Why be malicious or incompetent when you can be both

I don’t know if you’ve noticed but the Albanese government seems to be trying to set a new land speed record for fucking up.

In the last few weeks Labor has:

• Gutted the CFMEU, setting a precedent for any future government to effectively destroy any union it deems inconvenient;

• Abandoned its commitment to banning gambling ads, which one of its MPs fought literally to the death for;

• Announced, with great fanfare, a maximum $11.50 weekly raise to rent assistance, which advocates and experts say will do precisely fuck-all to fix the housing crisis;

• Neutered the recommendations of the Senate inquiry into missing and murdered First Nations women and children, adding yet another wasted opportunity to the decades-old pile of neglected reports, inquiries and royal commissions into Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social murder;

• Infuriated people with disability by ripping more than $14 billion out of the NDIS;

• Flagged that it will gut the proposed new Environmental Protection Authority;

• Capped international student enrolments, thus committing Australia’s funding-starved universities to yet more staff layoffs and cost-cutting; and, last but not least;

• Somehow turned the addition of five questions to the 2026 Census into a rolling political scandal.

I’m definitely missing a few things but you can’t blame me for that.

Albo is now about as popular as Scott Morrison was the month of the last federal election. Labor’s primary vote in average polling is worse than it was in 2022, which was the party’s lowest since the Great Depression. According to Labor-aligned polling and communications outfit Redbridge, only 24% of voters can name a government policy that has improved their lives.

Labor’s takeaway from this avalanche of negativity has not been to, say, begin introducing policies that would tangibly improve peoples’ lives. Instead, as Redbridge director and Victorian Labor campaign veteran Kos Samaras has said, Labor doesn’t believe its enduring unpopularity is due to a lack of substance.

The real problem, apparently, is “a lack of communication discipline,” which is why Labor is making a song and dance about meaningless appoinments like who Albanese’s media director is and doubling down on posting the worst ~~~content~~~ you’ve ever seen in your life.

(As a former and, in all likelihood, future comms staffer, I’m comfortable with saying that anyone who comes up with shit like this should be zapped with a cattle prod until their brain resets. In a few years lifelong comms people are going to start being preselected as MPs and then we are truly fucked.)

The common theme running through all these instances of electoral masochism is that the Labor Party, as an institution, doesn’t know how to win political arguments anymore.