I'm Daniel James and you're listening to seven Am. Anthony Alberzi leads a party that no longer argues in public. Labor presents as unified, consistent and on message, but behind that unity is another story one. We're a party, once defined by its dissent and debate, has become scared of conflict, to the point where its identity is formed not by beliefs, but by a commitment to staying in power no matter what.
Sean Kelly has worked up close with Anthony Alberanzi and with Labor prime ministers before him, and he's been interrogating what the government stands for and what its legacy will be.
I've heard his very odd experience watching this government, which is that something about it has always puzzled me. And that's part of where this essay came from. I was trying to think, what does this government believe today?
Author of the new Quarter of the essay, The Good Fight Kewey what happens when political identity is built on belonging, not belief. It's Monday, November seventy John, thanks so much for coming on the show. It's great to see you again. Anthony Abberaneze have recently stated that he's never seen the Labor Party more united, and he went on to say that that's a virtue.
What I'm focused on is my united team that are focused on the needs of Australians.
When you look at the Labor Party as a stands today, do you see unity?
Okay? I do see unity In some ways. The party is as unified as it's ever been. But another way of putting that would be to say that the caucus is perhaps the quietest Labor caucus I can remember. And I think that does point to a couple of things which you can frame in different ways. If you're a politician, you might say, well, that's great, it's a unified party with very little leaking, with very little descent. Great, that
allows us to go ahead with our political goals. But I think on the other side of things, it means that you don't necessarily have the type of debate you
need to reach the best possible solutions. So I think this is really interesting if you look at it in terms of Labour's history, there has always been, right from its very beginnings, a struggle within Labor, and that struggle is between idealism and pragmatism between heading for the best possible society, which once upon a time many people in Labor would have called socialism, by which they didn't mean socialism exactly as we understand, but a form of equality
and pragmatism, the desire to win elections. And I think one of the really strange things about Labor is that that struggle now seems to be inaudible. It's very hard to say whether that struggle still exists or whether the party has started to prioritize winning elections far more than anything else.
What do you attribute this lack of internal debate and dissent to Shore, I mean, it's very Unlabor like.
Yeah, look at it is. I think you've got a few factors here. Firstly, you have the fact that it's become pretty much taboo to say I am a socialist. You know, once upon a time people could describe their beliefs with a single word, I'm a communist, I'm a socialist, I'm an anti communist. And with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the death of the Soviet Union, I think our landscape of belief kind of collapsed into a
flat plane. And I think that means that the Labor Party doesn't have that very clear ideal towards which it's heading anymore. And the lack of a clear ideal is a problem because what an ideal does is provides a mechanism of accountability. You can always compare yourself to that ideal and say, well, look at the things we're doing, are they helping us get closer to that thing. I don't think Labor feels as though it has a clear
ideal which it can articulate. The second thing that's happened is that that battle, that struggle used to go on within the Labor Party, but at some point the Greens came along and I think that has meant over time that that ideal, that pursuit of policy purity has migrated outside of the Labor Party into the Greens. And I think that that is part of why you don't see
such debate within the Labor Party. And I think it's all something that the Labor Party has almost started to define itself in opposition to that idea of pursuing ideals.
For the Greene Political Party, this isn't about the Australian people.
This is about then.
They want the issue, not the outcome. The ideal In protests, we focus on.
Progress, and that has seen pragmatism come even further to the fore. And so I think this means that there is an overall difficulty in labor, which is that it's not entirely clear what labor is trying to do anymore.
So what's been the cost of that sort of lack of friction within the caucus? I mean, how has it changed the way that the Labor Party is actually governing at the moment.
I think you can see it in certain policy areas. The one that comes to mind most readily is gambling. When the Party has been willing to say we will do something about gambling, but we won't ban online ads, which is the thing that everybody, of course has been talking about. And I think you see the Party often
stopping short of things. You know, they'll say, we will do something about supermarket pricing, but we will defend the existence of this, calls will work soligopoly, and again and again we see Labor Party just kind of step clear
from the strongest possible answer to things. Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing in each individual instance, but as a whole, I think what it adds up to is a party that is incredibly conflict averse, and that is actually something the party has been talking about right from the start. They would boast about not frightening the horses, by which they meant not provoking huge debates, not provoking their opponents to come out and bash them, and that
was in certain respects successful. But I think the question is whether over time that costs the Labor Party something else, and I think it does. I think again, you come back to this question. If it's not fighting these fights, if it's not willing to go into battle with entrenched interests, then what exactly is it that it cares about?
Coming up Albanese's three great faiths, Labor, the Catholic Church, and the rabbit. As Sean Alberanze tells us that the party is unified under our labor hat. So to the question what does the party currently stand for? That's the heart of your essay.
Look, I think that this labor hat thing is so interesting. Jim Chalmers described the Labor Party this year as centrist.
Obviously, there are some things that governments, sensible, middle of the road centrist governments like ours don't consider, you know, we don't consider inheritance taxes, we don't consider changing the arrangements for the family home those And.
As Richard Datis wrote this year, you know that difficultly with Centrists. It means you're not defining yourself in relation to particular beliefs. You're just defining yourself according to who's on the right of you and who's on the left of you. You're essentially a little tugboat being tossed by
by great waves. Anthony Albanese, when I put that label centrist to him in twenty twenty three, said we're Labor and that to me sounds better, but I still think it doesn't leave us with a much clearer sense of what the party stands for. And I think this is related to a trend in Anthony Albanese's rhetoric, which is it's often to find him negative terms rather than in positive terms, by what labor wants not to do rather
than what it wants to do. So you could see this when he was talking about the Australian way during the election campaign. It started with a determination not to be like America, not to be Donald Trump, and it would say we don't need to copy the ideologies of any other nation.
Why on Earth would we try to mimic anywhere else. We don't want a wager system where people have to rely on tips to make ends meet. We don't want Australian students burdened by a lifetime of debt. And we never ever ever want an American style health system in this country.
Which is fair enough, but it is saying Australia should be as it is now, not like something else. And he did a similar thing when he was asked earlier this year what he meant with his famous phrase, I like fid.
I like fighting tories. That's what I do. That's what I do.
And he said, well, what that means is not giving up the gains that have been made. And I think that's a fascinating way to describe it, because it's looking backwards as saying we don't want to give up what has already been done, not about fighting for new things, not about fighting for change, and that is a really conservative framing for the Australian Labor Party, it's a really conservative framing for any center left party, because he had
left parties have traditionally been about change. And I think it's really interesting that Anthony Albanez he constantly defines himself by reference to the three great faiths he has the Labor Party, the Catholic Church and the South Sydney Rabbitos.
Say that I was raised with three great faiths, the Labor Party, the Catholic Church and Chastity regul League Football Club by my mum.
And that because what I think that really means is defining himself by tribes. You know, it's not a set of beliefs, it's institutions that he belongs to and supports. I think that's interesting because it is on some level de finding yourself in opposition rather than with reference to a particular belief, to a particular thing you were trying to do.
Alban Eazy has said he didn't know why anyone would go into politics if they didn't want to leave a legacy. So what do you think he wants his legacy to be.
I think he would point to two things. One he would say, I want to leave home a universal childcare, and that absolutely may still happen. But it is worth noting that the progress towards universal childcare has been much slower than the government foreshadowed early on, and the time frame has kept slipping a little bit. But that is certainly one aspect of what he would hope to be his legacy.
Our labor government believes firmly that every child should have the right to quality, affordable early education.
The other thing that he points to is the transition to renewable energy, and the government believes very strongly that this is a revolutionary thing, that this is the most significant thing that they are doing, that it is a huge wave of economic change, and also of course changed the way we approach the climate.
Every assailing who knows that climate change is a challenge we must hate together to meet for their future.
Of our environment, and.
Knows the fact that renewable energy is an opportunity we must work together to seas.
Trying to feature of our Again. There are really big questions about just how much Australia's emissions are falling, and you also have to factor in the fact which the Albanezy government basically likes to ignore, which is that Australia is in the top five exporters of fossil fuel emissions around the world. I mean, that is a staggering fact that really should shame us as a country, but we just don't talk about it.
So how do you think he's going in terms of achieving the legacy that he's hoping to build, how would you assess that at this point?
I think one of the great difficulties in assessing this government. One of the reasons I've really struggled with what to think of them all the way along and still do, is that the nature of incrementalism, the nature of approaching things gradually, is that the moment of judgment always seems
to be somewhere down the track. If your argument to the Isralian people is we are going about things slowly, we are accumulating small changes over time into something that will be larger and more significant, then you can always say, well, that moment's coming. But I think it's important to remember
that we are three and a half years in. One of the arguments that the government makes is that the reason you need to win several elections in you need to embed changes so that the following government, the following coalition government, can't tear them down. Now that sounds fair enough, except that when it's applied to previous governments, what you're really talking about is reforms that happened early. Because at this point, let's say the government loses after three terms.
We're really only talking about a term and a half in which to embed those policies. So I think that incrementalism argument loses power the longer the government is there. And it loses power for another reason too, which is that you could actually look at the results and say, well, are these things being solved. I think there's something really interesting about this decision not to pick fights, this decision to avoid political trouble. It does work in a certain way.
It means you don't get strips torn off you, it means you don't have the media piling on your head. These are political advantages. But I think that over time, every prime minister's strength ends up becoming their weakness. Every prime minister ends up having a quality which works for them, and because it works for them, they lean on it ever more heavily, and because they lean not too heavily, eventually it ends up hurting them. And you saw that
with Gough Wicklam. You know his boldness, he meant that he eventually crashed. Similarly, but in the opposite way. Anthony Albanize's caution has worked for him. It may work for him for a longer period, and at some point if he doesn't learn to balance that caution with boldness in some other respects. Then I think that caution could end up hurting him in the same way that Whitlam's boldness ended up hurting him.
Sean, it's a fascinating essay. Thanks so much for coming on the Showutte talking to us about it.
Thanks so much for having me on. It was lovely to see you again.
Sean. Kelly's quarterly essay, The Good Fight What Does Labor Stand For? Is out today. Also in the news, a dead lockover who will host next year's cop Climate Summit is said to be broken this week as this year's
conference in Brazil comes to an end. Australia is up against to a Kia for hosting rights, with the Albanesi government hoping to stage the global summit in Adelaide, but despite pursuing the right to host cop the government has not outlined the cost, with some reports suggesting it could be as high as two billion dollars, and Prime Minister Anthony Alberesi as endulgs Victorian Premier Jacinder Allen's new juvenile justice laws, which will allow children as young as fourteen
to be jailed for life for violent crimes. The new measures have been widely criticized for breaching human rights obligations, but the PM described the move as consistent with the premier's commitment to keeping Victorian safe. We will bring you an episode on the new laws tomorrow. I'm Daniel James. This is seven a m. Thanks for listening.