Politics

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has often spoken in terms of football analogies when referring to his electoral opportunities, strategies and chances. Recently his focus has been on ‘coming home in the second half with a strong wind at his back’.

For Labor to build real political momentum in an incredibly tough year, the prime minister needs to be with his treasurer the way Bob Hawke was with the younger Paul Keating in the 1980s.

Politicians have become so accustomed to this soft corruption that they genuinely think it is what election campaigns are about – a competition of promises for car parks, sporting fields and a new microwave for the senior citizens’ club.

Negativity and denial are not election-winning policies or strategies. Nor is continuing to drag the Coalition further and further to the right of the political spectrum.

So how have we got to this and how is Albanese going to respond? … There are big lessons from this year that, unless learnt, bode very poorly for the survival of the government. Albanese and his closest confidants know it.

For a prime minister on leave, Anthony Albanese had a busy week. It’s a sure sign of knowing you can take nothing for granted in politics, especially when everyone keeps telling you to lift your game.

The cost of living is still running too high and the opposition is weaponising every issue it can. As Treasurer Jim Chalmers prepares to deliver the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook statement, he faces a very big question. How he will balance the desire to maintain the long-awaited surplus Labor touted this year as evidence of its sound economic management with the need to help households still struggling with inflation and the highest interest rates in 12 years.

The latest batch of published polls suggest voters are not yet ready to switch to the Dutton-led Coalition. In this context, it is not hard to see why Dutton, who has always been a strident partisan warrior, has given no quarter as he attempts to turn the High Court-directed release of indefinitely detained migrants and refugees into a national security emergency, a shambles and a catastrophe. In this he has the unabashed urging and backing of the Murdoch media.

The year just ending is the worst I can recall for more than half a century. Already there are strong indications the next will be worse. It has been the hottest year on record since global meteorological systems were established in 1873. Increasingly brutal wars between Russia and Ukraine, and Israel and Hamas, and massive conflicts in Africa and border wars in South America are destructive not only to lives and property but to all human values and the whole concept of rational problem-solving. Politics itself is a war zone. No prisoners are taken and the winner takes all. The more existential the crisis, the more trivial and toxic the response.

Australia is engaged in the most significant economic, industrial and social transformation – the transition to renewable energy. Unfortunately, the opposition, backed by its loyal media comrades, is doing its level best to complicate and undermine this effort with baseless assertions and misrepresentations.