Erima Dall looks at Labor’s drop in support and why it has disappointed its supporters
If Labor loses the upcoming election, it will be the first time since 1931 that a government has been unseated after one term.
After the 2022 election, the Liberals were declared to be “in the wilderness” for the long term. Peter Dutton’s rise to party leadership added to that assessment.
Dutton, the ex-Queensland cop, is a racist and union hater, who joked about Pacific islands going underwater and was once voted by doctors to be the worst health minister in living memory.
With Dutton leading the opposition, Labor should have this election in the bag. Except they don’t. One poll put Labor’s primary vote at just 25 per cent.
The election will be close. The Liberals need to win 19 seats to form a majority, which is a tall order given the rise of the Teal independents. But if Labor loses just three seats, they will be back in a minority.
A Dutton victory would be disastrous. He wants to build state-funded nuclear power, compound discrimination against Indigenous communities by bringing back the cashless welfare card and sack public servants while imitating Trump’s bigotry against transgender people and racism towards migrants and refugees.
Yet rather than mount any challenge to Dutton’s right-wing agenda, Albanese has paved the way for Dutton and in many instances has tried to outflank Dutton from the right.
Labor has dropped any policies or issues, such as negative gearing, that could be regarded as controversial or attract criticism in the mainstream media.
But this approach means people have little reason to vote for Labor. Polling shows that on cost of living, wages and the economy, up to 44 per cent of voters believe “it makes no difference” who wins.
Albanese wants to be seen as a “responsible leader”—responsible, that is, for the interests of the rich and powerful. He has done everything to position Labor as the reliable choice to run Australian capitalism.
Albanese immediately embraced the AUKUS defence pact between Australia, the US and the UK and Scott Morrison’s associated commitment to spend $368 billion on nuclear-powered submarines.
Even with Donald Trump now US President, Labor has doubled down on the US alliance, shackling itself to a far-right thug who wants to start a war with China.
On climate, Labor has failed to stand up to the fossil fuel industry and has approved multiple new coal and gas projects. Its Safeguard Mechanism relies on flawed carbon offset schemes and its 43 per cent emissions reduction target will not keep global warming under 1.5C.
On First Nations rights, Labor has done nothing since the failure of the Voice referendum. And on refugee rights, Labor has adopted so many draconian Liberal policies that the Coalition boasts that “they are running the immigration system”.
Nowhere has Labor’s capitulation to the right been clearer, and starker, than on Palestine.
The Labor government has refused to impose even the smallest sanction against Israel, while telling lies that Australia does not export weapons to Israel. Albanese has attacked the pro-Palestine movement as antisemitic. He backed the NSW state Labor government introducing draconian anti-protest laws.
Domestically Labor’s historic low point is the attack on the CFMEU. In response to unsubstantiated allegations, Labor did the bidding of the bosses and corporate media and attacked one of the country’s most militant unions. Democratically elected union officials have been sacked and the union put under the control of government appointed administrators.
Albanese was very willing to junk any principles and turn on workers who had been among Labor’s most reliable supporters. In the process, Labor has handed a blueprint to any future Liberal government to similarly attack more unions.
Labor’s failure on the cost-of-living crisis has resulted in widespread disillusionment and could cost them the election. Real wages are back at 2011 levels.
Yet Albanese has refused to take any kind of bold action, hiding behind the pathetic excuse that incumbent governments world-wide are suffering the consequences of run-away inflation.
Albanese came to power determined to stand for nothing except the hope that Labor would get a second term.
After Bill Shorten’s shock defeat at the 2019 election, Albanese, the parliamentary leader of the Labor left, became party leader and quickly abandoned rhetoric about inequality, dumping modest reforms to tax the wealthy and tackle the unaffordable housing market by restricting negative gearing.
Labor also refused to challenge Scott Morrison’s Stage 3 tax cuts—a $20 billion giveaway to the wealthy—until overwhelming public backlash forced them to slightly revise the policy. Even then, the cuts still hand money back to the rich.
The government’s recent announcement of $8.5 billion towards Medicare bulk-billing incentives is a small step in the right direction but co-payments have already become well established. And it is nothing compared to the $368 billion for nuclear submarines, money that could also easily cover including dental care into Medicare. In any case, Dutton was quick to match the bulk-billing announcement.
Labor has thrown some crumbs, such as funding for aged care pay rises, three days of subsidised childcare, increased parental leave and some modest industrial reforms like “same-job same-pay” and redefining “casual” work. But there is still no right to strike and Labor’s crumbs have been outstripped by interest rate rises, rampant power bill increases and rising grocery prices.
Managing the system
Labor’s failure to deliver meaningful change stems from its commitment to managing capitalism. Labor is committed to trying to hold parliamentary power within capitalism rather than challenging the system, let alone organising to overthrow it.
Labor once paid lip service to full employment, free public education and a welfare safety net, and even opposed privatisation.
But possible reforms have always been subordinate to first ensuring the profitability of business. Under capitalism, it is the minority that owns and controls “the means of production”, the owners of factories, tech platforms and supermarkets—the 1 per cent—who hold real economic power.
This is why a strategy for change based on winning elections to parliament is a dead end. Elections can change governments, for better or worse, but it is the capitalist class that makes investment decisions that determine whether people are employed or not.
Labor accepts that they have to make conditions favourable for business and that means profits come first.
That means keeping wages down and restricting welfare spending while fossil fuel companies keep polluting and make billions.
It also means leading a nationalist agenda to shore up Australia’s imperialist interests. Labor is boosting military spending, tying itself even closer to US imperialism and the drive to war on China.
This is what has characterised Labor since the 1980s, when they embraced pro-corporate, user-pays, neoliberal economics.
The Whitlam government was the last Labor government with a progressive reform agenda. Whitlam was elected on the back of massive social movements and union strikes demanding change. His government abolished university fees, doubled school funding, created Medibank and increased health spending by 20 per cent. Budget outlays doubled overnight.
But when the “stagflation” economic crisis of the 1970s ended the post-war boom, Labor could no longer fund reforms through uninterrupted growth. Whitlam froze his own reform agenda in late 1974 and began to back-pedal, drastically cutting public spending.
After the infamous “Whitlam dismissal” in 1975, the Labor party dramatically changed course. As the system went into recession in the 1980s, Labor embraced austerity. The Hawke and Keating Labor governments of the 1980s and 1990s did in Australia what Thatcher did in the UK and Reagan in the US—privatising public assets, restraining strikes and tying wages to productivity increases in enterprise bargaining.
Decades of these pro-business policies have eroded Labor’s once-loyal working-class base and its primary vote has collapsed from over 50 per cent to the low 30s we see today.
Working-class seats like Lalor and Werriwa are no longer safe for Labor.
In 2014, Labor won the state seat of Werribee, which falls within Lalor, with a 56.6 per cent primary vote. In the recent by-election, this plunged to 28.9 per cent. Werriwa, Gough Whitlam’s old seat and a Labor stronghold for 90 years, is at risk this election.
Albanese champions Hawke and Keating’s commitment to corporate capitalism. Albanese stands proudly in their tradition of sacrificing Labor supporters and the interests of ordinary working class people to the interests of big business.
Disillusionment with Hawke and Keating in the 1980s and 1990s led directly to John Howard; this time disillusionment with Labor is dangerously boosting Dutton and his Trump-lite policies.
History shows that real gains come from struggle not parliamentary manoeuvring. It was protests and strikes that were crucial to ending Australia’s role in the Vietnam war. Protests stopped uranium mining. After tens of thousands of workers demonstrated against Howard’s anti-union WorkChoices legislation, it was the union movement that was central to defeating the Howard government in 2007.
Just as working class industrial power broke the penal powers of the industrial courts in 1969, strikes could break Labor’s administration of the CFMEU.
Challenging Labor and standing up to the threat from the right will take a serious fightback from unions and social movements.
For sections of the climate movement who thought Labor would seriously tackle climate change, the Albanese government has been a bitter lesson.
Union leaders have also looked to Labor rather than industrial struggle; instead of standing up for militancy, and defiance of anti-union laws, many have shamefully collaborated with Labor’s attack on the CFMEU.
The most important task of the left and of socialists is to build struggles that can put real change back on the agenda. We need to build leadership and rank-and-file confidence in the unions and movements that will not put the brakes on struggle when it comes into conflict with the system.
For that we need stronger socialist organisation committed to fanning the flames of resistance and linking the struggles into a fight to overturn the system that is dragging us to war and climate catastrophe.
