You’re right to emphasise this, Tim. Albanese with his huge second term majority and his central role in shaping the ‘new’ ALP owns all of this.
Albanese has made all the key decisions, often unilaterally and with minimal consultation (eg. overruling Plibersek and Chalmers).
Most decisions are typically delayed after dithering, and sometimes ill-advisedly in the spur of the moment.
Whether the former (Stage 3 tax cuts, Bondi RC) or the latter (AUKUS, Voice to Parliament) he has more often than not been ham fisted and delivered for the establishment either by design or by incompetence.
A lifetime in juvenile student politics, backroom factional dealing and the sheltered workshop that is parliament has not prepared him for leadership; quite the contrary. Granted, some things are done well (at least in comparison to the shitshow that is the LNP) and any missteps are blown out of proportion by a media desperate for clicks, but the litany of bumbling hubris and lack of any ambition is becoming dangerous to the progressive cause itself.
His more competent management of a rotten system is not addressing the plight of ordinary Australians, and so disgusted with the Colesworth that is the present Australian party politics they are starting to turn to the fantasists as a ‘F you!’ to the establishment. The right may appear to be unraveling before our eyes, but it is actually just realigning around a far more toxic point of gravity.
The irony in all of this is that a man so desperate to leave a legacy as a Labor Legend is instead steering the party onto the rocks of becoming an anodyne facilitator of corporatism and the asset classes,
lacking any salience for a working class* that is being ground into the dust.
*working class in the broadest sense, ie. requiring a wage to subsist.
You are right to highlight the lack of consultation. I think the thing that jags me most is the secrecy. There is no sense of a shared project: just, shut up and leave this to me. Well, no.
With the majority that Labor presently have and the housing affordability crisis a progressive government has the opportunity rarely given to any party. But as you highlight Albo plays the "Centre Right" card most times in his decision making. We should already have tax breaks like Capital Gains Tax changes, Negative gearing eliminated or altered at least. Both these are costing us way too much, but if the rich are taxed at a higher rate ap per the CGT or changing the Negative Gearing benefits then hopefully this will eventually change the affordability issue so that this current and future generations can afford housing again. Doing the Liberal thing of nothing is not cutting it.
And I mean, if not now, when? When are the chances ever going to be better? And there is time to bring people along, to create a new centre. Instead, what?
Well said, Tim! Yes, agency matters. The whole “forced by Murdoch / Advance / geopolitics” line is bullshit. It doesn’t defend Albanese, it infantilises him. Decisions are made. Responsibility attaches.
Yes, the centre isn’t a neutral midpoint waiting to be discovered. It’s produced. If you keep giving ground in one direction, it moves. That much is obvious. But the deeper failure here isn’t just cowardice or bad judgement. It’s the abandonment of conflict as a governing principle. Labor isn’t merely conceding. It’s governing as if politics itself is a liability to be managed and neutralised, rather than a terrain of interests that has to be fought over.
Once conflict is treated as a failure rather than the substance of politics, you stop naming power, stop drawing lines, stop mobilising anyone except the already comfortable. You get competence without purpose. Administration without direction.
Framed this way, the problem isn’t personal betrayal, a demand for purity, or theatrical radicalism. It’s strategic emptiness. A party that refuses conflict ends up managing decline, then acting surprised when people go looking elsewhere for someone who sounds like they actually mean it.
My view is that it is just the water we swim in. It is to politics what the speed of light is to the universe: a constant that defines its very structure.
Interesting. I am researching these issues at the moment for something I have in mind, the lines between power and violence (conflict) and the positions of say Arendt, Weber and Foucault. It is a fascinating argument. Arendt would disagree with you, but I'm not sure I do.
And yes, none of this is about being performative, it is about recognising the opportunity that is being squandered.
I’m coming at this with some fairly unfashionable instincts. I was trained on the German Idealists and what followed, then bailed on the academy to deal with how politics actually behaves when real people and real constraints are involved (and pay the bills). I still reckon they were onto something.
I take Arendt’s point about power and violence seriously. Violence guts politics rather than grounding it. Where I differ is on conflict. To me, it’s not violence or theatre, it’s just the background condition. The friction you get once politics is about managing finite resources among people who don’t agree.
So, when I talk about abandoning conflict as a governing principle, I’m not calling for aggression, constant mobilisation or permanent revolution (as fun as that sounds). I’m talking about what happens when conflict itself gets treated as a problem to be smoothed away. Power doesn’t go anywhere. It just comes back quieter, messier, and harder to challenge.
I’m keen to see where you take this, because that line between conflict, power and violence feels like exactly where something important is being missed or wasted.
I feel like there is a whole book in it, with Australian examples. We'll see.
Agree that Arendt was onto something--and argues it brilliantly, of course--but I can't quite reconcile the idea of power and violence being opposites. It can be a productive distinction to make, but it doesn't quite work for me.
Looking back at some things I wrote in the early 2000s, I don’t think the problem was that conflict was misunderstood. It was reclassified. Conflict gets actively redescribed as incompetence, extremism, or bad process, then pushed out of visible politics and into courts, procurement, policing, and culture-war proxies.
That’s why the Arendt distinction still nags at me. Power and violence aren’t opposites in practice. They’re sequenced. Power presents as order and legitimacy. Violence arrives later as enforcement when suppressed conflict resurfaces.
The traditional role of this sort of media is to maintain party discipline, across the board. They have been very good at it, but atm, the power is fading and a friggin Labor govt should be looking to topple the castle, not shore it up.
I think there is a real argument that people need to be led to a better place…. by their leaders. Give them centre right, they’ll go centre right. Give them hope of a better future and say it proudly, and they will follow. Look what’s happened in for example Warringah. Zali has led her community to stand up for pretty much everything Tony Abbott opposed.
Maybe, but that's my point. That "centre" is created, not pre-existing. So it isn't really a matter of what people like you and me want, it is about having political representation that will argue a case and take people along with them; not one that just responds to what they seem to think is some eternal configuration.
I get your point now. A phrase from before I retired is that there are managers and there are leaders, our politicians are definitely the former (and some / most of the time, not very good at that either).
What I find bizarre is that Albanese was (is?) considered to be on the left of the ALP because he is (Was?) from the left wing of the party. Yet his behaviour since becoming Prime Minister, in my mind, places him on the right of the party and centre right on the political compass. He appears to be wed to neoliberalism and managerialism. He may very well make the ALP the ‘Natural Party of Government’ but at the cost of the ALP being no different from the Coalition in its government style and being no relation to the Hawke/Keating government let alone the Whitlam government.
I think it all grows out of Hawke/Keating and I understand that was reaction to what happened with Whitlam. I try to explicate this is the forthcoming book. The research forced me to change my mind on some stuff I had taken for granted.
I agree. It was a mistake for Hawke/Keating to embrace Neoliberalism. I know they did try to temper the effect of neoliberalism through the accord and benefit adjustments. But it was too little and was open to the Coalition removing those adjustments and introducing middle class benefits that still curse Australia’s fiscal accounts
I was elated when Labor won the election, at last a government that would tackle the issues that were vital to the success of this country. I was clearly deluded and gullible, I believed the bevy of lies that were the backbone of the campaign. The promise to act on climate change, housing, justice for the victims of robodebt. Pledging that no one would be left behind.
Instead we have a government that is an enabler of the worst fossil fuel expansions in this countries history, a NACC that is costing taxpayers a fortune but is nothing more than a club for the well heeled to suck off the taxpayer teat, a housing situation that is a catastrophe for anyone who isn't amongst the most advantaged in this country and a callous disregard for the environment.
The betrayal of everything I believed Labor stood for is Albaneses legacy. History will judge him harshly.
That is the real tell. All his passion has been reserved for maintaining party discipline internally (think Payman) and maintaining the two-party status quo externally.
Bernard Keane argued in Crikey for the creation of a new centre right party to replace the dumpster fire that is the coalition parties, and I argued that we already have one in the ALP.
What is needed is a centre left/left party to replace the ALP in that space and drag the “centre” back to something approximating the “centre” and not the right 🤷🏼♀️
Tim, the guys at Lamestream are chewing over some of the same issues:
“I think that take about the hyper-fixation on where people sit on the left-right axis is really, really fucking spot-on, to be honest. And that's because, like, sure, there are some one-nation supporters who are like, I'm really, really right-wing, and I don't think the Liberal Party is right-wing enough for me. And that is why I'm voting for One Nation.
"I'm not convinced that is, like, most One Nation supporters. And my evidence for this is looking at what is happening with the kind of far-right movement across the world, and how much of that is more driven by, like, disaffection at the status quo than any coherent analysis of where people sit on the scale of left to right. Like, the Labour Party in the UK is losing votes to reform.
"That's not because those people have jumped vastly to the right of the Tories. It's because they feel like their financial situation isn't great. Like, there's a by-election coming up in the UK.
"It's always been a Labour seat, Manchester. It looks like it's gonna be Reform that wins that seat. I don't think that is because all those Manchester voters have decided they are now more right wing than the Tory party.
"I think the same thing is happening in Australia. A lot of voters are annoyed and frustrated with both major parties. And in some instances, these might be really right wing voters.
"In some instances, these might be labour liberal swing voters who are just sick of voting for one or both of the parties and feeling like over the last 10 years, things haven't gotten better. So I think you are totally right on that. And I think that is a limitation of some of the analysis that is going around right now.”
From Lamestream: Our Rudd-Epstein Exclusive, the Israel Protest Ban, and the ABC Investigates Tyra Banks, 5 Feb 2026
I have three Lamestreams back up for reading listening and hope to get through them in the next few days. I have been grateful for their interventions.
I believe NDIS funding is not means-tested, and I know of two wealthy people receiving around $200,000 a year from the program. For all the obvious reasons, why isn't it means tested?
There's a tough argument to make about the advantages of means testing versus universalism. Basically, if you make a benefit universal, you bring along everyone in support of the payment (whatever it is) and thus ensure it's viability and longevity. Medicare is the classic example. But not everyone agrees with this. This piece sets it out reasonably well, just fyi: https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2022/11/11/universal-benefits-cost-less-than-means-tested-benefits/
I believe the Greens and independent candidates are essential for frightening Albanese that he will lose seats in progressive areas; Labor seats, not Liberal, going to left-leaning Independents or Greens. Challenging Labor seats in state and council elections has become essential. If only the media (and the LibLabs) would stop going on about "the two-party system"! There is nothing in the Constitution that even mentions "parties", I believe...
We need diverse voices representing their electorates, not constrained by party lines.
You’re right to emphasise this, Tim. Albanese with his huge second term majority and his central role in shaping the ‘new’ ALP owns all of this.
Albanese has made all the key decisions, often unilaterally and with minimal consultation (eg. overruling Plibersek and Chalmers).
Most decisions are typically delayed after dithering, and sometimes ill-advisedly in the spur of the moment.
Whether the former (Stage 3 tax cuts, Bondi RC) or the latter (AUKUS, Voice to Parliament) he has more often than not been ham fisted and delivered for the establishment either by design or by incompetence.
A lifetime in juvenile student politics, backroom factional dealing and the sheltered workshop that is parliament has not prepared him for leadership; quite the contrary. Granted, some things are done well (at least in comparison to the shitshow that is the LNP) and any missteps are blown out of proportion by a media desperate for clicks, but the litany of bumbling hubris and lack of any ambition is becoming dangerous to the progressive cause itself.
His more competent management of a rotten system is not addressing the plight of ordinary Australians, and so disgusted with the Colesworth that is the present Australian party politics they are starting to turn to the fantasists as a ‘F you!’ to the establishment. The right may appear to be unraveling before our eyes, but it is actually just realigning around a far more toxic point of gravity.
The irony in all of this is that a man so desperate to leave a legacy as a Labor Legend is instead steering the party onto the rocks of becoming an anodyne facilitator of corporatism and the asset classes,
lacking any salience for a working class* that is being ground into the dust.
*working class in the broadest sense, ie. requiring a wage to subsist.
You are right to highlight the lack of consultation. I think the thing that jags me most is the secrecy. There is no sense of a shared project: just, shut up and leave this to me. Well, no.
Zoe Daniels piece in today’s Guardian pretty much echoes your article and the comments, Tim
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/08/one-nation-filling-labor-coalition-party-vacuum?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
With the majority that Labor presently have and the housing affordability crisis a progressive government has the opportunity rarely given to any party. But as you highlight Albo plays the "Centre Right" card most times in his decision making. We should already have tax breaks like Capital Gains Tax changes, Negative gearing eliminated or altered at least. Both these are costing us way too much, but if the rich are taxed at a higher rate ap per the CGT or changing the Negative Gearing benefits then hopefully this will eventually change the affordability issue so that this current and future generations can afford housing again. Doing the Liberal thing of nothing is not cutting it.
And I mean, if not now, when? When are the chances ever going to be better? And there is time to bring people along, to create a new centre. Instead, what?
Well said, Tim! Yes, agency matters. The whole “forced by Murdoch / Advance / geopolitics” line is bullshit. It doesn’t defend Albanese, it infantilises him. Decisions are made. Responsibility attaches.
Yes, the centre isn’t a neutral midpoint waiting to be discovered. It’s produced. If you keep giving ground in one direction, it moves. That much is obvious. But the deeper failure here isn’t just cowardice or bad judgement. It’s the abandonment of conflict as a governing principle. Labor isn’t merely conceding. It’s governing as if politics itself is a liability to be managed and neutralised, rather than a terrain of interests that has to be fought over.
Once conflict is treated as a failure rather than the substance of politics, you stop naming power, stop drawing lines, stop mobilising anyone except the already comfortable. You get competence without purpose. Administration without direction.
Framed this way, the problem isn’t personal betrayal, a demand for purity, or theatrical radicalism. It’s strategic emptiness. A party that refuses conflict ends up managing decline, then acting surprised when people go looking elsewhere for someone who sounds like they actually mean it.
Conflict is vital for the labour movement.
My view is that it is just the water we swim in. It is to politics what the speed of light is to the universe: a constant that defines its very structure.
Very true
Interesting. I am researching these issues at the moment for something I have in mind, the lines between power and violence (conflict) and the positions of say Arendt, Weber and Foucault. It is a fascinating argument. Arendt would disagree with you, but I'm not sure I do.
And yes, none of this is about being performative, it is about recognising the opportunity that is being squandered.
That’s a useful way of putting it, Tim.
I’m coming at this with some fairly unfashionable instincts. I was trained on the German Idealists and what followed, then bailed on the academy to deal with how politics actually behaves when real people and real constraints are involved (and pay the bills). I still reckon they were onto something.
I take Arendt’s point about power and violence seriously. Violence guts politics rather than grounding it. Where I differ is on conflict. To me, it’s not violence or theatre, it’s just the background condition. The friction you get once politics is about managing finite resources among people who don’t agree.
So, when I talk about abandoning conflict as a governing principle, I’m not calling for aggression, constant mobilisation or permanent revolution (as fun as that sounds). I’m talking about what happens when conflict itself gets treated as a problem to be smoothed away. Power doesn’t go anywhere. It just comes back quieter, messier, and harder to challenge.
I’m keen to see where you take this, because that line between conflict, power and violence feels like exactly where something important is being missed or wasted.
I feel like there is a whole book in it, with Australian examples. We'll see.
Agree that Arendt was onto something--and argues it brilliantly, of course--but I can't quite reconcile the idea of power and violence being opposites. It can be a productive distinction to make, but it doesn't quite work for me.
I'll keep nagging at it!
Looking back at some things I wrote in the early 2000s, I don’t think the problem was that conflict was misunderstood. It was reclassified. Conflict gets actively redescribed as incompetence, extremism, or bad process, then pushed out of visible politics and into courts, procurement, policing, and culture-war proxies.
That’s why the Arendt distinction still nags at me. Power and violence aren’t opposites in practice. They’re sequenced. Power presents as order and legitimacy. Violence arrives later as enforcement when suppressed conflict resurfaces.
It begs the question if Murdoch is forcing all of this through, then what's the point of being the natural party of government?
Jobs for the boys.
The traditional role of this sort of media is to maintain party discipline, across the board. They have been very good at it, but atm, the power is fading and a friggin Labor govt should be looking to topple the castle, not shore it up.
𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑑𝑒𝑠𝑖𝑟𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑏𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 “𝑛𝑎𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑎𝑙 𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑡𝑦 𝑜𝑓 𝑔𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑛𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡”, 𝑎𝑠 𝐴𝑙𝑏𝑎𝑛𝑒𝑠𝑒 ℎ𝑎𝑠 𝑠𝑝𝑒𝑙𝑡 𝑜𝑢𝑡 𝑎𝑠 ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑎𝑖𝑚, 𝑖𝑠 𝑛𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑛 𝑎 𝑑𝑒𝑠𝑖𝑟𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑜𝑤𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑐𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑟𝑒-𝑟𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡 𝑠𝑝𝑎𝑐𝑒.
I don't want to think so, but maybe the "natural party" is reflecting a more right wing electorate than you (and I) want.
I think there is a real argument that people need to be led to a better place…. by their leaders. Give them centre right, they’ll go centre right. Give them hope of a better future and say it proudly, and they will follow. Look what’s happened in for example Warringah. Zali has led her community to stand up for pretty much everything Tony Abbott opposed.
That's it exactly. Neutral doesn't work. You have to bring people with you. It takes courage.
Maybe, but that's my point. That "centre" is created, not pre-existing. So it isn't really a matter of what people like you and me want, it is about having political representation that will argue a case and take people along with them; not one that just responds to what they seem to think is some eternal configuration.
I get your point now. A phrase from before I retired is that there are managers and there are leaders, our politicians are definitely the former (and some / most of the time, not very good at that either).
What I find bizarre is that Albanese was (is?) considered to be on the left of the ALP because he is (Was?) from the left wing of the party. Yet his behaviour since becoming Prime Minister, in my mind, places him on the right of the party and centre right on the political compass. He appears to be wed to neoliberalism and managerialism. He may very well make the ALP the ‘Natural Party of Government’ but at the cost of the ALP being no different from the Coalition in its government style and being no relation to the Hawke/Keating government let alone the Whitlam government.
I think it all grows out of Hawke/Keating and I understand that was reaction to what happened with Whitlam. I try to explicate this is the forthcoming book. The research forced me to change my mind on some stuff I had taken for granted.
I agree. It was a mistake for Hawke/Keating to embrace Neoliberalism. I know they did try to temper the effect of neoliberalism through the accord and benefit adjustments. But it was too little and was open to the Coalition removing those adjustments and introducing middle class benefits that still curse Australia’s fiscal accounts
Not divisive? Minns will fix that. Another stunner Albo!
Minns is worst of all. I mean, what?
And where?
I was elated when Labor won the election, at last a government that would tackle the issues that were vital to the success of this country. I was clearly deluded and gullible, I believed the bevy of lies that were the backbone of the campaign. The promise to act on climate change, housing, justice for the victims of robodebt. Pledging that no one would be left behind.
Instead we have a government that is an enabler of the worst fossil fuel expansions in this countries history, a NACC that is costing taxpayers a fortune but is nothing more than a club for the well heeled to suck off the taxpayer teat, a housing situation that is a catastrophe for anyone who isn't amongst the most advantaged in this country and a callous disregard for the environment.
The betrayal of everything I believed Labor stood for is Albaneses legacy. History will judge him harshly.
Not to mention electoral funding laws that nicely entrench the two party system (under the guise of getting big money out of politics).
That is the real tell. All his passion has been reserved for maintaining party discipline internally (think Payman) and maintaining the two-party status quo externally.
And Husic.
Exactly, dirty deals stiched up by the two to entrench the facade of democracy. We need to smash the duopoly.
I suspect a lot of people join you in this, Robynne. And we will be dismissed as "naive". So be it.
Bernard Keane argued in Crikey for the creation of a new centre right party to replace the dumpster fire that is the coalition parties, and I argued that we already have one in the ALP.
What is needed is a centre left/left party to replace the ALP in that space and drag the “centre” back to something approximating the “centre” and not the right 🤷🏼♀️
Ha, I'm with you on this. I must read BK's piece.
Geez I love reading your writing Tim. It’s one of the things that keeps me sane. Cannot wait for your book! 📕
Thanks, Louise. Much appreciated.
Not sure if you’ve seen this Tim. It’s a little off point but Emma Shortis linked it in a recent article in The Point. https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/how-not-to-defeat-authoritarianism/
I hadn't Harry, thanks. Not sure how I missed it.
Tim, the guys at Lamestream are chewing over some of the same issues:
“I think that take about the hyper-fixation on where people sit on the left-right axis is really, really fucking spot-on, to be honest. And that's because, like, sure, there are some one-nation supporters who are like, I'm really, really right-wing, and I don't think the Liberal Party is right-wing enough for me. And that is why I'm voting for One Nation.
"I'm not convinced that is, like, most One Nation supporters. And my evidence for this is looking at what is happening with the kind of far-right movement across the world, and how much of that is more driven by, like, disaffection at the status quo than any coherent analysis of where people sit on the scale of left to right. Like, the Labour Party in the UK is losing votes to reform.
"That's not because those people have jumped vastly to the right of the Tories. It's because they feel like their financial situation isn't great. Like, there's a by-election coming up in the UK.
"It's always been a Labour seat, Manchester. It looks like it's gonna be Reform that wins that seat. I don't think that is because all those Manchester voters have decided they are now more right wing than the Tory party.
"I think the same thing is happening in Australia. A lot of voters are annoyed and frustrated with both major parties. And in some instances, these might be really right wing voters.
"In some instances, these might be labour liberal swing voters who are just sick of voting for one or both of the parties and feeling like over the last 10 years, things haven't gotten better. So I think you are totally right on that. And I think that is a limitation of some of the analysis that is going around right now.”
From Lamestream: Our Rudd-Epstein Exclusive, the Israel Protest Ban, and the ABC Investigates Tyra Banks, 5 Feb 2026
https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/lamestream/id1810214465?i=1000748238014&r=2901
I have three Lamestreams back up for reading listening and hope to get through them in the next few days. I have been grateful for their interventions.
Yes, I'm impressed. They work together well, fluid, simpatico but also happy to disagree with each other.
Above all, they seem reality based rather than ideological.
I believe NDIS funding is not means-tested, and I know of two wealthy people receiving around $200,000 a year from the program. For all the obvious reasons, why isn't it means tested?
There's a tough argument to make about the advantages of means testing versus universalism. Basically, if you make a benefit universal, you bring along everyone in support of the payment (whatever it is) and thus ensure it's viability and longevity. Medicare is the classic example. But not everyone agrees with this. This piece sets it out reasonably well, just fyi: https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2022/11/11/universal-benefits-cost-less-than-means-tested-benefits/
I believe the Greens and independent candidates are essential for frightening Albanese that he will lose seats in progressive areas; Labor seats, not Liberal, going to left-leaning Independents or Greens. Challenging Labor seats in state and council elections has become essential. If only the media (and the LibLabs) would stop going on about "the two-party system"! There is nothing in the Constitution that even mentions "parties", I believe...
We need diverse voices representing their electorates, not constrained by party lines.