Politics

With the prime minister in Britain to attend the coronation of our unelected head of state and the treasurer back home doing last-minute bean-counting ahead of Tuesday’s budget, the Greens’ Adam Bandt seized the moment to pose the key question confronting Australia: What kind of country do we want to be?

Today, May 6, 2023, King Charles III will be crowned king of Australia and 14 other realms. It will be the first such ceremony in seven decades and the first in living memory for most Australians. It is clear the passing of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, in September last year has opened space for important conversations long avoided in Australia.

In any other context, the Albanese government could have expected to be wedged between national security and social security this week – with a debate on spending priorities and its willingness to do so much in one area and so little in another.

As the May budget draws closer its outlines are becoming clearer. It looks like it will embrace the incremental ‘don’t scare the horses’ approach that has so far defined Labor’s first year in office. Revenue gains will be largely banked, but otherwise efforts at budget consolidation will be modest.

Something truly bizarre is happening in the federal Coalition under the leadership of putative Liberal Peter Dutton. With him in charge, the conservative parties have embarked on a cunning plan to abandon metropolitan voters in favour of rural and regional ones.

There was a moment of light relief towards the end of the Q&A following Minister for Foreign Affairs Penny Wong’s address to the National Press Club on Monday. The Canberra Times’s Nicholas Stuart prefaced his question, the penultimate of the day, by commenting that it had been ‘a wonderful speech’, to which Wong quipped: ‘You’re the first person who’s said that. I was starting to get a bit paranoid.’

This growing willingness to write off the Liberal Party is a sign of something dangerous. It’s fair to dismiss the party as out of touch after resounding defeats in the federal election and more recently in the Aston byelection. But these failures, and the apparent inability to learn from them, are deeply unsettling.

The resigning shadow minister for Indigenous Australians and shadow attorney-general, Julian Leeser, did something very rare in Australian politics this week: he quit the frontbench not to launch a challenge against the party leader but rather to undermine him on a point of deeply held principle.

Recently, speaking at a school, I asked the teachers to imagine how they would feel telling children in the future that in 2023 Australia voted ‘No’ at the Voice referendum. I asked them to imagine how it would feel and it brought me to tears.

What happened in Aston is simple … The voters of Aston endorsed the positive agenda of the Albanese government against the vagueness and negativity of the Dutton strategy. Mary Doyle achieved a historic win in what the Liberals had basically taken for granted as a traditional and ‘safe’ Liberal seat.