The Labor leader defends the party’s recent pattern of capitulation, promising a policy reboot that won’t happen overnight
Anthony Albanese does not hold back when sharing his situation report. “We’ve just got the lowest vote for the Australian Labor party in over 100 years,” the Labor leader tells Guardian Australia’s politics podcast.
We are talking about a progressive backlash evident on social media – a negative response to Labor’s tendency post-election to vote for the Morrison government’s policy after critiquing it.
We are talking about a progressive backlash evident on social media – a negative response to Labor’s tendency post-election to vote for the Morrison government’s policy after critiquing it.
We’ve seen this pattern emerge on tax cuts, on national security and drought relief – a modus operandi the Guardian Australia Canberra bureau has dubbed “bitch and fold”. Unsurprisingly, Albanese doesn’t care for our characterisation. He thinks it’s cynical and hasty, given this is very early days.
We are speaking at the tail end of the first substantive parliamentary sitting week since the ALP lost the apparently unlosable election: there has been a handful of bills, a handful of question times. Making definitive calls about Labor’s strategy at this juncture is “quite frankly, absurd”, he says.
Albanese says progressives inclined to making scarifying judgments about the opening phase of Labor in opposition need to be clear-eyed about what’s just happened, and by this he means the election defeat on 18 May. “So part of the commentary on social media is Labor [only] just lost the election. Actually, we went backwards in seats that have been held by Labor that were marginal seats, but are now safe Coalition seats,” Albanese says.
“For all those people who are disappointed, including myself and members of the caucus who looked at the Newspolls and looked at the commentary and thought we were destined to be in government – the fact is we have less seats now than we had before the election, the Coalition have more seats now and the Senate is more conservative so it will be far more difficult to stop legislation.
“I understand the disappointment that is out there, and I understand that people are looking for easy answers, but if we simply said we will do exactly the same thing with exactly the same policies in exactly the same way, then you should expect exactly the same outcome.
“We’ve seen the movie, it just played out, and we’ve seen the conclusion.”
Albanese says Labor in the 46th parliament will support some of the government’s legislation and reject other proposals. While Labor in the opening weeks has sought to amend key legislation, but not voted against it when push came to shove, Albanese says there can be no middle ground with the proposal to repeal the medevac procedures for asylum seekers. Repeal of that framework is “completely unwarranted” he says.
"The danger in a government that doesn’t have a clear idea of why it is there is they just go nasty."
The Labor leader says he intends to make decisions over the coming period about whether to support or oppose government measures based on “policy integrity rather than opposition for opposition’s sake”. He says he’s acutely conscious that oppositions end up being defined by what they are against rather than what they support, or support with qualifications.
He insists that Labor will continue to offer voters a progressive platform rather than wishy-washy centrism. “I’m a progressive. I’ve been active for a very long period of time, and I’m determined to get a positive outcome in 2022 … because I passionately believe that only Labor governments make a positive difference to people’s lives in a long-term way and in a transformative way.
He says repositioning and learning doesn’t mean taking a less progressive agenda to the next federal election. “It doesn’t mean we won’t take a range of policies that look similar to the ones we took to the last election.” He says the policy reboot will involve hastening slowly and working through carefully what went wrong in the 2019 campaign. Labor’s campaign review got under way this week.
Rather than focusing on now, and winning the day, and the week, Albanese says conceptually he wants to start at election day in 2022 and work backwards. He says the task is to set up the contest so that Labor can “kick with the wind in the last quarter”.
“There will be a whole range of things that we do from time to time that people will wonder why we are doing them,” Albanese says.
“We can’t focus on the day or the week, we have to focus on the term, and at the end of the day if you are not in government then you can’t change things in a progressive way.”
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