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.

At least since the carbon tax, and arguably as far back as the Tampa, Labor’s guiding principle has been concession. Rather than fight a difficult political battle against powerful vested interests and potentially lose, Labor concedes to its opponents immediately. It’s become an article of faith in Labor thinking that doing so “defuses” the issue, leaving their opponents with nothing to beat them over the head with.

This is so ingrained in Labor’s internal logic that any person or group that tries a more active approach — protests, strikes, forceful public advocacy — is immediately cast as fringe, powerless, and self-sabotaging. For Labor, giving up — especially on the issues that you supposedly care about the most — has become the highest virtue, and the truest test of whether or not you’re “serious”.

I’m not suggesting that every single issue should be a battle royale. Deciding when, how and on what terms a political movement chooses to advance its worldview is one of the great unanswered questions that keeps smarter people than me up at night.

But after more than two decades of reflexively rolling over every time there’s a political argument to be had, Labor has essentially forgotten how to fight for, and win, genuine progressive change.

This isn’t a very deep observation. Winning is not, as it turns out, like riding a bike. It’s more like exercising — if you stop using a certain muscle, eventually it atrophies. If you sink all your time and energy into losing, you will become very good at it. You can’t then be surprised when, on the rare occasion you do actually want to win something, you’ve forgotten how.

The biggest recent example of this was the Voice referendum — the one time in his prime ministership Albanese genuinely tried to win people over on an issue he seemed to care about. But it has also bled over into elections, the thing Labor cares about winning more than anything else. We forget how insane it is that, in the last dozen or so years, people as deeply unpopular and offputting as Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison managed to become prime minister purely because of the incompetence of the alternative.

Rather than undertake the slow and painful work of relearning how to argue for, and win, a more just and equal society, Labor’s only move is to double down on what it does best — performatively cringing for conservatives and going after anyone who tries something different.

I almost get it. Lining up with the Coalition and the business lobby and the Press Gallery smoothbrains to call Max Chandler-Mather the new Donald Trump must feel good on some level, just because it must be nice to feel like you’re winning for once.

That’s how we’ve ended up with a Labor government that votes to dismember unions rather than defend them, scares itself into deleting questions about sexuality and gender identity from the Census, and regularly cites the Coalition’s opposition to a piece of legislation as a reason to abandon it.

This is important to understand in the context of why the government continues to do nothing on Gaza. I see an argument out there a lot that Albanese used to be a passionate and principled leftie warrior until the Zionist lobby somehow forced him to change his tune.

The truth is, the Zionist lobby — like any other vested interest group in the country — didn’t need to do anything. Abandoning whatever principles he still had after half a lifetime in Canberra was the condition of Albanese getting the job at all — one which he happily accepted.

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