Don't F*ck it up

(Photo credit: Mike Bowers)

If the polls, the trend, and the vibe are all right, then voters are about to give the Albanese government another chance.

But you can feel the reluctance. The only question that seems to remain is whether Labor will govern in its own right, or as a majority.

From the moment he became opposition leader, Anthony Albanese planned on becoming the first prime minister since John Howard to be re-elected. He wants three terms. The old adage went that if you change the government, you change the country, but Albanese has been around politics long enough to know that’s no longer enough.

If you want to truly change the country, you need about a decade. That gives you time to refresh the statutory appointments, map out foreign relations, change the public service and shift the values of the nation. It’s an easy criticism that Albanese has no long term plans – he obviously does.

On Thursday, he told reporters he was not a revolutionary, but a reformer and maybe, if his gamble pays off, history will judge him as such.

But his reforms are set at a glacial pace. And the world? Well that’s moving much faster.

And if Albanese and Labor don’t do something with power to measurably improve people’s lives this time around, they risk losing it all.

A lot of time has been spent picking apart the Trump victory, but scrape away the MAGA-cult and you have a lot of people who voted against the status quo. Who were so desperate for change, so hungry for something other than the more-of-the-same the Democrats were offering, that they risked Trump.

President of the United States Donald Trump speaking with attendees at a rally at Dream City Church in Phoenix, Arizona. Gage Skidmore.

Minority or not, the message for Labor this time around isn’t keep-offering-people-the-same-as last-time and call it ‘stability’, it’s use the chance you have been given to change things, before people force change upon you.

The structural, systemic issues within this country have not emerged in a vacuum. And while much has been made about the fact that Millennials and Gen Z now have the numbers to match Baby Boomers and Gen X, that doesn’t set the stage for a ‘youthquake’ in the way it has been described.

We are talking about voters aged between 18 and 45. The oldest Zoomer is 28. There are millennials who have high school aged children or over. Who are grandparents. Gen Z is about to suffer the humiliation of watching their cultural chokehold loosen into a cringefest by children who would rather die than describe something as an ‘ick’. And collectively we’re pissed.

Not because we are younger than Boomers, and have yet to “mature” as Peter Dutton so condescendingly pointed out recently, but because we have less stability than the generations before us, but a hell of a lot more anxiety. And we don’t care about political truisms, nor do we have the patience for glacial reforms.

If Australia’s government doesn’t change things, then we WILL change that government, and not care about anything other than it offers something different.

Disruptors can be brilliant. They can transform nations – Gough Whitlam managed more in three years than most do in a decade.

But they can also be Donald Trump.

The more Labor insists on working on ‘bipartisanship’ with a party that it allegedly shares no values with and has just spent the past five weeks painting as detrimental to the nation, the more it risks sending people looking for a circuit breaker. And in this country, with a conservative-slanted media, growing anger and mistrust, rising inequality, a resurgence of One Nation and vested interests focused on their own survival, that disruption is unlikely to be for the good of the collective.

But in constantly claiming that there is no hope for reform because the Coalition, whoever leads them, won’t let them, Labor reinforces its own powerlessness. It is telling people it is unable to govern, to lead, without the permission of the party voters rejected. What’s the point of having power if you just cede it to your opposition and call that governing?

There was another pathway in the last parliament – through the Greens and the crossbench – to pass stronger environmental protection laws, a more transparent National Anti-Corruption Commission, religious protections and better taxation reform, but Labor tied itself in knots pretending it wasn’t there, because it didn’t want more progressive policy.

It didn’t want to have to negotiate with progressives and go further than the middle-of-the-road track it’s stubbornly tied itself to, because Gosh Darn It, people might actually think it was a progressive government. And we can’t have that when you’re trying to keep things just as they are, but marginally better than the other guys.

People might get ideas! It might get a bit uncomfortable! The government might have to *gulp* fight for something instead of just hoping that the lack of fight will leave people in a comfortable apathy, paying no attention.

But while this election campaign has focused mainly on the productivity people can provide a nation (to the point that Albanese constantly refers to “14 million Australians” – which is just those of us with a job, leaving out 13 million people) Australia is more than its economy.

During so much of this campaign, the major parties appear to have forgotten that an economy is not just something to be “managed”. It’s people. And it’s not only those who provide productivity through labour who deserve to be counted.

An economy is people. And those people have hope beyond the material. Hope for something better. Hope for the planet. Hope for shared values. Hope that politicians find it in themselves to be brave again and create courageous policy, that maybe, just maybe, they fight for because it’s the right thing to do. Even if it’s hard. Especially if it’s hard.

Because Australia? It is desperately lacking courage from it’s leadership. And that’s how you change a nation. If Labor keeps taking the safe route, it might just find people make the change for them.

We’ll be watching the results, and continuing to fight alongside you for a better – and hopefully braver, Australia.

As always, take care of you. Amy x

— Amy Remeikis is the Chief Political Analyst at the Australia Institute