Mark Riley: Labor’s all fizzle, no sizzle

In his retrospective analysis of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years, Treasurer Jim Chalmers lamented Labor’s inability to control its own narrative.

In his 2013 book Glory Daze, Chalmers reflected on the terminal disconnect between what he saw as the government’s achievements and the prevailing public perception of chaos and ineptitude.

Every challenge was magnified and every strength was ignored, his boss at the time, Treasurer Wayne Swan, observed.

Much of that, of course, was Labor’s own fault.

Four leadership challenges in six years acted like political paint stripper, peeling legitimacy from all the government’s parliamentary achievements.

And some of those achievements were considerable.

Steering the Australian economy through the global financial crisis without following the bulk of the developed world into recession was a stand out in Chalmers’ eyes.

But the government, and Swan in particular, were given little to no credit for that in the final analysis of those tempestuous times.

Jim Chalmers must be fearing this week that history is beginning to repeat itself.

The Albanese Government is unlike the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd regime in significant ways. The leadership isn’t an issue. And Cabinet unity is a strength.

But it is suffering the same dangerous disconnect between achievement and perception that helped sink their predecessors.

And that is driving many senior figures in the government to distraction.

Probably the clearest example of that disconnect came with Chalmers’ economic statement this week.

In it, he detailed an exhaustive list of the measures the Government has taken to ease the cost of living.

He referenced the household energy rebate, increased childcare subsidies, cheaper medicines, increased bulk-billing incentives, higher Commonwealth rent assistance, rises in JobSeeker and student allowances, fee-free TAFE and average tax cuts of about $1900 a year.

The cost of all that runs well into the tens of billions of dollars a year.

That is big money.

But ask the first person you encounter on the street today what the Albanese Government is doing to ease the cost of living and the most likely answer will be “absolutely nothing”.

And there is the disconnect. This Government is getting no political bang for its policy buck.

It is a massive problem and it is primarily the Government’s own fault. It has developed an inability to sell itself.

It is talking, but the electorate isn’t listening.

The art of politics isn’t just about selling the sausage. It is also about the sizzle.

And this Government runs the risk of becoming more fizzle than sizzle.

Chalmers pushes back in Glory Daze against the prevailing analysis that the “entrenched pessimism” pervading the politics of the time was the result of Labor’s “lack of salesmanship”.

He saw it more as a product of entrenched ideological opposition from the Tony Abbott-led Coalition, business groups and their supporters in the media.

Abbott’s approach, Chalmers wrote, was “throwing sand into the gears of government and then complaining it doesn’t work”.

It is a fair if simplistic analysis. And Peter Dutton is employing the same tactic now, denying the Government an easy win on any major piece of legislation.

This hyper-partisan approach isn’t very productive for the country, but that is politics.

And it is happening at a time when incumbency is no longer a benefit but a burden.

Election results here and around the world show that voters have shifted their disposition from rewarding governments for protecting them through COVID to punishing them for the financial pain the pandemic has left in its wake.

The Albanese Government’s re-election strategy has been built around a plan to force inflation back into the Reserve Bank’s two-to-three-percent target band and trigger at least one interest rate cut before an election in May.

That has now been plunged into uncertainty as inflation begins to rise again in the UK, Europe, the US and Canada and the re-emergence of Donald Trump threatens another costly tariff war with our major trading partner, China.

In the face of all this, the Australian electorate appears unclear about what the Albanese Government stands for and what it intends to do.

With just months to an election, the government needs to take control off its own narrative and begin articulating it clearly.

And it needs to do it urgently.

If it doesn’t, it runs the risk of going the way of the dodo, just like the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government.