The natural party of government

"Napoleon is always right."

If only I could see a landscape as it is when I am not there.

—Simon Weil

I once went on a ballon ride, on a cold, windy Canberra morning, beginning before dawn, and the incredible thing is that once you are up in the air and being blown by the wind you don’t feel the wind anymore because you are travelling at its speed. The experience is as comforting as it is deceptive.

Detail from the “Balloon-Prospect” image, featured in Thomas Baldwin’s Airopaidia (1786) — Source.

According to one theory going around, we should not be talking about the Liberal Party anymore because the last election consigned them to irrelevance. Our attention should be on Labor, the victors, the government, the shiz.

Look, fair enough, in one respect. Labor supporters feel, with some justification, that the Liberals get more than their fair share of media attention, that the “Peter Dutton says” framing that accompanied so much reporting over the last three years was the worst sort of unexamined media bias, and I agree with them.

Still, it is actually hard to separate Labor’s victory from the Coalition’s loss, so I think there is some value in lingering. To which end, I watched Four Corners do their traditional autopsy of the Liberal Party collapse.

Like a lot of people, I was struck by what a deluded bunch of secondraters most of that cast of clowns revealed themselves to be. The election loss was inscribed in every stupid thing they said—as was their next defeat I would imagine—and I wondered how some of them could even stand up. Their unwillingness—or inability—to speak outside of anything but the blandest clichés, and their obvious failure to apprehend the true nature of their defeat, told the full story of just how deep their malaise cuts.

But what I realised watching the program was that Peter Dutton was ever going to win despite the feeling we all had—mediated as it was endlessly—that he was in with a big chance. The Opposition he led was hollowed out, so riven with divisions that it had no chance of passing once muster was called.

Yes, the polls did show, at different points that Dutton was competitive, and things definitely did change when the campaign started and his lack of preparation was exposed. Things changed more when Trump went all-in on tariffs and Australians focussed on the concomitant transformation of the US into an authoritarian state. They focussed on the fact that Dutton had been presenting himself as a local version the American President, aping things like DOGE, and they really noticed when Senator Price said the magic MAGA words out loud.

On some level, though, all this was already known and factored in, and I don’t think Dutton was never going to win. The only thing that changed was the margin of his loss.

It is no fluke that Labor won in the way that they did, and they deserve all the credit in the world, but it doesn’t make them the natural party of government, as the prime minster claimed is his goal. Their current electoral standing flatters them and is no more an indicator of what people really feel about the state of the nation than those early polls were an accurate indicator of people’s concerns about Peter Dutton.

The very concept of there being something called a “natural party of government” is a relic from another era.

As Peter Brent put it the other day, “The long-term dynamic is not that Labor is the natural party of government or that the Coalition is unelectable, but that the two-party system continues its decline. That fact will outlast the swings and roundabouts, off lower and lower primary support, between the pair. Labor will be out of office one day, and what will its primary vote look like then?”

Ben Raue is tracking the increased vote for independents, noting that “while the number of independents won’t go up much in 2025, their presence is much stronger than before. A lot more seats are now defined by an independent contest. That doesn’t mean more seats will easily fall into the independent column next time. The failure of independent challenges in Wannon and Cowper show how hard it can be to bridge that final gap. But they’re unlikely to immediately return to being safe seats.”

As I keep saying, there is a floating third of Australian voters who are no longer strongly tied to any particular party and this floating third will land differently and unpredictably from election to election.

But all this can be hard to see when you are doing so much winning.

Labor is living in the afterglow of their 2025 triumph, dragging hard on a post-coital cigarette and puffing out smoke rings like Gandalf. But if we squint our eyes and look straight ahead, what do we see through the clearing smoke and the fading ecstasy?

We have been told for years now—no less than by the man himself—that the Albanese plan is to establish electoral dominance so that progressive reform can begin. Social media is full of Labor supporters who have been running this line, telling everyone throughout the last term to be patient, that Albo knows what he’s doing. That the rewards will come.

The prime minister’s undisguised hatred for the Greens has often expressed itself in his view that the “Greens political party” undermines genuine progressive reform, a view shared within the party and the broader Labor community. Labor’s national secretary, Paul Erickson, told the Press Club after the 2022 election that the Greens “always position themselves two steps to the left of Labor, minimise our successes, give zero credit for progressive gains made by Labor governments, constantly criticise, and divide Labor’s base in a manner that doesn’t help progressive politics.”

Albanese told the Victorian Labor Conference in 2024 that “They are the blockers – we are the builders.”

And yet, here we are in the lambency of an election victory for the ages, a lower-house majority not even the PM dreamed possible, in a period where the main opposition parties have all but collapsed and where the ability of a hostile media to sway the electorate has been shown in election after election at state and federal level to have evaporated completely, and what do we get?

A uniquely powerful Labor government that is using all its political capital, not to stand up to the reactionary forces of capital and enact progressive reform, but to stave off criticism from the left by rewarding the extractive industries at the heart of the threat of climate change with the approval for the extension of a gas project on the North West Shelf off the coast of Western Australia.

Given this, it’s pretty funny reading through Liberal Party press releases from before the election:

“We would expedite consideration of the North West Shelf project as a matter of urgency because, unlike Labor, we recognise the significance of the North West Shelf to the WA economy and the importance of secure and reliable gas supplies in pushing down energy prices,” Mr Dutton said.

“The Albanese Labor Government has been the most anti-resources, anti-mining, anti-WA federal government in living memory. It is of national importance that this project not be held up any longer by a government whose Prime Minister and Minister would rather gain Green votes in inner-city electorates than approve good economic projects for the energy security of our nation.”

Well, the PM has proved them wrong, hasn’t he?

"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."

Anyway, the Coalition is back together, for this week anyway, and the Liberals have their new leader and she has named her new frontbench and no doubt the party will vote with the government in the Senate to pass any legislation necessary to ensure the North West Shelf project goes ahead. And no doubt the prime minister will dismiss the Greens as “blockers” if they dare vote against it.

This is the new normal, apparently. This is sensible centrism. This is the adults in charge. This is neolaborism.

We have a Labor prime minister who tells us about the warmth of his relationship with Donald Trump. One who still refuses to enact any concrete sanctions against the murderous Netanyahu regime. One who approves massive fossil-fuel projects while blabbing about net zero. If all this is not a betrayal, I don’t know what is.

I’m not trying to score some cheap debating point here, but if progressive politics is to have any meaning at all then it must be about addressing climate change, surely? When Labor approves a project like the North West Shelf extension, giving the company free rein until 2070, it is no small thing: not just because of the project itself, but because it is Labor doing the approving.

Responding that Dutton would’ve been worse in other ways is just a massive deflection.

So, maybe this is why we should keep talking about the collapse of the Liberal Party, and force ourselves to watch things like that Four Corners program, because it reminds us what self-delusion looks like and where it can lead.

Labor is flying high now, no doubt, but they might want to remember that just because they can’t feel the wind as they glide across the landscape it doesn’t mean the wind isn’t blowing.