Politics

These have been an extraordinary five years. In that time, we have seen a new wave of discussion and debate about women’s safety, equity and right to respect in the workplace, the family and at large. We need to celebrate the big wins – the adoption of so many of Kate Jenkins’ key Respect@Work recommendations, for example, with better support for childcare and longer paid parental leave. But there is still work to do to bridge the gender pay gap, and to make women safer outside work, particularly in the domestic setting.

It is accepted in some circles that you can’t boil cabbage twice. Yet apparently this thinking doesn’t apply to recycling political leaders – or rehashing their worst ideas – irrespective of how hopeless they have been in government and of the damage they have done to the national interest. Two cases in point are the threatened resurgence of Donald Trump in the United States, and Boris Johnson’s soggy pitch to reclaim Britain’s prime ministership. And they have lessons for us here.

Jim Chalmers is no stranger to the dynamics and pitfalls of federal budgets. He has worked on 16 of them in and out of government – as a staffer, adviser, shadow minister and finally, this week, at the helm himself. On Tuesday, in delivering the first Labor budget in almost a decade, he turned convention on its head. Most obviously, he presented his fiscal reckoning just five months into the government’s term and well ahead of the traditional May scheduling. The treasurer was firmly of the view he couldn’t wait another seven months to tell Australians the true state of the economy.

It took Liz Truss just 45 days to destroy Margaret Thatcher’s life’s work. For 40 years the idea that tax cuts for the rich would trickle down to help the poor has not just dominated the rhetoric of Western politicians but aligned the ambitions of those who already have the most and those who wish they did. Truss’s tax cuts, however, were so excessive and so poorly timed she actually forced London’s bankers to admit they were bad for the economy and the British middle class to admit they were bad for society.

The admiration for Anthony Albanese’s political smarts was palpable down the line from one of his senior colleagues. ‘Albo,’ he says, ‘has 360-degree vision.’ The prime minister is not just looking at the next few weeks, his colleague says: he knows where he wants to be by the time of the next election.

In talking about wellbeing as part of the budget, Chalmers and his colleagues are trying to appeal to a community transformed by the impacts of a pandemic as much as by current economic turbulence. But they are also trying to speak to a range of groups they have relied upon for electoral success.

The ghosts of broken promises past are spooking the Albanese government as it prepares to unveil its first budget on October 25. More specifically, the prime minister is determined not to give his political opponents the chance to criticise him on the issue of trust just after an election where integrity in government featured heavily.

It is difficult to conceive of a set of government decisions purportedly aimed at protecting Australia’s national interests that have been more comprehensively destructive of them than those made by successive Coalition governments in the Timor-Leste case.

Deep in the bunker that is federal Parliament House’s cabinet room, the Albanese government’s economic brains trust spent much of Tuesday strategising about Australia’s response to what the treasurer calls the ‘gathering storm clouds in the global economy’. The expenditure review committee is chaired by the prime minister himself.

Anthony Albanese understands the power of symbolism. He has carefully cultivated signals that women will be front and centre of his government’s agenda, particularly its economic one. From the gender balance of participants and speakers at its jobs and skills summit, to the formation of a Women’s Economic Equality Taskforce, and the embrace of gender-responsive budgeting, there can be no criticism that women have gone unnoticed by the new government. The challenge for the prime minister is to marry the power of symbolism with real policy action.