I'm Daniel James and you're listening to seven AM. This year, Anthony Albanesi promised to make big changes on childcare, of many care, on the cost of living. But while the government delivered some wins, it also quietly stepped back from the fights it didn't want to have on gambling, housing
and corporate power. Today, contributing editor for The New Daily, Amy Reymakers looks back on yet another huge year in politics and on the deal's labor made, reforms it shelved, and what that reveals about how this government really works. It's Monday, December twenty nine. Amy, good to see you again. Take me back to the start of the year, before the election campaign was really in full swing. How did Anthony Albanese's year begin.
Yeah, it seems like a lifetime ago and it's not even twelve months. But we started this year knowing that an election was coming, but thinking that Labor potentially, at least from what the polls were telling us, end up in minority government.
Now, there was a.
Story and narrative at the time that the Coalition could potentially win government from opposition, that Peter Dutton was going to pull it off, but.
The polls never actually said that.
They said that Labor was in trouble, but they always said that the coalition was not popular, and you could tell that by looking at preferred leader, by looking at the coalition's primary vote, that sort of thing. But there was a real sense that the Albanese government was in trouble. They had recently lost the Voice referendum, which had taken a lot of wind out of their sales. Anthony Albanesi really started battening down the hatches after that started coming.
It seemed like they were a government without answers when it came to deal with inflation, dealing with the cost of living, dealing with issues in service delivery for Australia, the issues in housing. It just seemed like whatever hope had come from the twenty twenty two election had completely and utterly dispersed by the twenty twenty five election.
So they got off to a slow start, but by the time the campaign came around, they got themselves out of that slump. If we talk about the campaign itself, there was a lot of holding up of Medicare cards in speeches. What did that signify about the type of campaign Labor van.
Yeah, it was very much a back to basics Labor campaign and Labor sees medicare as one of its historical successes. And so what they did was they crafted this policy of saying, we're going to increase the bulk billing rates by you know, paying private practices a certain amount extra so that they can bulk bill more.
We will offer every gig practice a new incentive payment to volk bill. This payment will go to every doctor in every practice that commits to volve billing every patient every time.
If you looked behind that policy, it was essentially useless for most people's general practices because the hoops that they had to jump through did not make it economically viable for themselves to continue running practices. But the government knew that it had this headline figure that it could use to say, we're investing x amount into medicare. We're going to increase bolk billing.
This will mean three times as many GP practices fully bulk billing. It will provide around four thousand, eight hundred medical practices across Australia with the security that they need to vulk build every visit.
And then it had the amazing luck, happestance or whatever you want to call of Trump coming in with his tariffs, and one of his tariffs, one of the fights that he wanted to have was over Australia's PBS, which is of course the government subsidization of everyday medications for eligible Australians.
It's not surprising that there is a push and some opposition to the PBS, but let me be very clear and explicit, the Pharmaceutical Benefit Scheme is not for sale.
And that was a fight that the Albanesi government was very happy to have because every time Anthony Albanezi held up that Medicare card and said, you know, I am fighting for you, I am fighting for Medicare, they were able to say we're putting more money into health and we're going to fight Trump to defend it for you.
And that worked particularly well because there was all cir concerns within the electorate that Peter Dutton was very trumpy and when it came to a lot of his views and particularly around cultural stuff. So that defense of Medicare in particular was something that really rang through quite strongly.
Yeah, it was, and I mean, like I suppose my contribution to the campaign was accidentally coming up with Timu Trump, which you know, it landed because it rang true to so many Australians because Peter Dutton had always been the hard man.
Of the coalition, that is the role that he had adopted.
He was the you know, like have a good weekend lefties, you know, type of leader who was very open about the fact that he was strong on national security and that meant cracking down on minorities and crime and all the rest of it. And by the time the election came round, that an absolute negative for the coalition and that was one thing Labor had counted on.
How Teama Trump didn't make it into the Coora dictionaries beyond me. But that's another thing.
Should I mean the word of the year?
Damn it.
Anyways, if we returned to the election, what did the government promise during that campaign?
It was very much a business as.
Usual but we will try and make things a little bit easier campaign. So the main things that they were promising, apart from Medicare and we're all sick of that Medicare card being held up, was cutting student debts. They promised to cut about twenty percent from student hex and help debt.
A re elected Labor government will take twenty percent off student debt for everyone who has won.
And also dealing with housing.
Our five percent deposit plan will be open to every Australian looking to buy their first home. It will be available for homes valued all the way up to the average price in every city and region, and you won't have to pay a single dollar in mortgage insurance.
Our government will cover it, even.
Though we've already seen policies like that, you know, increase the price of housing at least according to the experts who watch the housing market, and the fact that the Heck's cut has maybe helped students, but it hasn't actually done anything to address the cost of degrees that were increased under the Morrison government for a lot of students, particularly if you're studying arts or humanities.
It was enough that it seemed like the government were doing something.
If you were to name one thing the government's done that would count as a big win for them, what would you suggest it would be?
Yeah, so, I mean the government would would say that it's social media ban has been a massive win for it and it has you know, a lot of parents on side and a lot of.
It is a very popular policy.
But then you've got experts and young people saying this is not going to work, and you know, we're going to see the wheels fall off this in another couple of years. But right now the government is getting glowing international coverage over this.
The government would consider its environmental laws.
To be a massive win because that's something that they, you know, commentators including me, said would be very difficult for them to pass.
They managed to get it through with the Greens, which means the laws are not as bad as they could have been.
This isn't a win for the environment, but it's politically a win for the government, and this is a government that has been winning the politics a lot, but the policy is not up to scratch when.
You consider, you know, people who were hoping.
For progressive reform or even something that was different than the status quo that we've seen for the last few decades.
Coming up, why twenty twenty six will defy In Albanesi's legacy, Anthony Albanesi wants his legacy to be universal childcare inn Ee, where we have seen the horrific outcomes of a broken childcare system. What has the Albanese government done to reform the sector?
So I do think that.
Anthony Albanesi is being very legitimate when he says that he wants to create a.
Universal childcare system.
And what that would mean is that we would consider childcare the same way that we consider medicare or the same way we consider public education, in that it shouldn't cost too much and it's open to know, you know, most.
Australians without an issue.
So the solution to making childcare universal in Australia is for the government to take over it, for the government to control it, and that's not what's going to happen. So what they're trying to do is retrofit all of these little fixes around a private system that is already pretty broken. So the first thing that they did was, you know, they increased the childcare subsidy. The idea was that if it's universal, it is open to everybody, you know, no matter how much you earn.
But that just meant that childcare centers increase their fees.
So every single thing that they've done, they've had to then retrofit another fix to try and ensure that their
overall intentions are carried out. But then we had, of course, the horrendous stories as revealed by the ABC about all of the dangers in the childcare sector, how a lack of regulation has left it open to predators, and so now you're seeing states and the federal government have to retrofix safety regulations around that, which, of course in a private system is going to end up increasing costs.
So what can they do.
They can spend a lot more, which it doesn't look like they want to do in this inflationary environment because every single time the government is spending money on something, be it infrastructure, be it pay rises, be it whatever, they're then accused of adding to inflation. And then that conversation takes off and so we never really get to the nub of the problem, and.
So we just go round and round and round.
And this is not something that I think Anthony Albanezi can achieve even in a decade. This is going to be something that would take decades to fix, and ultimately it would be bringing childcare into the public sector for a government to control, and they're not going to do that, So it's a lofty goal.
One of the fights that Labour seems extremely hesitant to have is on gambling reform. Their own reviews said the ban online gambling ads years ago. They haven't done it and they've been under pressure from the cross bench on the all year, so why would they take it on.
I think it.
Really speaks to one of the core issues with this government, which is its incrementalism. And Sean Kelly describes it in his latest quarterly essay The Good Fight as a government that doesn't want to offend anyone, a government that doesn't actually want to have the fights. And it doesn't seem like the government wants to have the fight with the gambling industry, even though they have all of the social license in the world to do this. They have so
much political capital to do this. Nobody actually loses, and in terms of some of the arguments that have been thrown up, they are actually very easy fixes for that. One of the arguments we've heard is that it's going to make free to air media or you know, what's left of Australia's legacy media really suffer because of the
lack of advertising. Experts have pointed out that you could just put a levy on gambling companies in Australia and that would you know, pay for the loss of gambling advertising. The Guardian had stopped accepting gambling advertising, and The Guardian is still doing quite well.
It is possible.
So this isn't a fight with anyone except the very vested interests of gambling companies and some media companies who want to continue seeing that revenue. And so what we're seeing is a government choosing its priorities to stay in power, and the way that they're doing that is by not having the fights, not offending any big interests.
If we cast down on forward to this time next year, Amy, what do you expect from the Albanesi government, What do you actually expect from them in twenty twenty six, and what will we be talking about this time next year.
Guy, It's so impossible, isn't it, Because when you look at the year that has just been, you're just kind of like that was only a year.
It feels like a decade, you know.
But looking at the landscape more broadly, I would expect this government to make any sort of reform moves it's going to make next year, probably around the budget time, and I would say that by the middle of next year we'll have a pretty good indication of how Labor starts to feel about its leadership, about its incrementalism, and about its future. Because on the numbers, the chances of the coalition winning are about as high as me becoming
a bond Girl. But there is the chance that you start to see third parties, independents and disruptors like One Nation start to chip away at Labor seats or seats that Labour thinks.
That they should be holding.
That's when we're going to start to see is Labor going to transform, Is it going to be the party of reform, Is it going to try and set Australia up for the next ten years, or is Anthony Albanesi going to continue sacrificing Reform to be what he calls the natural party of government, thereby consigning Labor to.
Know a pretty predictable future.
Well, Amy, it's been one hell of a year and despite any sort of Bond Girl ambitions you may have had, you do have a license to kill and you've killed this year. So thanks so much for coming on and speaking to us throughout the year.
Thank you as have you guys, You've been incredible.
Tomorrow on the show, we're taking an in depth look at another of the big political stories of twenty twenty five, the wipeout of the Australian Greens after a terrible election result where they lost three out of four Lowerhouse MPs. The Greens had some soul searching to do. Now, more than six months out from the election, and under the leadership of Larissa Waters, they're beginning to show some signs of what they'll do next. I'm Daniel James. This is seven AM. Thanks for listening.