Welcome to country, Prime Minister
It's a beautiful country and your party's primary vote is 35%
There is an interview a retired Paul Keating did with Kerry O’Brien some years back in which he talks about his and Bob Hawke’s strategy in implementing what we now think of as neoliberalism. I’ve been scouring YouTube for it but couldn’t find the clip I wanted, unfortunately. (There are other chats between the two of them, but not the one I was after).
I wanted to pull an exact quote from the interview, where Keating says something to the effect that the idea was to put Labor in a position of controlling the political centre, in effect, dominating the economic argument, thus allowing them to bump the Coalition as the natural party of government. I don’t think he used that exact phrase, but it captures what he was getting at.
The point is, after last Saturday’s election, Keating’s comments came back to me very strongly because I had been thinking: mission accomplished. It mightn’t have unfolded in quite the way Keating and Hawke hoped it would back in the early 1980s as they “opened” the economy, but you would have to allow that, at least for now, the dream has come true.
As it happened, Guy Rundle expressed similar thoughts in his recent newsletter, and he puts it better than I likely would have, even if I had found the Keating interview I was looking for:
This then is the triumph, not of Albanese or Tim Gartrell, or of Gillard further back, but of Paul Keating. What he wanted, with house-as-asset and compulsory super, was a propertarian-stakeholder society, spread to a significant number beyond the bourgeoisie, who would then reward a centrist party with their loyalty, creating a broad coalition of life conditions. The purpose was to finally crush the left within Labor. He has done that so successfully that the ‘left’ is now the faithful enactor of what were once Catholic right policies, suspicious of state provision and universality of access and right.
Keating wanted that, and he got it….
Politically, though it looked really ropey for a while in that first term, it has triumphed. The asset access extended to the upper-income working class has joined them to the middle class as a constituency that can support Labor. Gillard’s design of the Fair Work Commission has created Labor’s idea of perfect arbitration: one where strikes are illegal and capitalists have the majority of positions on its bench.
Capital, labour, the asset class. Labor has created a neat triangle it sits at the centre of, excluding the Liberals altogether.
This dream-come-true aspect of the election is what I was thinking about when I said in the previous newsletter that there was something mythical about Labor’s win. A prophecy fulfilled; a plan coming to fruition.
The thing about myths, though, is that while they can be inspiring and explanatory, they are also not entirely true. What’s more, after a win like this, the Greeks would be telling stories of hubris, and even if Albanese isn’t inclined to reread the story of Icarus, he might at least remember what happened to John Howard when he was unexpectedly handed a Senate majority in 2004. WorkChoices was hubris made manifest and Howard ended up losing government and his own seat.
Albanese is likely smarter than John Howard in this respect. Or less ambitious.
I avoided predictions about the outcome of the federal election, though it turns out I was right to say that if “The election of 2022 was a two-steps-forward moment…2025 may well be a one step back moment.” I meant this in a normative sense of my preference for minority government, and although I didn’t see the exact 2025 outcome coming—who did?—I think this assessment holds up pretty well:
Since 2022, my argument has been that there is a floating third of Australia voters who are no longer strongly tied to any particular major party and that this floating third will land differently and unpredictably from election to election. In 2022, they ripped the heart out of the Liberal Party and voted independent in record numbers, allowing Labor to crawl into majority on a tiny primary vote. A continuation of that trend at the upcoming election would likely see Labor go into minority, and many are predicating this. But it wouldn’t take too much change in the voting intentions of that floating third for Labor to once again squeak across the line in their own right or even for the Liberal’s to secure pole position for a minority government.
What has happened to the Greens is an excellent example of the uncertainty I am highlighting, with their 2025 result showing what happens when you sit, as they do, right on the cusp of that floating one third and the vagaries of our system of preferences.1 Greens’ haters will make a lot of mileage out the party’s loss of seats in the Lower House—and conveniently ignore their stable primary vote and ongoing success in the Upper House—but all politicians are now party to the same uncertainty.
Electoral analyst, Ben Raue, gives a good overview of what happened to the Greens :
Their result wasn’t particularly impressive, but I want to emphasise how much they are victims of the electoral system. Nationally the Greens vote is steady, just over 12%, and part of the story is that the Greens suffered primary vote swings in many of their best seats while gaining votes elsewhere. The map at the end of this post makes this very clear in cities like Melbourne and Brisbane, although you don’t see it in the same way in Sydney.
But in a number of their seats, their defeat did not primarily come due to a dropping primary vote, but a rearrangement of their opponents. In Brisbane and Griffith, the rising Labor vote pushed the LNP into third, and thus LNP preferences will elect Labor.
It’s a perverse part of our system that the most conservative voters decide who wins in some of the most progressive seats. Elizabeth Watson-Brown likely will survive while Max Chandler-Mather will be defeated because she represents a more conservative seat where the LNP is the main opponent.
And this is a challenge for the Greens because so many of their best seats are now Labor vs Greens contests where Labor will easily win the 2CP on Liberal preferences.
One matter that should temper Labor’s celebrations is that their primary vote remains stubbornly low: 32.6% in 2022 and 34.8% in 2025. I’m not taking anything away from the scale of their win—as it translated into seats—only to say that with two-thirds of voters giving their first preference to someone other than Labor, they remain vulnerable to the shifting allegiances of that floating third.
Given all this, it was a little disconcerting to hear how quickly the prime minister jumped from a victory speech promising to govern for all Australians to this rough declaration: “I say this message to the Senate and members of the House of Representatives: we have a clear mandate to build more housing. The key is supply. Get out of the way and let the private sector build it. That is going to be one of my priorities.”
Look, I’m happy to cut a winning prime minister some slack in terms asserting his right to govern as he sees fits, but a 35% primary vote does not deliver you a mandate. Or at least, if it delivers Labor one in the Lower House, then voters have delivered the crossbench something similar in our almost uniquely powerful Upper House.
Anyway, we are now in the dust-settling phase and there is plenty of cautious goodwill towards the new government.
But for those hoping that the scale of Labor’s win will deliver a significantly more progressive government than what we saw in the first term, Albanese’s comments should give some pause. Not just his command for every other elected member of parliament to get out of his way, but his comment that the houses would be built by the private sector.
This evocation of the private sector is the perfect example of how Keating’s victory, if that’s what we want to call it, has been achieved with a significant shift of Labor away from a traditional understanding of progressivism and into the realm of the neoliberal managerialism that is at the heart of the revolution Hawke and Keating engineered.
Albanese’s comment reminds us that Keating’s plan was not won without casualties.
Not only did the Accord sap the power of the unions and move Labor, less into the territory of what Mark Latham called “civilising global capital”, and more into the realm of discipling global labour, it also shifted Labor away from the model of government intervention into a model that includes the sort ongoing partnerships with the private sector the prime minister foreshadowed.
Regarding housing, this is particularly problematic because—like the author of the Emergent City newsletter—I don’t think the problem can be solved through the for-profit sector. In a compelling post, the writer at Emergent City sets out the problem in detail and then concludes:
For private sector projects to [make] financial sense again…dwelling values need to go up again. The paradox being, of course that this will mean even less people will be able to afford a new build than they do today.
…In my mind, there’s only one card left to play. There’s only one solution left that doesn’t require current dwelling values to go down. It’s time for a massive, sustained investment in public housing. We need to build towards a separate parallel housing market that serves the need of the growing caste of people whose needs the private sector cannot serve.
Fat chance, if the triumphant prime minister is successful in pushing everyone else out of the way.2 (UPDATE)3
As Rundle noted, “Labor has created a neat triangle it sits at the centre of, excluding the Liberals altogether.”
But he goes onto note that the neat triangle “also excludes the lower income working class, the poor and the benefits dependent, and in that, it is the completion of the workerism and familialism buried deep in the Labor project. Quite aside from the lack of debate on sovereignty, defence and alliances, the lack of real action on even the inadequate target of net zero, inequality and poverty of life will entrench for whole sections of society, who might once have benefitted from a more unified working class situation, and its heft.”
To put it in my own terms, progressivism in these circumstances will rarely be about prioritising the needs of community over those of business—of being the sort of government that would, for example, build public housing sans the private sector. The progressivism we have on offer is likely to only ever be about managing the demands of vested interests, eking back incremental gains for the rest of us, within a framework the vested interests are willing to tolerate.
I hope I’m wrong about that.
For now, we can continue to marvel at Labor’s victory, to contemplate it for the sea change that it is and enjoy—shamelessly—the ongoing hollowing out of the Coalition that has accompanied it. Or occasioned it. But we would be a too incautious to think that this mighty Labor majority guarantees a notably more progressive government or that the new shape of our politics is built on anything other than shifting sands.
Uncertainty, not instability, I will just add.
It is precisely for reasons like this that I would prefer all such plans had to go through the deliberation of minority government.
Thank you Tim for the article an analysis, particularly on the point of the primary vote.
At the end of the day, despite the overwhelming evidence that the LNP’s plan was not fit for purpose, more than 65% did not vote for the ALP. At this rate, the ALP will still receive fewer first preferences in 2025 than they did in 2007. Albanese’s statements to the Senate speak to his disdain for other parties that have achieved representation. Hubris and arrogance can easily set in at the point of greatest triumph.
It speaks to more about how more Liberals switched their votes to Labor, and far the ALP has moved to the right to occupy the space the LNP once held.
Much has been said about the virtues of Australia’s preferential voting. If you are one of the 33% that did not vote for either major party, your preferred candidate got squeezed out. The Greens especially have run in a system that the major parties created for their own benefit, and suffered what can only be described (in the lower house) as a devastating blow.
The results this election will be among the most disproportionate in history. Parties like the Greens need to bring proportional representation into the conversation. Until then their ‘target seat’ strategy will remain fraught as the major parties team up to crush them every time.
Relieved to see the end of Dutton but bitterly disappointed that this government has a majority, a hung parliament would have forced Labors hand on the environment, climate change and housing.