Things Aren’t Looking Good for Albanese

One-term prime ministers are not unknown in Australian politics, but for a while they were the exception rather than the rule. Fraser, Hawke and Howard ruled the Lodge for multiple terms. But Howard was the last to survive a first-term slump and win successive elections.

In the years since, Australians have been particularly intolerant of leadership failure.

And Anthony Albanese’s failures of leadership, from the losing Voice referendum to his shameful failure to tackle surging antisemitism head on, are so egregious that even the lefty bible of Australia’s Wokest City is starting to talk about him as a one termer.

The hilarious part, though, is that the Age is so passionately dedicated to Woke delusion that they think it’s because Albanese and his government haven’t been hard-left enough.

The Albanese government’s first full calendar year has produced policy gains on a range of issues including industrial relations, China, energy, and budget management.

Yes, he actually wrote that with a straight face. Presumably someone else is paying the power bills for him.

However, it’s been a period of serious political failure. Labor’s coalition of support in the community – a blend of the well-educated, new entrants to the country, and people on low incomes – was already fraying, but the Voice referendum and its aftermath have accelerated its decay. In September, I wrote how a steady drop in voters’ confidence in Labor’s handling of the economy and the cost of living accompanied the government’s prosecution of the Yes case in the lead-up to the referendum.

The latter in particular shows just how much Labor’s vote – already on a record-low 32 per cent – fell in tandem with the failure of the referendum. The seat of Scullin in Melbourne’s northern suburbs is the safest of safe Labor seats. It’s only ever been held by Labor.

Last year, Labor’s Andrew Giles won Scullin, in Melbourne’s outer north, with a two-party preferred vote of 65.6 per cent. The Yes vote in Scullin last month was 38.1 per cent, 27.5 per cent down on the election result. What all the latest polls suggest is that more than a few previous Labor supporters were rejecting not just the Voice proposal but Albanese too.

And why wouldn’t they? He’s failed on everything he promised but most brutally on kitchen-table issues.

They thought he would devote himself to reducing their cost of living pressures because that’s what he promised. Instead, after a year of rising mortgage pressures and price increases, he made them go out on October 14 to vote against something most people weren’t interested in. Albanese, who’s never far away from reminding them of his hardscrabble upbringing, seemed deaf to their first-order concerns, so they rebuffed him. Worse, once the referendum was done, he seemed to be hobnobbing overseas all the time.

“Seemed to be”? His very first act as PM, within days of winning the election, was to scurry off overseas. Since then, he’s taken 21 overseas trips in 18 months. No wonder memes like this are proliferating on social media.

Even when Albanese tries on his tried’n’true ‘cool dad’ gambit, posting a selfie wearing a Radio Birdman T-shirt on Twitter, he gets lambasted.

So what does the government do now? A ministerial reshuffle either side of the summer break would be a conventional way of signalling a fresh approach. Does the government spend the first half of 2024 coming up with a bunch of goodies targeted at young mortgage holders and renters, bolstered by a vision of Australia’s future that pulls it together, and then bring the next election forward to the second half of the year before something else goes wrong?

The Age

The only problem is that the talent pool for a ministerial reshuffle is too shallow to even get a midget’s toes wet. And treasurer Zippy Chalmers has already ruled out ‘budget relief’ for households. And power bills and mortgages continue to rise.

But the palpable sense is that, whatever Albanese does from here on, voters have just stopped listening.

They’re too busy reading the clubs and brickbats for the next election.