risks of characterising childcare as an issue of primary concern to women. But the reality is that mothers continue to shoulder the lion’s share of the responsibility for rearing the young and expanded childcare provision thus chiefly enhances their choice.

I also alluded to the operating style of the Albanese government, suggesting that its premium on collaboration and internal solidarity was consistent with a “feminalist” approach. A recent article by the Saturday Paper’s chief political correspondent Karen Barlow about how the prime minister manages the government’s record-sized caucus was striking in that context. The tight discipline of Labor’s party room can be attributed to several things. On the less flattering side, it is consistent with a longer-term marginalisation of caucus and centralisation of authority in the hands of the prime minister and senior ministers. On the positive side, it reflects a lesson learnt: a determination not to repeat the destructive and indulgent disunity of the Rudd–Gillard years.

In Barlow’s piece, an unnamed Labor MP — the absurd braggadocio of the quote all but gives away that it is a male speaking — ascribes the Albanese government’s internal discipline to the dictatorial control exercised by the Prime Minister’s Office. “PMO is like North Korea, right? They’re like Pyongyang.” No one can doubt that Albanese’s PMO, like the offices of all prime ministers at least since John Howard’s time, maintains strict oversight of the government. But Pyongyang, really?

More instructive was a reflection by an unidentified female Labor MP who contended that the government’s solidarity could also be explained by a caucus that comprises 56 per cent women: “There’s a lot of women and there is a much greater sense of working in a collaborative way… outcomes-focused, not ego-driven.”

Julia Gillard’s leadership illustrates the point. Unlike many of her male predecessors and successors, Gillard did not preen or chest-beat as prime minister. Her method was to put her head down and concentrate on managing her team and the nitty-gritty of the government’s legislative program. She let her deeds speak for her without much in the way of fanfare or flamboyance. A behaviour characteristic of women, Gillard’s disdain for the performative side of the job was ironically debilitating for her prime ministership.

The Albanese government’s feminine bearing is also undoubtedly a reflection of its prime minister. As with all holders of the office, Albanese, the son of a single mother, exhibits a belief system and leadership style powerfully stamped by his early life. His was an upbringing in which women — his adored and adoring mother and to lesser extent his grandmother — were the dominant adult influences. This has manifest in what the political psychologist Graham Little categorised as a “group” leadership style: one orientated towards collaboration and cooperation. It is also revealed in the prime minister daring to speak of kindness and compassion as positive leadership traits — at a time when the norm worldwide is uber-aggressive — and by his frequent displays of emotion. Only a little over a week ago, at the Victorian state Labor conference, he barely suppressed tears while defending his government’s budget measures.

Let’s not be doe-eyed about Albanese. He is also the product of the bare-knuckled school of NSW Labor politics. While there is ample testimony to his close and nurturing relationships with female Labor colleagues — Penny Wong and Katy Gallagher in the current government, Linda Burney and Jenny Macklin in the past — his never fully explained lack of generosity towards his neighbouring inner-Sydney Labor MP and one-time potential leadership rival, Tanya Plibersek, has been less becoming. And on occasions his empathy has gone conspicuously missing. His gratuitously callous declaration earlier this year that he had “nothing but contempt” for the “ISIS brides” is an example.

Even so, the advancement of women on Albanese’s watch is unmistakeable. Another dimension of that agenda, perhaps at least equally significant, is the appointment of women to posts that have previously been exclusively male domains. This trend began in the government’s first term with, among things, the appointment of Michelle Bullock as governor of the Reserve Bank and Danielle Wood as chair of the Productivity Commission, followed by Albanese’s handpicking of Sam Mostyn as governor-general.

Australia’s twenty-eighth governor-general, Mostyn is the second woman to occupy the office — the first having been Quentin Bryce, who filled the post between 2008 and 2014. When she was invited by Albanese to become governor-general, a surprised Mostyn asked him, “Why me?” to which he responded: “I want to modernise the office.” That modernising process, as the Australian’s Troy Bramston revealed in his record of an interview with Mostyn in January this year, is based on the guiding principles of “care, kindness and respect.” It suggests a close alignment of (feminine-style) values between prime minister and governor-general.

The announcement of Mostyn’s appointment provoked a sour response from the Australian’s Janet Albrechtsen. Under the headline “Cushy Job for the Wokest of Women,” Albrechtsen bemoaned the “utter predictability” of Albanese’s selection and sneered that if Mostyn’s “chromosomes were XY she wouldn’t have been considered for the role.” That seems a peculiar complaint given the XY chromosomal profile has been a foremost consideration in the choice of the vast majority of governors general since 1901.

Still more bizarre was Albrechtsen’s assertion that Mostyn’s appointment was symptomatic of a “new group of oppressors putting the squeeze on a new group of oppressed.” Presumably men made up that rising class of downtrodden.

The Albanese government’s strategy of placing women in high offices has proceeded apace in its second term, many of them pioneering gender appointments. Among the key examples are:

• Jenny Wilkinson as secretary of treasury
• Sarah Court as chair of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission
• Meghan Quinn as secretary of defence
• Krissy Barrett as commissioner of the Australian Federal Police
• Susan Coyle as chief of army.

Announcing Court’s appointment in February 2026, treasurer Jim Chalmers observed that the Albanese government had “ushered in a wave of female leadership across Australia’s top economic institutions”: the Reserve Bank, the Productivity Commission, Treasury and now ASIC.

The storming of the upper echelons of the public service by women — who now head eight of the sixteen Commonwealth departments — and their appointment to other institutions and agencies partly reflects a longer-term evolution. But the Albanese government’s role has been to accelerate that trend purposely and assiduously.

Does this campaign to promote women matter? We ought, of course, be careful about surrendering to essentialist assumptions about the kind of leadership women provide and the cultures they nurture around them. Each woman will steer in her own distinctive way — and not all will lead well. Nevertheless, research indicates that women, generally speaking, tend to be collaborative, team-orientated leaders who privilege “soft” values. Measuring the impact on the fabric of the nation of the rush of appointments of females to senior positions will be difficult, if not impossible. Its effects will take time to mature and mainly materialise osmosis-like.

Make no mistake, though. We are witnessing a quiet revolution. It suggests there is more than one way to skin the cat of societal change. •

The post Quiet revolution appeared first on Inside Story.

He expanded on his theme over the following weeks by invoking the concept of “progressive patriotism” and holding out the promise that Australia could serve as a beacon of harmony: “At a time when there’s conflict in the world, where people are often divided on the basis of race or religion, here in Australia, we can be a microcosm for the world,” he told the Inside Politics podcast. It was “not just about strengthening Australia, but also being a symbol for the globe in how humanity can move forward.”

These forays into national identity were relatively novel for Albanese. The subject had been notably absent from his prime-ministerial repertoire compared to the most able of his predecessors. And that muteness was consistent with one of his conspicuous shortcomings as leader: his failure to weave a compelling narrative of his government’s mission. A year later, it is evident that re-election did not remedy that weakness. Albanese has not gone on to develop the inchoate theme of “progressive patriotism.” He has gone quiet on it.

In parallel and of greater moment, the outpouring of confident assertions about Australia’s distinctive democratic resilience has all but dried up during the past twelve months. What was celebrated at the time as a watershed repudiation of an ugly politics of fear and division — a decisive rejection of the Coalition’s efforts to shrink Australia into a mean-spirited country — is now rendered by recent commentary as merely a temporary respite. Right-wing populism has regrouped and, if anything, its threat has grown more menacing. We have regressed to the anxiety and resentment that stalked the land after the defeat of the Indigenous Voice referendum in October 2023 and through 2024 into early 2025.

It is not hard to identify the reasons for a darkening of mood and pessimism about the state of the nation. There was the trauma of the Bondi massacre of December 2025, which battered claims that Australia is a nirvana of social cohesion — a setback rendered worse by the poisonous blame game that erupted in its wake. There has been the disturbing surge in the polls of the grievance-driven and xenophobic One Nation, which began before Bondi but accelerated afterwards. There has been the Coalition’s seemingly inexorable march to the right (and electoral irrelevancy). And, of course, there has been the roiling of global international relations and the world economy by the grotesque US administration of Donald Trump, as exemplified by the reckless attack on Iran.

But even allowing for these factors, how do we reconcile what the election result of May 2025 suggested about Australia’s political character with the country in which we apparently find ourselves a year on? Which better represents the true nature of the nation’s soul?

One way to begin answering these questions is to revisit the run-up to last year’s election. Since the Peter Dutton–led Coalition’s swingeing defeat, it has been easy to lose sight of how different the political environment appeared during much of the preceding two years.

By the second half of 2023, the first-term Albanese government looked to be in trouble. Against the backdrop of the meandering and doomed campaign for a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous Voice to Parliament and worsening cost-of-living pressures, opinion polls showed the government’s primary vote had dipped to the low thirties. Disapproval of the prime minister’s performance was outstripping approval; trust in government and satisfaction with democracy, having risen early in Albanese’s term, were sagging.

Australia seemed to be spiralling back into the cycle that had plagued the country for the previous decade and a half: precipitous loss of support for national governments and widespread public disenchantment with how politics worked.

The drubbing of the Yes side in October 2023’s Voice referendum only seemed to confirm a souring national mood. Albanese’s final recourse had been to characterise a Yes vote as an act of kindness by non-Indigenous Australia — an outstretched hand to First Nations peoples. When 60 per cent of the electorate responded by voting No and the referendum was beaten in every state, it was easy to assume a collective stoniness of heart.

This is not the place to analyse the reasons for the Voice’s decisive defeat. The contributing factors were many, among them the long-established reluctance of Australians to amend the constitution, the cruelling effects of the denial of bipartisan support, the inability of Yes proponents to effectively counter the argument that a constitutionally entrenched Voice would elevate one group of Australians above the rest, and Albanese’s deficiencies as an advocate.

This was the moment in Labor’s first term that most underlined questions about Albanese’s capacity to switch to a dynamic, galvanising prime-ministerial mode. Words, or his lack of facility with them, bedevilled him and the Voice campaign.

The referendum’s defeat upended the political battle between Albanese and Dutton. In a way that rehearsed his initial disorientation after the Bondi massacre — as betrayed by his stricken face and glassy eyes — the prime minister could not disguise his mortification. Having raised the hopes of First Nations people only for them to be cruelly crushed, he had joined a dispiritingly long line of occupants of the Lodge, Bob Hawke most prominent among them, left to rue their failure to deliver for Indigenous Australians. In the days and weeks after the vote, the prime minister was demoralised. It was as if the stuffing had been knocked out of him.

Dutton, by contrast, was emboldened. In the pattern of the referendum results, he was able to discern vindication of his strategy of seeking government through the outer suburbs and regional and rural Australia. There were doubters, of course. Andrew Gee, who had split from the Nationals over its opposition to the Voice, predicted the Liberals would eventually face the reality that campaigning against the referendum had “burned a large swathe of their supporter base” and would “ultimately be ashes in their mouths.” Noel Pearson, a chief architect of the Voice, later observed that Dutton had squandered an opportunity to soften his ingrained and politically damaging “hard-arse persona.”

When the Coalition was thrashed at the polls in May 2025, Pearson declared that Dutton too, “along with the blackfellas,” had become “victim of the failure of the Voice.” Corroboration of Pearson’s argument could be found in post-referendum research by ANU that had highlighted Dutton’s deep unpopularity in the community. The data invited the conclusion that his pitiless prosecution of the No case had been purchased at the price of a chilling of attitudes to him.

Nevertheless, for much of 2024, the impression conveyed by the opinion polls and reinforced by the bulk of political commentary was that Dutton enjoyed the upper hand over Albanese. The prime minister was dogged by the same scepticism about his leadership that had existed before the 2022 election. Columnists asserted that he was “shrinking” rather than growing in office, that he was allowing the opportunities of office to slip through his hands, and that he was sleepwalking towards taking Labor to a first-term defeat.

In early December, the eminence among columnists at the Australian Paul Kelly captured a nagging question about Albanese that had grown more insistent with the election of the disruptor-in-chief, Donald Trump, to a second presidency. Albanese’s problem is his “incrementalism in an age of transformation,” opined Kelly. A fortnight later he suggested that Dutton, who he claimed Labor had badly underestimated — just as it had John Howard, Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison — was the one clued into the zeitgeist of the times:

[Dutton is] becoming more than a Liberal leader — he is becoming a symbol for the people who feel disenfranchised, overlooked by the system, denied a voice and patronised by the elites. These “forgotten people” in 2024 constitute a growing segment of the population and every move by progressives — from backing identity politics, bagging Australia Day, championing high immigration, altering the way people live, promoting distinctions on race, sex and gender, and deploring Dutton on the flag — only boosts Dutton’s profile. The progressives don’t get it… left progressives in Australia are Dutton’s best friends.

It is worth recalling exactly what Dutton was offering to voters that caused Kelly to believe he had cracked the national political code. The Coalition’s headline policy under his leadership, unveiled in meagre detail in June 2024 after months of delay, was a plan for seven publicly owned nuclear energy plants. The policy defied expert opinion, including from the country’s chief science research agency, CSIRO, to which Dutton responded by impugning its objectivity.

The core problems identified with the policy were the time lag involved in the construction of nuclear facilities and the uncompetitive cost of nuclear-generated power compared with renewables. It was hard to avoid the conclusion that the opposition saw nuclear energy not so much as a serious solution to curbing carbon emissions but as a filibuster for delaying the transition from fossil fuels. That depressing reality was effectively confirmed when Dutton announced that the Coalition intended to scrap Labor’s legislated carbon emissions reduction target of 43 per cent by 2030 — a decision he had reportedly taken unilaterally.

Otherwise, Dutton’s statements and policy offerings during 2024 seemed principally designed to ignite xenophobic antagonisms in the community. In his budget reply speech in May, he advocated a major cut in the migration intake, ostensibly to address the nation’s housing shortage. But he did not stop there. He connected excessive migration to people in the suburbs struggling to get their children into school or childcare and to gaining access to medical care. Migrants were even at fault for road congestion.

Another familiar strongman trope in the budget reply address was Dutton’s pledge of action to counter violent crime, despite law and order lying primarily in the jurisdiction of the states. In September, during an interview with a friendly Sydney talkback radio host, he warned that international students appealing for visa extensions had become “a modern version of boat arrivals.”

The opposition leader also showed a cavalier indifference to the social tensions in the Australian community unleashed by Israel’s invasion of Gaza, which was precipitated by Hamas’s atrocities in October 2023. This was a diabolical issue for the Albanese government, both diplomatically and domestically. As with sections of the Australian media that vehemently policed a line of unfettered support for Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, the Coalition’s position on the Gaza war was bereft of nuance. It dogmatically backed Israel’s military aggression against Gaza’s population even as evidence mounted of its disproportionate and catastrophic deadliness.

Ignoring a plea for restraint from the director-general of ASIO, Dutton provocatively alleged that Labor’s security checks had been lax and demanded all visa applications by Palestinians fleeing the war zone be refused because of the threat to national security. He called for draconian measures to curb pro-Palestinian protests, even proposing deporting transgressors. Then he rounded out the year by announcing on Sky News that, if elected prime minister, he would discontinue Albanese’s practice of standing beside Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags, in company with the Australian flag, at media conferences. The flags, he claimed, were “dividing our country unnecessarily.” It was all red meat for a constituency Dutton evidently believed to be baying for this stuff.

Significantly, of Liberal leaders this century, Dutton (along with Tony Abbott) came the nearest to being a Howard protégé. He was elected to the House of Representatives in November 2001, arguably the twenty-first century’s other watershed election. The so-called Tampa election, not long after the 11 September attacks, heralded a decisive shift to strongman politics built around the weaponisation of border control and an intensified securitisation of politics.

Combined with climate change scepticism, a lack of sympathy for First Nations self-determination and discomfort with multiculturalism, Howard smuggled into mainstream Australian politics a potent strand of homegrown conservative populism. In the hands of his successors, who lacked their master’s agility in application, that ideological pivot sharpened. Under Dutton, it was a distilled and noxious brew stripped not only of subtlety but also of any serious interest in economic issues. Abbott and Dutton were both conspicuous for their lack of adeptness or interest in economics.

As Australia entered 2025 commentators commonly assumed the country was headed for a close-shave election, with a real prospect that Dutton would achieve the extraordinary by dragging the Coalition back into power after just one term. The dire polls for Labor peaked in February, with one risibly reporting that the party’s primary vote had collapsed to 25 per cent. I always suspected that the picture painted by the polls was a mirage. In an essay for Inside Story in September 2024, for example, I contended that “the nation is neither as fearful nor as paranoid as Dutton is banking on, with women and young voters likely to prove major obstacles” to his prime-ministerial ambitions.

No magical powers of prescience were needed to arrive at this viewpoint. For at least a decade it had been clear that Howardism — a turning away from the forces of cultural and social modernisation doubled down on by his less capable successors — was propelling the Liberal Party towards electoral marginality.

The disintegrating support for the Coalition among young voters was especially stark and portentous. Among millennials and Gen Z voters last year, Labor attracted 64 per cent and 67 per cent of the two-party vote respectively. This loss by the Liberals of cohorts of younger Australians immersed in, and comfortable with, social and cultural pluralism shows where the Howard project had left his party.

Tellingly, the 2025 election also showed that Dutton and his fellow travellers didn’t have much more insight into the outer suburbs. These communities, which were undergoing a tsunami of growth and dramatic demographic change, were vastly and increasingly diverse. They were not defined by so-called “bogans,” as the opposition had condescendingly conceived them.

Above all, the 2025 election was a disavowal of Dutton’s dread-infused vision of the nation. The historian Frank Bongiorno wrote at the outset of the campaign that the Liberal leader’s bleakness was “in a league of its own,” even more unrelieved than that of the minatory Abbott. The Australian Election Study found Dutton to be most unpopular leader since data had been collected, bumping out Scott Morrison from its previous survey.

The result also reinforced the message the electorate had sent the Coalition three years earlier when they cast Morrison from office. Though Morrison was somewhat aberrant in the Liberal Party and Australia’s political culture because of the influence of his North America–style evangelical Christianity on his belief system and style of leadership, the 2022 and 2025 election results effectively telegraphed the same message to the Coalition, with the latter adding an exclamation mark. Indeed, just as Dutton had doubled down on his side of politics’ march to right-wing populism, voters had doubled down in rejecting it.

The unexpected scale of Labor’s victory in May last year left questions about why pundits had been misreading the political mood over the previous eighteen months. Opinion polls had begun to track a recovery in the government’s standing by about March and were tracking a widening gap between Albanese and Dutton as preferred prime minister, but the magnitude of Labor’s improvement between its nadir of February and the early May election beggared belief. This reminder of the limited predictive power of opinion polls at a distance from an election also raises questions about what they had actually been registering. Rather than providing a reliable measure of voting intention, my suspicion is that the polls might well have been acting as an instrument for the public to let off steam and stretch the government on the rack.

The emphatic repudiation in May 2025 of the Coalition’s journey to strident conservative populism also provoked an effusion of interest in the country’s political distinctiveness. Australia had bucked the trend of democratic backsliding in many other parts of the world, not least in Trump’s United States, and the associated proliferation of populist strongman leaders. Its democracy was resilient and its political centre holding.

Historians have been writing about the country’s democratic exceptionalism for many years, but suddenly in the second half of 2025 it became a subject about which every galah in every pet shop was squawking. The ABC’s 2025 Boyer Lecture orations were dedicated to the theme “Australia: A Radical Experiment in Democracy,” and a three-part television documentary on the national broadcaster, hosted by Annabel Crabb, lauded the nation’s democratic architecture.

Nor was it only at home that the country’s democratic system was winning favourable reviews. According to one of Britain’s most influential politics-watchers, Rory Stewart, “if liberal democracy has a future, it looks surprisingly Australian.” One of the ABC’s 2025 Boyer orators, Justin Wolfers, a US-based Australian who has successfully carved out a career as a scholar and economist, rhapsodised that the country’s “democratic and economic institutions” were “not just world class… [but] the world’s best.”

All this optimism came to a shuddering halt on the evening of 14 December with the killing of fifteen innocents at a Jewish festival of Hanukkah on Bondi beach by father and son Islamic State sympathisers radicalised by Israel’s bloody invasion of Gaza. That depravity immediately became a subject of partisan-fuelled blame, spearheaded by Coalition politicians, present and former, who accused the federal government of failing to rein in a burgeoning wave of antisemitism. An evidently distraught Albanese was condemned for bungling the moment, for being slow to act in the days following the massacre, and especially for his resistance to what quickly became a coordinated campaign for the appointment of a royal commission into antisemitism.

The legitimate reasons to pause before proceeding down a royal commission path were drowned out by a clamour fuelled by News Corp and Nine media. Later, the Age’s editor, in an extraordinary column puffing the virtues of the newspaper and its journalists, conceded that sometimes its coverage could be “less frantic, more considered.” This was apparently said with no self-awareness that the febrile weeks following Bondi had been just the time for sober debate and steadiness rather than — as the Age had earlier bragged — being in the vanguard of the campaign for the royal commission come hell or high water.

The shocks kept coming, most notably the joint US–Israel airstrikes on Iran in late February, disrupting global oil trade and catalysing intensifying cost-of-living pressures. One Nation’s poll figures had smashed through the 20 per cent barrier by the end of December, with the lion’s share of that vote (as Murray Goot’s trademark granular analysis for Inside Story demonstrated) hiving off the Coalition and especially the Liberal Party.

The Coalition’s answer to this existential challenge has been to move further to the right: to effectively mingle in the same space as One Nation in competition for the votes of the angry and the disaffected. Witness the new opposition leader Angus Taylor’s recent immigration announcement, with its thinly coded signal of the abandonment of the principle of a non-discriminatory intake. One of the most arresting things here is how ill-fitted Taylor is for the role. A leader who looks like he has emerged from central casting and exudes a privileged background has taken on the mission of steering the Liberal Party further towards an anti-establishment position to vie with the much more impeccably credentialled outsider, Pauline Hanson.

Two essays published during the past fortnight probe the national mood a year from the May 2025 election. One appeared in the left-leaning Monthly and the other in the Murdoch flagship, the Australian. Despite their contrasting venues, they are consistent in depicting a troubling picture.

The former is written by the respected journalist and author of an accomplished biography of Albanese, Karen Middleton, and draws on focus group findings by social researcher Rebecca Huntley and polling work by Redbridge’s Kos Samaras. Middleton writes of “a deeper change in Australia that’s been gradual but now feels sudden, like a kind of fraying in the order of things”:

People have endured wave after wave of stress from fires and floods, a pandemic, conflicts abroad, rising inflation at home, a terrorist attack and now a fuel crisis. Australians’ anxiety and exhaustion have progressed to frustration, disillusionment and rage, as people become less willing to accept orthodoxies — political, corporate, legal — and more inclined to revolt.

Not surprisingly, Middleton identifies the dramatic spike in polled support for One Nation as the most visible manifestation of the community’s disenchantment with business-as-usual political practices. She points to the powerful performance of the party in the South Australian election in March, where it captured 23 per cent of the primary vote, as evidence of the realistic threat of that populist surge. She argues the loss of faith of Australians in institutions has been a slow burn, and even harks back to the corporate excesses of the 1980s and 1990s.

Middleton quotes Labor’s federal treasurer, Jim Chalmers, referring to the period since the global financial crisis: “all of these rolling shocks for twenty years have been cumulative. And every time it feels like ordinary people are going get off the mat, something else arrives.” At the same time, she singles out the Covid-19 pandemic as “a major pivot point for Australian attitudes.” In turn, the worsening cost-of-living pressures unleashed since the pandemic are compounding the sense of a system that is not delivering for ordinary people: a situation in which hard work is no longer a guarantee of material progress or security. Huntley perceives a besieged public and a “mood of persistent despair and fragility… she hasn’t encountered in twenty-two years of field work.”

If this is grim reading, then the second essay, by retired sociologist and longtime conservative commentator John Carroll, borders on the dystopian. When he looks at contemporary Australia, Carroll sees “conditions of disunity, malaise and confusion.” This is “a demoralised nation.” Social and culture decay is everywhere, not least in the big cities as manifest in “potholed streets, graffiti-smeared buildings and precincts populated by mentally disturbed drug addicts [and] an increasing failure to address crime, notably at the hands of violent teenage gangs.”

In common with Middleton, Carroll interprets the dramatic increase in One Nation’s appeal to voters as a symptomatic of political despair. But equally suggestive of political nihilism, in Carroll’s view, is the large proportion of Gen Zs who vote “for a marginal extremist party, the Greens.” Like Middleton, Carroll regards the current crisis as having a long genesis, with the decline of Christian faith among its causes. Yet he is also alive to the effects of public policy failure, especially the lack of action to tackle declining housing affordability that has left the young condemned to “a rootless existence, an understandably insecure and anxious one, prone to deflating self-esteem and low hope.”

Depressed? My question following reading these two essays is whether we are in danger of repeating the error of 2024: to believe that Australia is ripe for picking off by an opportunist populism that foments and feeds off grievance and division — that this country is, in other words, no less susceptible to a lurch to the extreme right than the United States or Britain. Indeed, suggestive of a parallel with Britain, Middleton recites how British Labour MP Liam Byrne, in his book Why Populists Are Winning and How to Beat Them, classifies the groups of voters being seduced by the blandishments of Reform leader Nigel Farage.

To put this another way, Middleton and Carroll’s essays would lead us to think the 2025 election result was not so much a defining repudiation of the dark lands of political populism as a mere postponement.

Though not wanting to diminish the extent of disgruntlement with politics in Australia, or the serious economic pressures and social fissures in the community, or the profound public policy challenges, I believe there are grounds to be more hopeful about the nation’s political sensibility and direction. One of the most pronounced lessons of Australian political history is that the public has little time for demagoguery and a keen nose for moonshine. The loathing Morrison engendered once voters had seen through his confections is only the latest evidence of the latter instinct.

Moreover, the institutions that were extolled in the aftermath of the 2025 election for their role in buttressing the political centre have not been packed up in the twelve months since. Compulsory voting and preferential voting, well-documented as restraints against polarisation, are an entrenched part of our democratic architecture, as is that underappreciated national jewel, the independent Australian Electoral Commission.

I also doubt the levels of support for One Nation registered in opinion polls will translate into a vote of that magnitude in a federal election. The latest surveys are already giving an inkling that the party’s appeal has peaked. And, while the SA election result suggested One Nation’s support was far from a polling mirage, it is important to remember that Peter Malinauskas’s Labor government was unmistakeably on track to romp back into office, allowing voters to vent frustrations in the knowledge that a first preference for One Nation would not change who was in power.

In that context, it is pertinent to note Middleton’s citing of Huntley’s finding that most voters contemplating shifting their allegiance to Hanson’s outfit “don’t actually want it to run the country.” Support for One Nation is effectively “a cri de couer,” Huntley believes, rather than heralding the party’s conquest of government.

None of what I am saying here is an excuse for complacency. Nor is it a reason to ignore the fact that Australia’s political system is under significant strain for a complex constellation of reasons, including a radically transformed and balkanised media landscape, two decades of stasis in key policy areas, and the ongoing flight of voters from the major parties. The latter phenomenon, while an expression of disillusionment, is also a natural byproduct of an increasingly diverse and complex society. Historically, the established parties were very proficient at accommodating growing pluralism, but that ability was always destined to reach its limits.

One of my conclusions in my new book on twenty-first century prime ministers, The Alchemy of Leadership, is that two decades of mostly underwhelming political leadership, instability in high office and accompanying policy stagnation have put the country on borrowed time. One thing that has differentiated Australia from many other democracies is that the young, females and males alike, have been overwhelmingly immune to the siren song of angry resentment politics. Instead, as suggested by the 2025 two-party-preferred vote, the young are skewing heavily to the progressive end of politics. Millennials, Gen Z and the coming Gen Alpha are demographic timebombs for the Coalition.

Far from Carroll’s dyspeptic and, I suspect, elegiac outlook developed at distance from younger Australians, the experiences of these generations have conditioned them to embrace diversity and endowed them with an outward-looking perspective. But we can’t expect endless forbearance from young people faced by what the former treasury secretary Ken Henry has acidly described as “wilful acts of bastardry” in permitting intergenerational inequalities to grow unchecked in fields such as housing, tertiary education and the environment. Alienation will eventually fester unless these inequities are meaningfully tackled by government.

Another reason for my guarded optimism is that we appear to be approaching an inflection point in the Albanese government. The prime minister’s maxim for most of the past four years has been to hasten slowly: to stick firmly to a practice of orderly, modest change. Many Cassandras in 2023–24 believed that his circumspection would prove the undoing of the government — that, as Paul Kelly suggested, he had misread the times by being an agent of nip-and-tuck government in an age of disruption.

Though not without good fortune (though which successful prime minister has not enjoyed a fair share of luck?), Albanese’s approach was ultimately vindicated at the ballot box. A year later, however, he finally seems to be signalling that he appreciates the growing urgency of the moment: that the time has arrived for a shift in governing tempo and for a quickening of reform pace focused especially on addressing generational inequalities. That he is cognisant that the upheavals besetting the globe and the public’s discontent present a rare window of opportunity to shake things up. Middleton quotes the prime minister’s address to the National Press Club early last month:

Providing stability and security amidst uncertainty does not mean standing still… It means anticipating and creating change, true to Australian values and in Australia’s interests. Because if people feel like the economy is not working for them, if they’re putting in the effort but not seeing the reward… then government cannot provide stability just by keeping things as they are. There is no security in maintaining a status quo that doesn’t work for people.

This month’s federal budget is being anticipated as a litmus test of whether Albanese is really prepared to spread his wings. Movement in some areas such as the capital gains tax discount and negative gearing has already been telegraphed. The likelihood, however, is that the budget will leave many progressives underwhelmed. They ought perhaps to bear in mind what another former treasury head and ex–prime minister’s department secretary, Martin Parkinson, observed recently. While imploring the federal government to seize this moment, he conceded that not all reform boats can be launched at once.

The truth is that it is a characteristic of the progressive side of politics to devour its own: to be perennially disappointed by Labor in power only to later, once the government is fallen, view it retrospectively through more sympathetic lenses. The impact of any invigoration of the Albanese government’s reform mission will also be hindered by a deficiency in the prime minister’s makeup that I have already referred to: his limitations as a communicator-in-chief. Advocacy and explaining to the public where Labor’s busyness in office is transporting the nation is an abiding deficit in his leadership, and seems all but irresolvable.

The past twelve months has certainly confirmed that right-wing populist politics was not slain in this country last May: it is a hydra-headed beast. Yet neither ought we be spooked by its spectre nor rattled by the now habitual turbulence of politics. History shows that political excess is not a natural feature of the country’s DNA and there remain grounds for confidence that the populist threat can be kept at bay by brave and judicious leadership.

To conclude squarely on leadership: we are prone in Australia to think dimly of the quality of those who govern over us, to believe Donald Horne’s aphoristic assertion in the 1960s that this is a nation that has prospered despite the mediocrity of its governing class. This is not borne out by the historical record. Since the birth of Commonwealth, the nation has had its fair share of accomplished and effective prime ministers: Alfred Deakin and Andrew Fisher in the first decades after Federation; John Curtin, Ben Chifley and Robert Menzies in the mid-twentieth century; and Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and John Howard in the modern era.

It is the case that this century has been far from a stellar time for prime-ministerial leadership in this country: a phenomenon I explore in my book. Yet if Albanese can discover something of the heroic within him and rise to the opportunities of this moment, it isn’t beyond the bounds of possibilities that he might one day be counted among those consequential prime ministers. •

The post Glass half full appeared first on Inside Story.

In the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s electoral triumph it would be easy to lose equilibrium and faith in our values, or succumb to sanctimony, fight perfidy with perfidy and give way to anger at those whose worldview appears so alien. Yet none of these reactions, while natural enough, would be constructive.

Nor, here in Australia, can we afford to be complacent about what Trump’s victory might portend for our own politics. For a variety of reasons, historical, cultural and institutional, the political centre is more resilient in this country than in the United States and many other parts of the globe.

Our long and robust democratic tradition stretches back to the nineteenth century, when the Australian colonies led the world in innovations like the secret ballot, payment of members of parliament and the enfranchisement of women. Our national founding was mostly prosaic — an extended exercise in horse-trading among political representatives — and was yet a fundamentally democratic process capped by the vote of the people.

Unlike the United States, with its exaltation of individual rights, sanctification of state rights and instinctive resentment of government interference, Australia is typically described as having a majoritarian or utilitarian political culture. This predisposes citizens to be open to trading individual rights for the collective good and accepting that government has a responsibility to go at least some way to levelling social outcomes.

Where other countries have been susceptible to demagogues and snake oil political salesmen, Australians have shown a keen antennae for detecting and repudiating charlatanry. The public’s relatively speedy working out of, and subsequent revulsion towards, Scott Morrison is an illustration, as is the fact that Peter Dutton, for all his pretensions to be a political strongman, is blessedly free of the performative excesses of his counterparts overseas. The rhetorical crudities and behavioural transgressions of a Trump would simply not wash here.

Australia also boasts precious, albeit undervalued, democratic guardrails, most notably the century-old practice of compulsory voting and an independent, impartial national election authority, the Australian Election Commission.

Nonetheless, a strain of conservative populism has penetrated Australia’s right-of-centre political parties this century. John Howard, the dominant figure in this millennium, initiated this trend, and the 2001 federal election, arguably still the totemic political contest of this century, was a landmark moment in its development. Howard weaponised the issue of asylum seekers — in part to stave off Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party insurgency but also to continue his party’s efforts to cannibalise Labor’s working-class base — and along the way recreated himself as the nation’s steely protector against a foreboding background of unauthorised vessels on Australia’s high seas and the 9/11 al Qaeda atrocity in America.

Not coincidentally, that was the election at which Peter Dutton arrived in federal parliament, quickly emerging as a Howard favourite because of his unforgiving hunting after “welfare cheats.”

Once the right-wing populist genie is out of the bottle it is difficult to put back in. Indeed, flirting with the dark angels of politics easily begets extremism. Witness the Republican Party’s morphing from the Bush–Cheney era of aggressive neoconservativism to the Tea Party insurgency and then the MAGA movement.

Australia’s conservative parties have not travelled anywhere near as far along this ideological continuum. Yet current events suggest we may be on a slippery slope. Howard, at heart respectful of institutions and conventions, disassociated himself from Trump’s run for office because the former president’s refusal to accept the 2020 result was “not compatible with democracy.” But Dutton gives not the least hint of disquiet at the direction of the Republicans in the United States.

To the contrary, in fact, as veteran political commentator Niki Savva has observed, Dutton is mimicking Trumpian tactics by making inflammatory attacks on immigration, for example, and impugning trusted institutions like the AEC and CSIRO. On the day after the American poll it was telling, too, to see a photograph of a smiling Gina Rinehart, a chief Dutton confidante, celebrating with Britain’s version of Trump, Nigel Farage, at Mar-a-Lago, the president-elect’s Florida residence.

In imitation of Trumpism but also amplifying Howard’s strategy, Dutton is focusing his party’s appeal on the outer suburbs and rural and regional Australia. He appears to envisage a future in which the Liberals become the natural home for economic battlers and especially the lower-educated, in a mirror of the Republicans’ growth constituency in the United States.

But Dutton might also be discovering that the forces of extremism can whirl out of control. Most notably, in still another echo of the Trumpian revolution, some of the most militant conservatives in the Coalition are agitating to ignite a debate on women’s reproductive rights. And so the slippery slope quickens.

Can this cycle be arrested? America’s nominally left-of-centre party, the Democrats, has undoubtedly failed in this regard. On its watch — during the Clinton and Obama administrations — neoliberal policies that razed industries and destroyed traditional working-class jobs were left largely uncurbed, economic and cultural inequalities were allowed to fester, corporate excess not only went untrammelled but the culprits were let off the hook when their avarice and recklessness ended in widespread distress for the vulnerable and poor, and the party became typecast as synonymous with a wealthy establishment elite (complete with orgies of celebrity endorsements at election time).

Australia’s Labor has a far better record than this. The governments of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating modernised and internationalised the economy through market-based reforms yet cushioned those changes by extending the social wage, including through measures as the cherished institution of Medicare and compulsory superannuation.

In common with social democratic parties across the world, however, Labor has frequently appeared philosophically adrift and bewildered about its mission in the twenty-first century. Notwithstanding some worthy measures, the current Labor government is wedded to cautious incrementalism — to modest renovations of the status quo rather than weather-making change.

As prime minister, Anthony Albanese has demonstrated little capacity to persuasively articulate a case for major reform, to inspire or galvanise public sentiment, or to cogently explain the sum of Labor’s policies or what lies on the horizon. Nor has it helped that his public persona — as an ordinary, relatable, wrong-side-of-the-tracks-reared bloke — has crumbled since he was revealed to have acquired a multimillion-dollar coastal property and a taste for upgraded flights and other perks.

To repeat: this is no time to lose our heads. But Labor must treat the challenges of this time with urgency and conscientiousness. This demands a degree of boldness from the government, and needs the prime minister to spread his wings — if, indeed, he is capable of growth in office. It requires policies that don’t merely tinker at the edges of inequalities but extend to systemic change with a real impact on the welfare of voters. And it needs a dexterous language with emotional freight that binds constituencies together and is attentive to the fact that disadvantage and disempowerment comes in different guises, economic, cultural and identity based. •

The post It’s no time to lose our heads appeared first on Inside Story.

It was, however, a commitment woefully unfulfilled. The near-decade of Coalition government that followed was defined by leadership turmoil and abject public policy negligence. The least distinguished governing period in modern Australian political history culminated in Scott Morrison’s prime ministership, an exercise in vacuous performative leadership. It spoke to the good sense of Australians that they swiftly saw through Morrison’s legerdemain and came to loathe him for it.

It has taken another Labor government, led by Anthony Albanese, to resume mature administration. Compared to the delinquency of its predecessors, Albanese’s government has been competent, unified, collegial and scandal-free. It has also been legislatively productive. Less than twelve months from the next election, though, the opinion polls suggest a government struggling to survive.

Having come to power in May 2022 with a century-low primary vote of 32.6 per cent, Labor won increased favour in the electorate during its first year in office. Too tepid to be properly described as a full-blown honeymoon, the government’s primary support nonetheless climbed towards 40 per cent and Albanese enjoyed solid though never stratospheric approval. The electorate appeared to wish him and his government well.

Since the winter of 2023, however, Labor’s vote has slid back to the low thirties or lower and the prime minister’s leadership rating is anchored in negative territory. Providing “grown-up” administration has not been enough to spare Albanese Labor from the common fate of governments since the end of John Howard’s reign: early loss of public goodwill amid a climate of disenchantment with politics. How do we explain this apparent conundrum — and how much does it owe to the prime minister’s limitations?

Anthony Albanese’s prime-ministerial origins are unusual. Unlike many of his predecessors he was not consumed by a sense of destiny: in a quarter-century-long parliamentary career he came late to the view that he could be leader. His “log cabin” backstory, the leitmotif of his political vocation, is unusual too among modern prime ministers. He never tires of referencing his childhood in public housing, where economic frugality was made emotionally secure by a mutually adoring relationship between his single mother, reliant on an invalid pension, and her son.

Intriguingly, intense maternal investment is a trait Albanese shares with Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. In their case it encouraged overweening self-regard and a sense of boundlessness. They were men who would not be held back, zestful and abundant. For Albanese, self-belief was crimped by harder realities: his mother’s poor health and the absence of a father and siblings. The pull effect of his relationship with his mother vied with the pressing necessity for self-reliance. Journalist turned Albanese government media strategist Katharine Murphy discerned a “lone wolf”: a collaborator in politics who is also faithful to his own instincts and resources.

Labor became Albanese’s tribe before he was out of short pants. Later, studying economics at Sydney University, he was a firebrand student activist, his chip-on-the-shoulder resentments softened by a knockabout geniality that drew others to him. Aligned with the party’s left, he was initially employed as a researcher for the faction’s grand old warrior, Tom Uren.

The two men filled a void for each other. Albanese became a kind of surrogate son for the childless Uren, a former boxer and survivor of the Burma railway, and Uren — as Albanese has acknowledged — became a father figure for the future prime minister. They were alike in many ways — compassionate, sentimental and loyal, yet steely where required. The latter was a vital attribute in the party’s right-dominated NSW branch, a place of brutal, occasionally violent, realpolitik.

By the end of his twenties, Albanese was assistant general secretary of the branch. In that role, he grew adept at the hard-nosed game of transactional persuasion and forging networks of support in inhospitable circumstances. His friends attest, however, that his toughening did not come at the cost of his core decency. And, while politics was his path to influence and respectability in life, he was not a monomaniac. Travel, rugby league and rock and roll were passions. A frequenter of the Sydney pub band scene, he thrilled at the raw energy of punk. Its rage against establishment injustice echoed in him, though not its dark nihilism.

Albanese was fundamentally an optimist. Given his practical-mindedness and external orientation, serious reading doesn’t seem to have figured prominently among his pastimes. He is not a collector of ideas nor does he have an evident facility with them. In this respect, he is not alone among the modern crop of politicians. Formally educated to a level unattainable to many of their predecessors, they lack the erudition of the voracious autodidacts of the past.

Albanese’s rapid advance in Labor politics saw him win preselection for the seat of Grayndler and enter parliament, aged thirty-three, in 1996. It was the beginning of the Howard era and he had little choice but to learn how to wait. Early on, though, traces of the enfant terrible remained. During the Coalition’s first term, the upstart Labor backbencher derided the prime minister as “yesterday’s man, a weak man, a little man, a man without courage and a man without vision.” Gradually over the next decade, though, Albanese developed a sneaking admiration for Howard’s indomitability and dogged effectiveness.

When Labor finally returned to office under Rudd in 2007, Albanese assumed the senior ministries of infrastructure and transport. He was a fixture in those portfolios during the six subsequent years of tumult. As an able and tenacious administrator, he could point to the creation of Infrastructure Australia as one of his legacies. But his chief talents were as negotiator and conciliator. A Rudd loyalist who presciently foresaw that the Queenslander’s overthrow by Gillard would destroy two prime ministerships, he nonetheless conscientiously served the latter as government leader in the House of Representatives. He was integral to guiding through her minority administration’s busy legislative program.

Having waited upon two Labor prime ministers, Albanese arrived at the belief that he had the stuff of a leader rather than a mere “counsellor and kingmaker.” Though he was the preferred candidate of the rank and file after the 2013 defeat, the numbers were against him in the party room. During Bill Shorten’s two terms as opposition leader he was again responsible for the portfolios of infrastructure and transport.

Even allowing for the likelihood that Shorten was quarantining his rival, dallying for a dozen years in the same areas suggested a want of policy ambition or curiosity. He was coasting and in danger of being regarded as a spent political force. When Shorten retained the leadership uncontested after performing better than expected at the 2016 election, that indeed seemed Albanese’s lot. Yet history was always against Shorten: no first-cab-off-the rank opposition leader has attained the prime ministership since the second world war. Three years later, with Labor badly demoralised by its front-runner defeat and the party’s next generation wary of stepping forward, the fifty-six-year-old Albanese was the sole candidate to succeed Shorten.

Not since the middle of the twentieth century has a first-time opposition leader come to the job later in life or having served longer in parliament. He was a safe, seasoned pair of hands. He embodied the virtue of durability and was persuaded by the possibility of progress through patient attrition. The closest recent parallel was Howard, who had waited and waited until he was Liberals’ last man standing in the mid-1990s.

Albanese’s chief tasks in his new position were to overcome the two handicaps Labor’s post-election review identified as having cost the party office in 2019. These were a deeply unpopular leader and a cluttered policy program that had unsettled voters. Albanese has never had the voter turn-off effect of the unfortunate Shorten. Where Shorten had a baked-in reputation for shiftiness originating from his complicity in the prime-ministerial downfalls of Rudd and Gillard, attitudes towards Albanese were benign: he excited neither enthusiasm nor antagonism.

In common with most opposition leaders, he was only a vague presence in voters’ minds. He also had the great advantage of being up against a prime minister, Morrison, who by 2020 was synonymous with duplicity and inauthenticity. The 2022 Australian Election Study subsequently found that Albanese out-rated Morrison on eight of nine leadership characteristics. The gap was widest on compassion, honesty and trustworthiness, and narrowest on “inspiring.” Voters assessed him as fundamentally decent, if underwhelming.

One reason for this lukewarm response was the circumspect policy project Albanese took to the public in May 2022. Redolent of Howard’s second coming as opposition leader, Albanese’s approach was monotonously described as a “small target” strategy.

A frustrated Coalition government portrayed him as a thief in the night trying to steal his way into office on a threadbare program. This was not entirely fair. Albanese’s Labor offered significant policy differentiation. Its 2030 carbon emissions–reduction target of a 43 per cent cut, for example, was substantially more ambitious than the Coalition’s 26–28 per cent. Albanese pledged that a Labor government would fulfil the Uluru Statement from the Heart agenda in full: a constitutionally enshrined Voice to Parliament, truth-telling and treaty.

Still, reassurance was the overriding note in Albanese’s pitch for office. Campaigning in prose rather than poetry, he abandoned the contentious redistributive measures Labor had taken to the 2019 election: the curbing of negative gearing, capital gains concessions and dividend imputation. He also promised not to repeal the third tranche of tax cuts legislated by the Morrison government, which principally benefited high income earners, and emphasised asylum-seeker boats would continue to be turned back.

Probably most momentously, he also vowed to stick with the Morrison-conceived AUKUS defence agreement with the United States and Britain. Desperate to avert being cast as unreliable on national security, Labor had adopted this position with an indecent haste that negated the chance to subject the arrangement to due diligence. To those who cavilled that he was surrendering the party’s ideals, Albanese’s riposte was blunt: “One of my Labor principles is for Labor to win elections.”

A cliché of electoral politics is that governments lose elections rather than oppositions win them. This was unequivocally so in 2022. The Australian public reviled Morrison and longed to be rid of him. Their embrace of the alternative, though, was tentative to say the least. Entering office with that century-low primary vote, Labor’s was a loveless triumph. Together with the party’s low-octane campaign and attenuated program, the result raised as many questions as it answered about the new prime minister and his government.

Machiavelli counselled that a successful prince must be able to modulate leadership styles, to know when to be a lion and when to be a fox. Did Albanese have the capacity to switch to a more galvanising style or would the caution that defined him in opposition shackle him in government? Was he instilled with the driving sense of purpose and the knowledge and imagination to achieve major reform that meaningfully shaped the nation? Would Labor’s thin mandate, which Albanese was determined to adhere to, emaciate the government? And was the tepid voter response to Labor — and Albanese — a function of the lack of ambition of the campaign? As John McTernan, a former key adviser to British Labour prime minister Tony Blair and later to Gillard, wisely observed, “There is a cost to crouching too low.”

Asked which of his predecessors he would take a leaf from, Albanese galled Coalition members by mentioning Howard, the man he had observed closely from across the despatch box. More orthodox was his nomination of Bob Hawke, the gold standard of modern Labor prime ministers. Following Hawke’s lead, Albanese aspired to be an agent of community consensus who ran his administration in an orderly, collegial fashion. In his election night victory speech, he declared his faith that “it is a show of strength to collaborate and work with people, not weakness.”

If we take a cue from the leadership typology designed by political psychologist Graham Little, this attitude made Albanese a “group leader,” a relatively rare figure in the ranks of Australian prime ministers. Armed with soft skills, group leaders value solidarity and interdependence. They are typically self-effacing and empathetic. They tend to rise to the top following periods of strife and upheaval, when there is a yearning for respite and healing. The risk with this type of leader is passivity — that they don’t lead. Things can drift on their watch.

Needless to say, Albanese is no Hawke. The latter was far more than a chairman of his government, much more than an orchestrator of collaboration. He was a leader of rare alchemy: in Little’s terms, a compelling combination of “group leader” inside his government and “inspirational leader” outside it. The latter was manifest in a radiating exuberance that had a multiplier effect in the community.

There are other pronounced differences between the two men. Though his energies diminished over the term of his government, Hawke possessed extraordinary drive and stamina. A man of earthly excesses and coursing emotions, he was nonetheless intellectually rigorous and had an eye for policy detail. Albanese is altogether more mortal. Visceral rather than cerebral, he appears less engaged by policy. He is also prone to wandering into verbal marshes and, as the 2022 campaign betrayed, he is not always across his brief.

Instilled with a mighty sense of providence from childhood, Hawke had the inordinate confidence of a leader acting out his destiny. Albanese, on the other hand, insists that he never had a sense of entitlement. Hawke was blessed by an intoxicating blend of charisma and an effortless ability to convey the ineffable quality of authenticity. The unique “love affair” he enjoyed with the Australian people replenished the well of political capital his government drew on to sustain its sweeping reform agenda. Albanese boasts nothing like Hawke’s emotional connection with the public. He is workmanlike and inoffensive rather than magnetic.

Hawke had another vital asset: his double act with Paul Keating. Rivals as well as partners, the two men had complementary talents and generated a fertile creative tension. Keating supplied the audacity in the Hawke government, along with being its most captivating storyteller. Albanese has Jim Chalmers, a student of Keating and arguably the best communicator and keenest thinker in the government, who is said to chafe against his prime minister’s caution. Yet, where Keating was a ferocious political flamethrower, Chalmers is measured and amiable in public. Where Keating was prepared to act as an in-house insurgent, Chalmers is a patient team player.

As the prime minister had promised, the Albanese government began in methodical style. Experienced observers describe it as the smoothest transition to office of any recent administration, including Howard’s long-term government.

As it steadily went about ticking off election commitments, the government appeared a genuinely collegiate project in refreshing contrast with the overbearing style of recent prime ministers. During its first twelve months, Labor created a National Anti-Corruption Commission, formally committed to the United Nations for Australia to reduce carbon emissions by 43 per cent on 2005 levels, struck an agreement with the Greens that smoothed the imposition of a hard cap on the nation’s largest carbon emitters, steered through a substantial lift in the minimum wage, increased the childcare subsidy for low-income earners, enabled trade unions to negotiate multi-employer pay deals, and implemented some of the recommendations of the aged care royal commission to improve conditions in nursing homes.

The government’s conscientious attendance to what the German sociologist Max Weber described as the “slow boring of hard boards” that is democratic politics bucked the chaotic trend of the previous decade. The contrast with revelations about the Coalition’s convention flouting (Morrison’s secret commandeering of ministries, for example) and scandalous practices (robodebt among them) reinforced the impression that ethical respectability was finally returning to Australian politics.

Despite the indisputable early progress, though, there was a nagging feeling that something was missing. Politics, as Weber also observed, was about both “perspective” and “passion” — achieving the possible also required reaching for the impossible. An element of the heroic was necessary. The government’s actions had an unfortunate resemblance to a laundry list of modest measures which, while undeniably necessary, fell short of capturing the imagination and weren’t in any way paradigm shifting.

With dreams of social transformation supplanted by well-meaning but bloodless managerialism, Labor was suffering the curse of modern-day social democratic parties. The neoliberal revolution, with its assault on collectivism, had emptied out these parties’ belief system and left them muddled about the appropriate balance between the market and state, between capital and labour, and between rights and responsibilities. The confusion of purpose was not alleviated by neoliberalism’s own exhaustion. To the contrary, what was left in its wake was uncertainty about the next great policy regime.

The dilemma of social democrats is exacerbated in a landscape in which right-of-centre parties have pivoted towards aggressive conservative populism, a lusty, grievance-driven, frequently irrational politics. In response, social democrats have hewed to the sensible centre, a safe harbour but an emotionally desiccated place. It is almost as if the two sides of politics have swapped clothes. While an ardour-filled right claims the mantle of subversive enemy of established “elite” power, the mainstream left is pushed towards an earnest maintenance project.

That dichotomy is to some extent embodied in the contest between Albanese and opposition leader Peter Dutton. Albanese wanted his prime ministership to usher in a tranquil national political conversation but Dutton was having none of it. A foreboding political strongman, he relentlessly and recklessly pushes the hot buttons of fear and resentment in the electorate, especially on issues of race. Responding to Dutton’s incitements with a restrained stoicism, Albanese rebukes the opposition leader more in sorrow than in anger.  This temperance might be statesmanlike and designed to douse social fires, but it can leave Albanese appearing limp next to Dutton’s muscularity.

The impression of stolidity is compounded by Albanese’s performance as communicator-in-chief. He is accessible to, and busy in, the media. Though he doesn’t shy away from serious outlets, journalists have noticed his predilection for “hokey” interviews on commercial FM radio designed to reinforce his everyman persona.

Nobody expects Albanese to sound like Robert Menzies or Gough Whitlam. In this demotic age, silver-tongued oratory is as likely to engender suspicion as to inspire. Yet one wishes the prime minister was a more effervescent communicator capable of striking an intense pitch. As Gillard did to her cost, he seems to operate on the premise that his government will be known by its deeds rather than through emotionally freighted words or gestures. He is mostly wooden, inhibited in body language and devoid of memorable or moving phrasing. Where Keating had the Redfern address, Rudd the Stolen Generation apology and Gillard, after provocation upon provocation, the misogyny speech, it is hard to imagine Albanese delivering anything comparably stirring or enduring.

The lament that governments lack an overarching narrative is commonplace in contemporary politics. Philosophical uncertainty and societal and media fragmentation militate against cohesive storytelling. But Albanese has showed little or no proclivity for weaving a compelling tale for his government, to joining the dots between its actions. In that absence, each measure risks disappearing into the ether as fast as the warp-speed media cycle.

Twenty twenty-three was the pivotal year of the Albanese government’s first term. Two things were defining. The first was Albanese’s March meeting in San Diego with British prime minister Rishi Sunak and American president Joe Biden to put flesh on the bones of the three nation’s AUKUS agreement. Under its terms Australia was to acquire eight nuclear submarines between the 2030s and the middle of the century at a gargantuan cost of up to $368 billion.

The announcement, made with the three leaders standing in the glistening sun against the backdrop of a symbol of American military might, the USS Michigan, was perhaps the apotheosis of Albanese’s journey to conventional respectability: the boy from council housing made good. Back home, though, opponents of the pact believed the prime minister and his government had been gulled by the nation’s traditional “great and powerful friends.” They raised a host of questions about the pact’s impact on Australia’s strategic autonomy, the likelihood of the submarines actually being delivered given questions about Washington’s future political reliability, and whether they would be obsolete by the time they arrived.

Yet caucus was conspicuously compliant. The noisiest critic of the agreement was Keating, who condemned it as the worst international decision by a Labor government since Billy Hughes tried to introduce conscription during the first world war. Declaring that Albanese and his ministers had “no mandate” for AUKUS inside the party, Keating forecast a major backlash at branch level. But the grassroots protests never amounted to more than a whimper.

This acquiescence in a far-reaching decision that went against the grain of Labor’s radical nationalist tradition said volumes about an often unremarked shift with the party. In a de facto split that has maimed both parties, Labor’s left has effectively migrated to the Greens. Untethered from moderates, the Greens veer towards strident — often breathtakingly cynical — exhibitionism; Labor, meanwhile, has lost an internal ginger group and a source of creative tension.

But the truly totemic battle of Labor’s term, also during 2023, was the Voice to Parliament referendum. When Albanese emotionally promised on election night to implement the Uluru Statement, he briefly let down his guard after three years of studious caution. Here is not the place to rake over the causes of the referendum’s emphatic defeat: suffice to say that the dismal record of referendums on this constitutionally “frozen continent” made it a long shot from the start, and it was virtually doomed once it was denied bipartisan support first by the Nationals and then by the Liberals. Afterwards, conservative proponents of the Voice naively accused Albanese of fatally wounding the referendum’s chances by not doing more to woo the opposition parties. The reality is that special rights for First Nations Australians, especially if constitutionally entrenched, were anathema to Dutton and the Queensland-dominated Coalition joint party room.

The opposition had another incentive to oppose the Voice: beating the referendum would wound the prime minister. Albanese had embarked on an exercise in defying history. He was the risk-averse leader attempting the quixotic.

The referendum defeat was indeed wounding for Albanese’s prime ministership. On the night of the vote he struggled to camouflage his bitterness at the people’s verdict. In the days and weeks after, he appeared demoralised and disorientated, as if the stuffing had been knocked out of him. Undoubtedly, the issue was close to Albanese’s heart. He had deeply wanted to deliver the Voice to Indigenous Australians.

While he vowed continued support for national truth-telling and a treaty, he realised their prospects had also been badly damaged. His recent “crab-walking” away from establishing a  Makarrata Commission to oversee truth-telling and treaty-making suggests an unwillingness to spend further political capital. Painfully, he is joining a line of prime ministers who raised the expectations of the First Nations community only to let them down. Hawke, Albanese’s leadership model, acknowledged that his failure to fulfil his promise of a treaty with Indigenous Australians was the profoundest regret of his time in office. Albanese knows this sorry history, but seems unable to avoid repeating it.

In a larger sense, the defeat meant Albanese had lost the opportunity for an achievement that would have been etched in history, conferring on him authorship of a landmark step in the chequered march to justice in this country. It also effectively cruelled the chances for other heroic advances by his government. That the goal of Australia becoming a republic, for example, was now seen as a lost cause was confirmed by the dropping of the portfolio of assistant minister for the republic in a ministerial reshuffle in July 2024.

In the absence of movement in these areas, Labor would mostly be confined to prosaic tasks such as curbing cost-of-living stresses. Hardly the stuff to stir the soul or make Albanese a memorable prime minister. His post-referendum funk perhaps owed something, too, to a loss of confidence following a lacklustre and meandering campaign performance in which he had been outpointed by the Coalition’s fear-mongering opposition leader. That performance only accentuated questions that had lingered since Labor’s small-target election victory. It seemed to confirm that Albanese lacked the magic to inspire the electorate on a path of transformative change.

Nor could it have helped Albanese’s state of mind that the referendum campaign had coincided with an ebbing of support for his government. Conducted against the background of worsening cost-of-living pressures and a crisis in housing affordability and supply, it was a setting in which worried Australians were susceptible to the view that the Voice referendum was a prime-ministerial indulgence and a distraction from what ought to be the government’s priorities.

Albanese failed to convince them otherwise. Polls showed that by the time of the referendum Labor’s primary vote had fallen to the low thirties and disapproval of his performance outstripped approval. Likewise, surveys indicated declining levels of trust in government and a ratcheting up of dissatisfaction with democracy. Once more Australia was spiralling into the cycle that had plagued the country for most of the twenty-first century: a precipitous loss of support for national governments and deep-seated public disenchantment with how politics worked.

In the almost twelve months since the referendum Albanese’s prime ministership has reverted to subdued incrementalism. The government roused itself from its post-referendum doldrums at the beginning of 2024 by announcing the recasting of the third tranche of the Morrison government’s tax cuts to provide a far more equitable spread of their fruits. It seemed like a Labor thing to do. Tellingly, however, the initiative was reported to have come from treasurer Chalmers, who had long been agitating within the government for the change.

Albanese had only belatedly agreed, concerned that reneging on his election promise to keep the tax cuts intact would hurt his standing. Far from rounding on the prime minister, the public understood and welcomed the move. Soon after, in a by-election in the Melbourne outer-suburban electorate of Dunkley, he and his government received a fillip when the party’s primary vote held up and it comfortably retained the seat. That result at least punctured any notion of an unstoppable Dutton-led Liberal conquest of outer suburbia Australia.

Even so, political momentum has eluded the prime minister and his government in 2024. The May budget featured cost of living relief measures and a centrepiece $23 billion, A Future Made in Australia, designed to revive domestic manufacturing, spur the nation’s transition to a net-zero economy, and integrate Australia into a global economy that Chalmers declared to be undergoing the greatest transformation since the Industrial Revolution. The policy provided funding for a vast array of projects, including $20 billion under the grandiose banner of the “renewable energy superpower.” Labor’s headlining of the package evinced that its activities in the field of climate change, though not without limitations and contradictions (the government continued to approve new fossil fuel projects and extend the lives of others), was the one field in which it believed it could nail its colours to transformative change.

Labor enjoyed no electoral dividend from either the budget or the delivery of the tax cuts from 1 July. For the government it must have been especially disconcerting that polling suggested its actions were barely registering with the population, let alone inducing feelings of gratitude.

Three reasons suggest themselves. First and foremost, the measures were too modest to have a significant effect on the lived experience of many Australians in an environment — by no means unique to Australia — of stubborn inflationary pressures and relatively high interest rates. Perilously for Labor, voters were defaulting to their traditional habit of seeing the conservative side of politics as the better manager of economic affairs.

Second, a decade of policy indolence by the Coalition had left Labor with a backlog of problems resistant to quick or easy fixes. Housing was a prime example. And third, Labor’s messaging was confounded by a balkanised and highly polarised media landscape. Whatever credit it claimed — or deserved — the audience was scattered, often out of reach, in online rabbit warrens. Needless to say, social media’s influence as a transmitter of (mis)information and a platform for inflammatory opinion formation is proving ever more inimical to persuasive engagement with the electorate. It is instead consummate at engendering impatience and inciting grievance, which rapidly and capriciously deprive leaderships of community goodwill. In a vicious circle, governments are sapped of a willingness to embark on major reforms.

With less than a year to the next election, the time for governing is closing. Labor has continued to eke out worthwhile reforms, including protections for gig economy workers and efforts to put the National Disability Insurance Scheme on a sustainable footing. In other areas, though — for example, banning gambling advertising, or whether the census should include questions on expanded gender options and sexuality — it has looked timorous and vacillating. The latter episode was reported to have begun with a “captain’s call,” not only something that recent prime-ministerial history indicates rarely ends well but also a breach of Albanese’s standard practice of collegiate decision-making. Worse, it revealed a prime minister lacking confidence in his ability to shepherd public discussion and jumping at the opposition leader’s shadow.

By now, the entrenched view of Albanese within the public is that he is well intentioned — he does not elicit animus as Morrison did — but also insipid and weak. The fact that focus groups are landing on the word “weak” to describe the prime minister is evidenced by how Dutton and Coalition shadow ministers have fixed the term on Albanese. He is regarded as a hostage to, rather than a shaper of, events.

Dutton, by contrast, is perceived as “nasty” and divisive but strong. Far from shying away from that reputation, the opposition leader is leaning into it, as exemplified by his recent provocative call to block all Palestinian refugees from war-ravaged Gaza. His inflammatory brazenness has more than once left Albanese looking defensive and leaden. That some polling is finding that Dutton is the preferred prime minister — a position seldom enjoyed by opposition leaders — suggests that a proportion of Australians equate “strength,” even at the cost of social cohesion, with leadership.

Anthony Albanese has demonstrated that he is a different type of leader — one whose modus operandi is to doggedly nudge the country along. In a leader-centric era in which alternative authority  figures have melted from view, we expect much from our prime ministers — too much. The challenge is arguably amplified for Labor office-holders. They are inheritors of the party folklore that its leaders are weather makers, exalted figures in a pantheon of great reformers. Filling those historical shoes is no easy thing. Moreover, there is a habit on the political left of devouring its own, of railing against the sacrileges and pusillanimity of Labor prime ministers and governments while they are in office only to appreciate their value once they are gone. Progressive frustration with Albanese has elements of this.

When he won office in May 2022, Albanese declared a hope that his “journey in life” — the boy reared in council housing who rose to be prime minister — “inspires Australians to reach for the stars.” Thus far inspiration has been missing from Albanese’s repertoire.

Today’s United States is hardly a reference point for democratic leadership, yet the emergence of Kamala Harris as the Democrats’ presidential candidate has illustrated the possibility of joy to lighten and energise the political mood. Similarly, the British political writer and broadcaster and former politician, Rory Stewart, has identified the importance of humour leavening the mundane but essential work of centrist leadership. Joy and humour can be powerful antidotes to the menacing catastrophising of right-wing populists like Trump — and Dutton.

Albanese and his ministers have provided grown-up administration, worthy and sensible, but it has also been dour work, a government of grinding necessity. Albanese sits atop, a decent and sincere man yet a model of prime-ministerial staidness and a dampener of political passions. He has also been wanting in explaining the journey the nation is on, why it matters, and what lies on the horizon. Dare we say, the vision thing.

The 2025 election will test whether Australia is tipping into a zone of ungovernability: whether an able administration can endure beyond a single term. Little can be taken for granted in our fractured, volatile electorate, but my hunch is that Labor will survive the election — as it deserves to — albeit with serious prospect of being reduced to minority rule.

For a number of reasons, historical, cultural and institutional, the centre holds better in this country than it does in many other parts of the globe. I also suspect that the nation is neither as fearful nor as paranoid as Dutton is banking on, with women and young voters likely to prove major obstacles to his ambitions. An Albanese mantra is that he has been underestimated all his life. For him, winning a second term will be further affirmation of that. The temptation in those circumstances will be to continue to trudge along towards a far off promised land, heading a government of honourable but modest deeds and pinched emotions.

Our best prime ministers have learned on the job and grown in office. With a lifetime in politics and hardboiled into a wily, flinty operator, does Albanese still have growth in him? Having acquired comfortable respectability in adulthood, is there anything left of the passionate incandescence of his youth for him to draw on? Can he yet spread his leadership wings? •

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THROUGHOUT much of the post-war era, including the “swinging” sixties, federal election night in Victoria resembled Groundhog Day. In election after election Labor’s wins were confined to the same ten seats – concentrated in Melbourne’s industrial suburbs – giving it a meagre 30 per cent of parliamentary representation in the state.

The culmination of this sorry state of affairs was the 1969 federal election, when Gough Whitlam brought Labor agonisingly close to government on the back of a huge national swing. The reason Whitlam fell short – and why celebrations turned sour for Labor supporters in Don’s Party, David Williamson’s famous dramatisation of election night that year – was yet another poor performance by Labor in Victoria. By the end of the 1960s, many people in the federal party rightly believed that the state was the chief impediment to their winning national office.

How things have changed. Wind forward to 2010 and opinion polls indicate that Victoria is the state most likely to thwart Tony Abbott’s bid to become prime minister. Victoria is now being tagged in election coverage as the “left-leaning” state and a “Labor bastion.”

While this strong support for Labor inverts the longer-term pattern of electoral behaviour in Victoria, it’s doesn’t actually deviate from the trend. Victoria has been metamorphosing into a Labor state for three decades. If, as seems inevitable, the party gains a majority of the state’s two-party preferred vote this Saturday, it will be the tenth time it has done so in the twelve federal elections since 1980. And in most of those elections (and this is set to be repeated) Victoria has been Labor’s best performing mainland state measured by two-party-preferred vote.

When I’ve pointed to this phenomenon previously, some correspondents have cynically suggested that it’s because Labor and non-Labor are now indistinguishable. Party transformation is certainly an important part of the story of Victoria’s changed electoral behaviour, but not as these correspondents assert.

Yes, the parties have converged and there is an undercurrent of disillusionment with Labor’s ideological shift to the centre and an attendant haemorrhaging of left-leaning supporters to the Greens. But most research shows that voters can still distinguish between the major parties – believing, for example, that Labor is better than the Liberals at delivering on “social” policy issues like health, education and the environment.

The contention that Labor’s recent electoral success in Victoria is the product of a new-found pragmatism and philosophical neutering often comes with nostalgia for a golden past. Yet there was little to mourn about the passing of the old Victorian Labor Party. For much of its history, Labor in Victoria was a Trades Hall–dominated party, ideologically hidebound and often only obliquely interested in winning executive office. Its woes were magnified in the postwar era by the legacy of the mid-1950s split in the party, which not only robbed it of a large part of its traditional Irish-Catholic constituency but also left it demoralised and antagonistic to fresh thinking of any kind.

The great change in the Victorian party came with federal intervention in 1970. Labor was significantly “middle-classed,” gaining some belated policy energy and electoral sensitivity. The effects of intervention were not confined to Victoria, and were an important milestone in the modernisation of Labor more widely.

It is not only Victorian Labor that has undergone change. In the 1980s, the state Liberal Party purged much of its social–liberal wing. It forgot the teachings of the great Liberal prime ministers from the state, Alfred Deakin and Robert Menzies, that the party must remain a progressive force, err towards liberalism not conservatism, and balance the creed of individualism with a positive view of government activity. Over the same period, the geographical centre of the Liberal Party in Australia has shifted from Victoria to New South Wales, accentuating the rebalancing to conservatism.

Other factors, including demographic changes, have influenced the mutation of Victoria’s electoral behaviour, but the sum of these party transformations has clearly been important. Put simply, modern Labor appears better attuned to the progressive traditions of Victorian politics, which stretch back to the nineteenth century.

Of course, attempting to define a state’s political culture is perilous. Nevertheless, few would fail to recognise in Victoria a metropolitan-dominated cosmopolitan culture that distinguishes it from some other Australian states. Victorians care about bread and butter and issues and want to see the economy soundly managed, but once they’re assured of that then they appear to have a greater openness to progressive politics. It’s notable that the major interruption to Labor’s ascendancy in Victoria during the past three decades was in the early 1990s when the financial scandals that engulfed the state Labor government provoked punishment at the 1990 federal election and the 1992 and 1996 state elections.

Federal elections aren’t won in a single state. Much commentary during this election has bemoaned Labor’s lack of principled leadership on issues like climate change and asylum seekers and suggested this is a cause of its troubles. Yet the regional variations in the polls cloud this interpretation. Progressive Victoria is largely sticking with the government while the “conservative” states are rebelling. Which raises the uncomfortable question of whether the Labor government would have been still more vulnerable if it had been forthright on issues close to progressive hearts. •

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LAST JANUARY I prevailed on my sceptical family to take time out from a day trip to the Bellarine Peninsula to visit Ballara, the Point Lonsdale holiday home of Australia’s second prime minister, Alfred Deakin. I was working on a book marking the centenary anniversary of the Fusion, the watershed moment in May 1909 when Australia’s party system consolidated into a Labor versus non-Labor arrangement that has remained essentially intact ever since. By his own description, Deakin was “the pivot” around which those momentous events turned, and, like any historian worth his salt, I felt it vital to make a connection with my subject.

A friend with local knowledge of Point Lonsdale guided us to the house. I’d seen photographs of Deakin at Ballara, and when we approached the property along a secluded back street it was instantly recognisable. Nestled in native trees and scrub, the distinctively designed timber house looked remarkably unaltered from when it was built some hundred years before. As we stood at the fence-line it wasn’t hard to conjure an image of Deakin on the verandah pensively gazing back at us through melancholy eyes.

Ballara was Deakin’s refuge from the pressures of national leadership during the first Commonwealth decade. His habit was to inscribe the words “At Peace” at the bottom of the many pages he wrote while there. Yet I wondered whether tranquillity had eluded Deakin over the summer of 1908-09. Though he escaped to the property with his family just before Christmas as normal, he carried with him the burden of perhaps the greatest dilemma he had faced in his three-decade political career.

In November 1908, Deakin’s second and most productive prime ministership had been terminated when the Labor Party withdrew its support from his Liberal Protectionist ministry. That decision was in keeping with resolutions carried at Labor’s July federal conference that stipulated the party was no longer to grant electoral immunity to so-called “good-as-labour-men” or enter into parliamentary alliances with other parties. Labor-supported Protectionist ministries, which had been responsible for the great bulk of the nation-building legislation enacted during the first Commonwealth decade, were to be consigned to the past. Emboldened by its growing electoral might, Labor was no longer willing to play second fiddle to the Deakinites. Instead, it would treat them as electoral prey.

For Deakin and his loyal band of supporters – they called him “the chief” – the alternatives seemed to be either electoral annihilation or to throw in their lot with the other non-Labor Party, their hitherto opponents, the conservative Free Traders. Faced with this Hobson’s Choice, Deakin temporised; but ultimately, in May 1909, he bowed to the seemingly inevitable and agreed on the terms of “fusion” with the Free Traders. For Deakin it was a joyless outcome. During the Protectionist party room meeting at which the union was sanctioned, he told colleagues: “I would have done almost anything to avoid taking the course I now recommend. It has been taken, and is recommended, only as a last resort, and as pure matter of intellectual judgement. I may be wrong, but I can see no other alternative!”

Fusion returned Deakin to the prime ministership for a third time in June 1909. But when the Fusion Party went to the electorate the following April it was trounced, the voting public signalling its displeasure at the expedience of the new political arrangement. For Deakin, that result effectively brought the curtain down on his career. He resigned the leadership of the Liberal Party (as party became known) in January 1913, by which time dementia was already eating away at him. He lived out his remaining years in isolation, spending lengthy periods at his Point Lonsdale hideaway. Even there, however, peace had deserted him. While he still took solace in his family, he was a melancholy witness to the disintegration of his once sublime faculties and haunted by despair at the meaninglessness of existence.

MY VISIT to Ballara left me with mixed emotions. I felt I had communed with the past, but my strongest feeling was dismay at the lack of recognition, let alone reverence, for the nation’s political past. There had been nothing at Ballara to indicate its historical significance. If not for our local guide, we never would have found the place.

I thought more about that omission a couple of weeks later, when, together with millions of others across the globe, I was absorbed by the history-soaked rituals and pomp and ceremony of Barak Obama’s presidential inauguration. Unlike Australians, Americans are big on revering their political institutions, including the office of president. We never seem quite sure what to do with former prime ministers, whether of the live or dead variety; in the United States the heritage of past presidents is preserved through long established customs such as archival libraries. There, it’s virtually inconceivable that the home of a past national leader would sink into historical obscurity. Google the name of an ex-president and you’ll find a myriad of commemorative sites. For the good and the great, those lists are seemingly endless. In Springfield, Illinois, even the church pew where Abraham Lincoln and his wife Mary worshipped qualifies as a tourist attraction. Paul Keating once notoriously suggested that Australia had never been blessed by a truly great statesman, no one who could measure up to a Washington, Lincoln or Roosevelt that made or saved the republic. Yet Deakin, whatever other limitations he had, was one of the “fathers” of federation and led the way in putting flesh on the bones of the rudimentary nation in the decade after 1901.

Australia went a small way to redressing the lack of public memorials to its political history with the opening last month of the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House in Canberra. Refurbished courtesy of a substantial Commonwealth grant, the museum features a series of well crafted and accessible exhibitions, films, interactive displays and multi-media presentations. One highlight is the Cabinet-in-Confidence presentation, which allows participants to relive a major cabinet debate, the Fraser government’s 1977 deliberations over whether to admit Indo-Chinese refugees to Australia. Children revelled in the chance to perform a mock “live” interview with a past prime minister in an old ABC radio studio. The building itself is a star, beginning with its resplendent position at the heart of Walter Burley Griffin’s Canberra. But what most enchants is its modesty. King’s Hall sparkles, but cavernous it is not, and the prime minister’s office is compact and unostentatious in decoration. And then there are the rabbit warrens that once housed the press gallery and the parliamentary chambers where the public galleries are so close to the action that it would have been possible to detect the sweat rising on the brow of a besieged minister.

I was among the few thousand citizens, mostly Canberrans, who attended the Museum’s opening on 9 May. The event oozed a quintessential Australian dagginess, for which it was all the more appealing. The official ceremony was preceded by a concert that featured performers as diverse as a local primary school choir, the Canberra Gay and Lesbian choir, John Williamson (who spruiked an alternative flag design) and Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter. While the musicians did their stuff, children were encouraged to chalk messages on the expansive bitumen of King George Terrace, which majestically fronts the building. They took to the task with gusto; although few of their slogans had much to do with democracy, which was apparently the point. The adults, meanwhile, queued patiently for their free egg and bacon roll and clapped the concert performers appreciatively. There was a marquee for VIP guests, but the officials didn’t seem too vigilant in checking who was important and who wasn’t.

Finally, a little after the anointed hour, the formal ceremony got underway. The special minister of state, John Faulkner, spoke of Australia being a progressive yet undemonstrative democracy. He was followed by former prime minister Bob Hawke, whose duty it was to officially open the museum. “Hawkie” has been parodied so extensively – think of Terry Serio’s rendition in Keating! The Musical or further back to Max Gillies – that I half expected him to dance through the front doors of the building in white suit and tug on an ear-lobe. We too easily forget how serious-minded and effective a prime minister he was, even if I wouldn’t put him on a par with Deakin.

Hawke gave a spirited address, notwithstanding hitting a discordant note when he admitted he never been a sentimentalist for Old Parliament House. He was on safer ground with a story, revealing of our casual approach to memorialisation, about how his name came to be on the foundation stone of the new Parliament House, delivered in nice self-deprecating style. Before Labor came to office in March 1983, there had been a lengthy impasse within the Coalition government between Malcolm Fraser and Billy Snedden (two men with an unhappy shared history) about whether the prime minister (Fraser) or the speaker (Snedden) should be immortalised on the foundation stone. After Hawke defeated Fraser, this unresolved dispute was drawn to his notice by department officials. Hawke promptly phoned the newly appointed speaker, Harry Jenkins, to inform him that this was a matter on which he intended to exercise his prime ministerial prerogative – and the honour was to be his. A bemused Jenkins did not demur.

Amid all the diversions of the Museum’s opening, the moment that struck home for me was when one of my companions pointed out what was conspicuous by its absence: security. In the United States, he ventured, the place would have been swarming with weapon-bearing police and soldiers and helicopters would have been relentlessly circling overhead. In Canberra, by contrast, all that filled the sky was the brilliant autumn sunshine and the only thing keeping watch was the remnants of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy. Suddenly, it didn’t seem so bad being part of a phlegmatic democracy. •

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Led by John Howard (whose participation was conditional on the exclusion of commentators and academics) the former government members interviewed for the series followed one fundamental instinct: to put the best possible construction on their actions and counter the idea that they might have erred during critical moments of the Coalition’s lengthy reign. Indeed, ironically, the programs reminded viewers of the preferred spin techniques of different members of the Howard ministry. Thus, for example, we had the pained insistences of a desiccated-looking Phillip Ruddock, the comically transparent dissembling of Peter Reith, and the letter-perfect, plausible deniability of Howard.

While providing a useful narrative of the political events of 1996–2007, the series was confirmatory rather than revelatory. There was further evidence of Howard’s unhealthy dominance and propensity for unilateral (or bilateral) rather than collective decision-making on key issues such as East Timor and the GST. The series also highlighted how quickly tensions surfaced between Howard and Peter Costello and how the two men’s rivalry smouldered away throughout the Coalition’s four terms.

Should we have expected more? The program was modelled on the 1993 series, Labor in Power series. What distinguished that series was the fact that it was filmed while the Keating government was still in office, but at a stage when the Labor ministers and other players interviewed assumed the government was electorally doomed. Instead, aided by an anti-GST scare campaign, Keating was returned in March 1993, meaning that the series become that most peculiar thing: a post-mortem on a living, breathing government. This endowed it with a salience missing from The Howard Years.

The broader problem with a series like this one is that self-reflection and self-criticism rarely feature prominently in the psychological repertoires of politicians, especially those who rise to positions of leadership. Adamantine self-justification built on steely inner conviction is more characteristic of power personalities. We shouldn’t be too harsh on them for this: too much introspection is most likely a formula for paralysis in a government leader.

Yet Howard was perhaps an extreme example of the conviction leader. Whether because he had been vulcanised by so many years in the cauldron of politics or desensitised by the rigours of continual decision-making, his capacity for self-doubt appeared to atrophy the longer he remained in office. Just in case we hadn’t noticed he took to ad nauseam declarations that, though we might not agree with him, we knew what he stood for. Nothing else much mattered. He was a leader inhabiting an existential free zone. And it was this same closed-minded, buttoned-up Howard that turned up for the filming of The Howard Years.

To be fair to Howard, it’s true that the resolute record-defending on display in The Howard Years has become one of the habitual preoccupation of modern ex-PMs. It seems to be a coping mechanism for post-prime ministerial life. Memoirs have become a particularly common means of defending records. The trend to self-justification began with John Gorton, who within months of losing office wrote a series of newspaper articles vaingloriously titled “I Did It My Way.” The hapless William McMahon hawked his memoirs to publishers, but without success; according to one account, McMahon’s “highly tendentious” manuscript provoked “universal scepticism, if not sheer disbelief.”

It is Gough Whitlam, however, who set the benchmark for post-prime ministerial self-justification with a painstakingly comprehensive 700 plus page inventory of the policy-making record of his government. Almost matching the size of Whitlam’s tome, Bob Hawke released his memoirs in 1994 to hostile reaction. Hawke was criticised for its vindictive attitude to Keating, the man who had prised the prime ministership from him in 1991, and the self-aggrandising in the book was taken as confirmation of the author’s narcissism.

Keating has not written memoirs, but he has devoted much of his energy since his political demise to claiming and reclaiming credit for the reforms of the 1980s and much else besides. Contrition for his misjudgements, on the other hand, has been not so much sotto voce as non-existent. Malcolm Fraser, while previously expressing scepticism about autobiographies because they too frequently amount to “self-justification,” is now working on his memoirs with the assistance of one of Australia’s most accomplished journalists. Howard has already flagged plans to write his memoirs.

What all this tells us is that we ought not to have been surprised that The Howard Years, despite the publicity claims, effectively became an exercise in self-justification and record-defending. This doesn’t mean it lacked merit. Indeed, it’s healthy that former prime ministers and ministers place their version of events on the historical record.

At the same time, it should give us cause for scepticism when some future chronicler, whether the ABC or otherwise, trumpets the virtues of an account of government unencumbered by “commentators or academics,” in which only those “in the room, the players” are privileged with a voice. For “the players,” more so than anyone else, have an investment in retailing at best a partial truth. •

• Peter Brent reviews episodes 1 and 2 of The Howard Years

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