Full marks to them for trying – oppositions have to have something to say. In the past,these tactics could and often did work. When the electoral contest was overwhelmingly a binary choice between Labor and the Coalition,and the mainstream media was the gatekeeper for news and opinion,with many voters following the daily narrative of politics,sympathies could shift pretty quickly.
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But these are more diverse and diffuse times,with voters belonging to one of three camps in roughly equal number:Labor,the Coalition,and the rest. Voters are not dummies,nor do they have memories like goldfish. Their clear intent was to get rid of the Coalition government by voting Labor,Green or teal,with 52 per ensuring their vote finally wound up with the ALP. The Liberal Party was sent to the doghouse.
Yes,Albanese will take heat as unemployment and mortgage repayments go up. But most Australians right now want his government to succeed. At the election nine months ago a solid majority of voters were seeking a government open to new approaches to the nation’s challenges. Some of these challenges are the result of deliberate policy decisions by past governments. Others are down to the indolence or disarray of those same past governments.
Changes of government in Australia are rare. In the 78 years since the end of World War II,we’ve changed governments only eight times. The default choice of most Australian voters through the years has been the Coalition parties. Recent history underscores that point. Voters were more tolerant of the Liberal Party’s revolving leadership door that brought us Tony Abbott,Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison than the one that Labor used to give us Kevin Rudd,Julia Gillard and Rudd again.
It’s regularly the role of Labor governments to bring the country into the present day and beyond. Conservative policy settings where the status quo is good enough might be preferred by most voters,but eventually they conclude that some modernisation is in order. This has been the case with all newly elected postwar Labor governments.
But voters hand the keys to the ALP on one condition:that it keeps its act together. Albanese has plenty of policy challenges,but his biggest political challenge is to maintain a settled government. Most modern Labor prime ministers have not managed to do that. Bob Hawke did,for the best part of four terms,but Gough Whitlam,Rudd and Gillard could not and paid a heavy price.