This episode of New Politics was released on the twenty ninth of November twenty twenty five and produced on the lands of the Wongle and Gadigal people.

The final week of parliament ends with the whimper, with so many issues still left up in the air, and what is the point of the Labor government.

That's what a lot of people are asking us.

I'm Edi Djokovic, I'm David Lewis.

All of this is coming up in a big episode of New Politics.

And just sir reminder that New Politics is produced by independent media.

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It was the final week of parliament for the year, and while the expected leadership challenge against Susan Lee didn't eventuate, there were lots of other things going on to keep us occupied and David, we've faced a little bit of criticism about being too preoccupied with all the things that are going on within the Liberal Party, despite how irrelevant they are.

And a lot of that is actually true.

They are irrelevant but still very interesting to talk about and that's why we've been doing it.

But there's a lot going on or not going on, depending on your perspective.

For the Labor Government, they keep stalling on gambling reform.

They keep having fights with the Australian Greens over the environment, although they did get a deal made on the final day of Parliament this year.

The Finance Minister, Senator Katie Gallagher, she's called for an efficiency drive within the public service of five percent.

There's also looming job cuts at the CSIRO of around three hundred and fifty people, and that adds to the eight hundred jobs that have already been lost there over the past eighteen months or though the government claims that the budget for the CSIRO hasn't actually been cut at all, and just going back in time a little bit.

During the twenty twenty five federal election campaign, Peter Dunton might remember that guy Peter Dunton.

He said that he wanted to cut the public service and the numbers that he wanted to cut were absolutely massive, of around forty one thousand staff, and the Labor government campaign strongly against that, but seven months after they've won the election, well, they're starting to do or talk about the same things that they criticize the Liberal Party of trying to do, which is job cuts, efficiency drives, cutbacks, whatever you want to call it.

A lot of this is still going against what the Labor government promised at the last election.

It's really odd a question a lot of people ask when you start searching Australian politics and getting what is the Labor Party?

And you learn all about the philosophy and the history of it and its members and its key members, and it's less key members.

And I think the better question these days is why is the Labor Party?

Is it?

And compared to the last government, it's much better than what could have been, but that was an extremely low bar to cross, and to be better really isn't good enough.

We have a Labor government that I guess tries and forgive the long pauses everybody, I'm I'm.

It does baffle me in that a labor government essentially led by the center left isn't being a little bit more brave in its reforms.

Now.

I know that the psychology of the Whitlam dismissal looms large in any labor government.

But we had a fairly reformist labor government under right, not a perfect government.

If we were around then we'd have still criticized elements of it.

But you can point to the school, you can point to the cash bonuses, you can point to the growth in the improvement in medicare.

And under Gillard, which is a different government, essentially the same period of time, you have the NDIS, you have the Royal Commission into child abuse.

You had things that you could point to that they did that were very much within the realms of what is labor, hence answering the question why is labor?

Under the Albanese government, we have a it's a competent government.

We're not besieged by scandal and criminality and everything as we were under the last government.

It's a very tight cabinet and we can point to some things have done that are good, and I don't want to disparage the good stuff.

As critics, we've got to point out the good as well as the bad.

They did this well, this was a good piece of policy, or this was a good piece of polity which could have been well executed, but there were external factors or what have you.

I think what we need to the question is why are they so soign managerial?

Okay, you don't want to be Whitlam dismissed or even Rudd cut down by the mediocrits, and Gillard cut down by the mediocrites in the party in their case, you don't want to be Keating.

But by the time he becomes Prime minister, the public is burnt out from constant reform and so they give him the first election, but in the second election he gets tossed for the different I was going to say less desirable, but let's be balanced.

The different Howard government, who was probably more reformist than the Keating government ever, could.

Be, oh for sure, but just in the other way.

Yeah, just in the other way.

And so the risk is that Labor ends up with no support.

One of our commenters said that, and this is actually a good point worth considering.

I think it was the person who calls himself Michael's Curious World that if you're getting hammered by the right and you're getting hammered by the left, you must be pretty much on target.

And there's certainly an argument there, but from I guess more of a left perspective.

It would be nice to see a labor government start to look at the inequalities in the system, and they're not going to change everything in a term and maybe not two terms.

That's we're not that idealistic.

Well, I guess the issue is that there's a lot of issues that do need to change, and we tend to get more questions towards the end of the year.

I don't know why that is from our audience, but you know, we're here to try and answer those questions.

But the question that we commonly get is, well, there's certain things like reform to gambling advertising, and that question is, well, if there's so much public support for something like this, like reforming the gambling advertising, why doesn't the government do something about it?

And the public absolutely hates gambling advertising.

We hear that all the time.

It's insidious, it's absolutely everywhere, targets young kids, and you would think that this would be low hanging fruit for a government, but they're just not doing anything about it.

They're really dragging their feet on these reforms to gambling advertising.

And the reason why this sort of stuff happens is that elections happen only every three years, and that's when the electorate has their say about a particular issue, and usually that's muddy with all of these other issues going on during an election campaign.

But all of these lobbyists and stakeholders in this code from the gambling industry, well they have the year of government every single day of the week.

And that's pretty much the same across every issue that you can think of, David.

When it comes to what you would think would be a relatively easy decision for a government to make, it's stakeholder management.

That's what it's all about.

And it's not just the labor government, it's the liberal government as well when they are in office as well.

Keeping the donors, the lobbyists and the captains of industry happens.

So when it comes to cutbacks in the public service or the efficiency, that ends up being an easier option for a government, even though there will be some blowback from that, instead of doing something like chasing more revenue from the mining industry and the mining and the reason why I'm singling out the mining industry that it made two one hundred and ninety five billion dollars in profits in twenty twenty two, just three years ago, and there's no firm figures available since that time, but two one hundred and ninety five billion dollars in profits.

But if you had something like a five percent super profit tax, and I know that they tried that back in twenty ten, it was a bit of a disaster because it wasn't implemented very well.

But if you had a five percent superprofit tax, that would raise an extra ten to fourteen billion dollars, and there's your problem with an efficiency drive within the public service gone.

You wouldn't have to do that.

Then with the leftover money, you could sort out a few other problems within health education, childcare, higher education.

And that's just getting a reform of the superprofits from the mining sector.

So if you're looking at some of the big picture items, this is where go instead of cunning the public service or cunning back on one of the best science organizations in the world.

It was really upsetting to see the labor government cut back the CSIRO.

Now I think I'm going to.

Well, they argue that it's not a cutback, but no, yeah, still, well you're still like eleven hundred jobs that are going.

I think it was a bituta advocate who said later CSIRO research finds that labor can go get fucked.

Yeah, you can play all the accounting games you want.

The fact is that there's so much untapped income resource.

And this is even before we enter into newer ideas like MMT, which says there's unlimited money, you just have to manage how you print it up.

Essentially, there's plenty of science work for the CSIRO to do.

Just off the top of my head.

Batteries.

How great would it be for Australia to have developed the first battery that could go a thousand kilometers right, A tanker patrol for a current, or food tech getting out all the toxins from food yet being able to preserve it, and all of that medicine, on and on it goes.

We're actually communicating through technology that was developed by a CSIRO Wi fi.

Yeah, but in all seriousness, CSIRO properly utilized the ABC properly utilized, and I don't mean as a government propaganda device, the public service being able to have an effective and we've always focused on the wrong word.

Things don't have to be efficient to be good, but things have to be effective to be good.

And of course Murdock Press points out one person who may or may not have roughted the system on the NDIS and extrapolates that to ninety nine percent of people.

Sure go through, cut out the things that don't work, but expand it, make sure that those who need it get it.

Education.

Imagine that fourteen billion dollars into New South Wales education in schools like Burrona and Gooduga and Burke and all those in the Far West.

For those of you not in New South Wales and who might not have heard of those towns, or if you're in Western Australia, the Far East.

But imagine all those schools getting an injection of fifty million dollars a year out of that fourteen billion dollars from a five percent super tax.

All of the playgrounds would be paid with gold.

Yeah, and there'd be money left over.

Same with health.

The crisis in New South Wales hospitals, the crisis in Victorian hospitals, and I suspect all the other states too would be solved in a stroke just from that super tax.

We could abolish the GST quite easily.

And then and the abolishing the GST should bring prices down, of course it would.

They'd keep the prices the same and pocket the profits but that's but the onus of tax collection goes off the poorest people and back on to the richest, which is where it should be.

It's not about always stopping you making money.

No, if five percent, five percent of your income is fourteen billion dollars, you're doing okay.

You can afford to give back to the place that allowed you to make this kind of money and have this type of success.

And again, good on you, good luck to you.

I'm not.

But seriously good luck to you.

But you didn't do it by yourself.

You didn't do it in a pocket, and you didn't do it with resistance.

You might have thought you had resistance, but you didn't.

You were given an easy path so to a grudge.

Giving a little bit back I think seems to me is mean spirited, greedy and really uncalled for and un Australian.

Kept low during COVID headline inflation began to peek at the tail of the coalition government, spiking during the first alban Easy term at seven point eight percent before a long decline, but in the last six months a slow but steady uptick to three point eight percent.

When you have the withdrawal of state energy subsidies you're always going to get.

You were always going to get a lift.

The annual inflation rate has shifted up to around three point eight percent and heading up to the Christmas period, well that's not such a good sign.

Now the inflation rate is complex, but after the government through absolutely everything getting the rate down to around two point three percent, well it suggests that there might be deeper structural problems within the economy.

Now.

Productivity has gone down, and that's not about people slacking off.

Most people are working harder than they've ever been working before, but corporate investment in the road had to get up at ten thirty five the other day.

It's appalling, and we need to work harder.

So it's not about people slacking off, but corporate investment in their own companies through innovation and better technology.

That's really gone downhill over the past five years or so.

And a lot of this gets back to the changes that the Howard government made to capital gains tax and the Franklin credits system back in two thousand and Twenty five years later, we're getting all of these problems with under investment and a focus on speculation and shareholder dividence.

Now the big issue is that we've got a very unbalanced economy and there's a lot of structural problems that have existed for a long time and it's resulted in this lower productivity, weak business investment, unaffordable housing, the government that's not collecting the revenues that it needs to collect.

And there's new evidence that for the first time ever, the Labor Party is considered by the electorate to be the superior economic manager compared to the Liberal Party.

And sure, over these are just opinion polls and it's based on research produced by the A and U.

But it suggests that the Labor government has built up a level of trust the electorate for what they might be doing in the future or what they would like to do in the future.

And there's all of these economic problems that we've talked about.

National government debt is up to one trillion dollars.

We complained about that when the Liberal government was in office.

I'm sure the Labor government might not have caused most of this debt, but it's still their responsibility to fix it up with the government now.

And if we know what these problems are, why isn't the government fixing them up?

Another one of our questions that we get from the audience, and if these problems are structural in the economy, well then the solutions have to be structural as well.

The whole government managed to do it between nineteen eighty three and maybe nineteen eighty nine or thereabouts.

There was a lot of economic pain that was caused towards the end of the nineteen eighties as well, but that resulted in thirty years of a very strong, recession free economy after nineteen ninety one.

But the Labor Party didn't actually benefit from all of those strong economic conditions.

There was the Howard government that mainly benefited from that.

But sometimes you just have to do these logical things in the national interest, and I think this is one of those occasions.

Yeah, I don't know if there is a timidity in the left.

I don't know if it is that that segment of right wing labor that was had elements of neoliberalism just doesn't want to let go.

And we see this in America.

We see it in Britain too, that basically non labor policies being put forward by a labor party, and here too, I suspect there's many factors in Australia, you do have the post traumatic Whitlam syndrome.

I think we can call it three or four reformist labor governments since then, not being dismissed brutally losing offers.

Sure, but that's democracy at work.

I think too.

The Urban Easy government's plan of burning political capital when it's nece leaded to be burned over things that should be burned over is a habit they've seemed to have gotten into.

And I guess too, we've got the notion of once you're in power, you want to hold into power and you think that the center is where you hold power from.

There's a lot of evidence for that, but there's also a lot of evidence against Howard governed from the right, Morrison governed from the right, Abbott governed from the right, Turnbull governed from the right.

And the last three governments were in power for nine years, kept winning elections that they shouldn't have won, frankly, but scrape through.

Howard was in for thirteen years.

So this idea that you need to govern from the center seems to me to be a rightist idea to bring in centrists who actually to the right of the center.

I think the Labor Party has to sit down and think, is the center such a good place, maybe we should try it from the left.

They have left control at the moment, and that Albaneasy was from the left, Gallagher was from the left, Wong is from the left.

Those are very senior the Prime Minister obviously senior people who could affect policy in a more consistent way.

Okay, now Wong's Foreign Minister, so there's other issues there.

It's much harder to be left or right.

It's not impossible, but you've got to make compromises.

And before you all start typing, I know that Penny Wong has bitterly disappointed with her support of Israel over Palestine.

I will say that her language seems to be softening, but she's got a long way to go before she can be accepted as the potentially great foreign minister that she held the promise for.

And before the rest of you start typing, yes, I know that there's a lot of compromises and it's hard to judge when you're not in the position.

And all that, Hello to everybody, You're all loved and required here.

It seems to be a lot of keyboard typing going on at the moment.

My boards are lighting up here, and I'm not excusing or trying to defend anybody of just throwing the facts out there, as they say on Sky after Dark, except minor actual facts that you can chase up.

I think the left has broken into timidity and fear.

I won't use the word cowardice, because that's a cheap shot in a way to cut the public service when they should be expanding the public service, if only to help the job figures.

And you can't tell me that there aren't plenty of jobs that need to be done at a federal level, so that you're not just putting people behind a desk campaigning them basically a glorified doll.

There's plenty of work out there, the frontline services.

In fact, one of the figures I've seen is that labor has hired a lot more frontline service people, and that I think is true in certain labor states definitely, and probably true at a federal level.

And two we go down to one of my themes of politics is that politics is perception.

It's not what you do, it's not how you do it.

It's what you've seen to have done and how you've seen to have done it and that nothing else matters.

So you can be the most useless, incompetent minister.

Something goes hideously right for you for once and you're the hero of the day.

You can be like Peter Garrett, who in the Royal Commission was praised as being extremely good minister, probably one of the best on the front bench at the time.

Yet yes, the general punter in the street and he was a terrible minister who got it all wrong.

Royal Commission, which was set up to crucify him, basically found he did an excellent job, but the perception is he didn't, which is of course unfair.

Life is unfair, and that's part of the deal in a Westminster system.

As the minister, not only do you get all the credit, you get all the blame.

I guess Peter Garrett has to live with that, and i'd have thought that the experience in the front bench and on paper it was one of the best front benches that we'd had since nineteen forty nine.

It was up there with the Hawks first term.

It was up there with Menzie's first term.

The forty nine ers, the class of eighty three as they were called, just really skilled talented ministers.

I think they need to go back and start to use those talents and be seen to use those talents, and you might get a government in which will deserve to maintain its majority rather than potentially slip into a minority situation, which I don't think can happen numerically yet the next election.

But I don't know that you want the government to fade away.

I think you want it to burn out, and that might take the same amount of time three or four even five elections, but you want it completely spent and with an Australia changed for the better rather than they did some good things and they did a whole lot of things that made no sense and we're not quite sure why we voted for them, except that the other side was such a rabble.

This is New Politics with Eddie Jokovic and David lewis the best podcast on Australian politics and news commentary.

You can support us through Patreon and substack, and also find us at newpolitics dot com dot au.

Australia isn't hosting the COP thirty one environment conference next year that's going to be held in Turkey, and David, I think if the meeting had gone ahead in Australia would have been a bit of green washing anyway, Australia can't really hold this sort of meeting if we're approving all of these gas projects and cole maines, and I think all we would have been doing is lecturing all the other countries about what to do, but not following our own advice.

So Australia, who's missed out on that?

But I don't think it's such a big deal.

But closer to home, there's been a lot of negotiations on environmental issues, mainly about the national interest exemption for gas and mining, which really means the interests of the mining industry and exemption for our donors.

And most of this is going through the usual process of politics and has got nothing to do with the end result.

But once again we see the Labor government trying to present itself as a pro environmental party but then going on to do the exact opposite.

And on the final day of parliament the government did make a deal with the US training Greens on environmental protection.

It shopped around with the Liberal Party to get a deal done, which is not really known for its environmental credentials.

And of course this part of this is that process of deal making of politics.

But it shouldn't take this long, or it shouldn't have taken this long to get this deal made and the reworking of this legislation it actually took five years, so it was the back end eighty months of the back end of the Morrison government in now three and a half years of the Urban Easy government.

But the point is, David, that it just should not have taken this long to get around to final this deal.

Now we're within shouting distance of some of the years that were meant to be key indicators where we're supposed to get stuff done by twenty thirty two.

That's only what five or six years away, which is no time at all.

There's a at least one to two elections between now and then three.

Really, we've also got the changing technologies, which some of those changing technologies use inefficient coal mission stuff too.

The time to stop and I say this fully aware of the irony that I'm on a podcast.

The time to stop talking is now, and the time to start doing was yesterday.

Oh well, all of this stuff should have started back in nineteen ninety one.

Yeah, exactly when.

And we tell the mining industry, you don't have to go.

But you can't do it that way anymore.

If you can't afford to do it that way.

There's plenty of people around the world who you're happy to come in and do their new technologies.

And of course when they talk about, oh, you'll lose all that tax, they're talking about the tax they lose from the employer.

Rupert Murdoch egregiously said he shouldn't have to pay text because he employs five hundred thousand people who pay tax, so why should he have to.

He probably doesn't pay that much tax anyway.

David, No, but that was his argument.

Well, he doesn't have to pay any tax because it's his employees paying it.

And that shows the attitude.

If you've got nothing, we'll take it from you.

If you've got everything, you want to keep it.

It's and Gina Reinhart's people in Africa get paid two dollars an hour and they're really happy.

Two dollars a day, David, two dollars a day.

Gosh, yes, two dollars a day and they're really happy.

It shows the level of unbelievable hide of these people, and their time is really done.

I've said a million times.

Mining industry.

We still need to mine, We will still need raw metals in orders to build stuff that we need.

We're not going to lose mining, but we have to reduce coal mining.

We have to reduce oil drilling because that technology, after two hundred years and it's really one hundred and fifty years and it's really only one hundred and twenty years, is coming to an end.

And you don't want to get caught behind trying to sell stuff that nobody wants.

Well, no you don't.

But it's I think it's just becoming increasingly unclear what label actually wants to do on the environment or with the environment.

Well, I guess it's trying to be pro mining without looking like it's pro mining, just despite this deal that they've just made with the Australian Greens.

But on the surface there's a lot of green language.

There's talk about the climate targets, clean energy rest We can admittedly some of that is being done net zero by twenty fifty.

There's a target for twenty thirty.

I don't know if we will actually reach that or not.

It seems like we're lagging behind on the twenty thirty targets, behind all of this, the policy direction looks remarkably similar to before, the pro mining, the pro gas, the pro resources exporting.

It's not all that different from the liberal parties, just stressed up a lot more carefully.

And I saw the Resources Minister Madeline King in Perth during a media conference.

It's almost like she's more enthusiastic about mining than the mining industry itself.

And it's also like the government is trying to speak in different languages to different audiences.

And I guess that's part of the political process, but different languages to different audiences and hoping that each of those audiences doesn't understand what's being said to everyone else.

But it just seems to me that the environment, despite this deal, it's being seriously left behind.

There's a lot of rhetoric about the environment, but when you have a closer look, a lot of it is window dressing and business as usual for the mining and the resources industry.

Yeah, when we start talking about these things, we've got to get these people out of the room.

They've had their say, we know their arguments, thank you for presenting them.

Let's talk to us some other people and okay, let's be fellas se if we can accommodate some of the stuff.

I don't think we can anymore.

I think we've got to just wind it back.

As I said, we can't get rid of it completely.

That's just idealistic talk that doesn't really grasp the reality of the situation.

But we can reduce it a significant amount.

And Australia has always taken the lazy option.

There's a lot of great innovation here.

Look at the csiro.

Oh wait a second, but Wi Fi comes out of Australia.

We keep hearing about the Hills Hoist and the Victor lawnmower and things like that.

Sure, but the penicillin comes out of Australia too.

We have this ability to be an economy of progress rather than an economy of growth.

And I think.

That's where a brave and a fast seeing treasurer, which and again i'll be fair, Jim Chalmers seems to have it in him somewhere could transform the Australian economy forever in a way that benefits I'll say everybody.

It won't be everybody, but a vast majority of people.

And one other point that came up during the week was the well it came from the former Labor Minister, Ed hughs Itch, former minister.

He's actually still in the Labor Party, still in the Parliament, but raising concerns that we've known about for some time about Australia's outrageous gas export contracts.

And these are the deals that were locked in under John Howard back in twenty oh five.

And David, I think we can safely say that all of the problems of today all lead back to John Howard, There's no question about that.

But started minissing a sock, John Howard, where did you put it?

You can blame him for everything, but just getting back to bed Hugh's it.

So here's Ed Hughseych during the week.

We cannot tolerate being lectured to by overseas buyers telling us what we can do with our gas when they on sell the gas they get from us to make a massive profit.

Last year, Japan resold a third of the LNG at purchase from Australia, making over a billion dollars in profit and in quantities large enough to supply our domestic industry for a year.

This nation should not be reduced to pauper status in this country.

It's almost like we're embarrassed about possessing so many resources and are so timid we feel we just have to cop what overseas companies and buyers tell us what rot or.

We're spooked by this argument.

If we demand too much, these companies won't invest in new fields.

Lame we beg for the scraps, forced to cop globally index pricing that has absolutely no relationship to the cost of production.

We need supply at the right prices, and we need contracts that are fair.

Tinkering at the edges is not enough to fix this.

So, David, whichever test you want to apply, economic tests, credibility test, logic tests, sensibility test, sense it even use the good old fashioned pub tests if you like.

But the deal that John Howard set up in twenty oh five, which was then extended by the Rudd and Gillard governments, failed every single one of those tests f for fail most definitely.

And these deals it's all causing these high gas prices and high energy prices today, which is one of the main factors behind these higher inflation rates.

So it's all into linked and the government hasn't even looked at this issue yet, and instead of asking whether those contracts still serve the national interests and they obviously don't.

We can see the evidence of that.

The government just seems to be letting this situation go.

Now.

The government just can't rip up these contracts.

We saw what happened when there was the cancelation of the French submarine deal several years ago.

That costs around three four billion dollars or whatever it was.

But what the government could do is that they could create a domestic gas which is what exists in Western Australia, and that's before exporting this gas, and they would stabilize gas prices in other parts of Australia.

But the gas industry doesn't they do not want that.

But if the government isn't going to reduce environmental damage from these new gas and cold fields, you know, if they're going to pay lip service to all of that, well the least that they could do is examine the impact of all of these deals on consumers and on energy prices and domestic supply.

But environment So they're not even going there.

But environmental issues, I still think that's the big issue.

And the Liberal Party, well, they paid a heavy political price for being seen as anti environment well, not being seen as anti environment.

They are anti environment, So I guess the question is, well, will the Labor Party end up paying the same political price.

I'm not sure if it will, because the Liberal Party is actually even worse on the environment.

So if that's the case, well where do you go if you're concerned about the environment.

Yeah, you have the Greens, of course, who have been consistent in their approach to protecting the environment.

Anyway, I know that there's a lot of discussion within the Greens about how best to do it, but that's the nature of democracy, I think.

I think it's fair to say that every Green member is concerned about the environment in a way that every Labor Party member isn't, in a way every Liberal Party member isn't, and in a way that every National Party member isn't.

Now Again, to be fair, there's a range of views in all of those parties, and there are some quite staunch environmentally positive people in all of the parties, but how much, say, do they get?

The other problem with the Greens is that as things stand now, they're nowhere near being able to form an influence in government.

Yet they've got to keep plugging away at it.

I think there's enough grassroots in the Greens to keep them as at least for the next couple of election cycles.

If they don't improve their position, they may start to lose members to rival organizations or to apathy and disappointment.

But at the moment they're in a position where they can come back.

And I'm fairly certain that the relative silence from Larissa Waters is not just the press ignoring her, and we'll get into that in a little bit, but also that she's spending a fair bit of time trying to rebuild the policy aims of the party in a way that makes sense not just to her members, which is to the members of the Greens, which is important, but also makes sense to the broader voting public.

But when it comes to Suzanne Lee, I was listening to an interview with her with Billy fitz Simons of The Daily Os interviewed Suzanne Lee and really did an number honor really did a number onner.

Susan Lee couldn't answer any or wouldn't answer any of the questions.

Fitz Simons would ask a question, and Susan Lee tried the old of answering the question you wanted answered, But fitz Simons was tenacious and so Susan Lee, instead of coming out looking like she controlled the interview, came out totally destroyed.

And in that interview, Susan Lee said she's an environmentalist, and she kept going back to why did you make these compromises and she couldn't really answer, And of course what was unsaid was that the fact, the fact that Susan Lee is bound by her donors, and she's bound by the Natti right wing of the party who wanted it gone two minutes after she was elected.

They just got to find the right person.

And yeah, so even though I do believe that she is very much in favor of the environment in that small old government almost libertarian way, don't she's not a libertarian, but that if we all look after it and things will get better.

I think she's bound in a way that Anthony Albanezi is too.

He's bound by the right of the Labor Party no matter what his private views are.

Now again, I'll be fair.

The leader has to represent everybody, and that's one of the things.

There's stories of mensies in the corridor in Parliament House during a cabinet meeting, walking outside into the corridor from the meeting room, shaking with wur Age saying how can twelve men be so utterly stupid?

So I will acknowledge there's probably a bit of that in both the cabinet and the shadow cabinet too.

Things don't always go your way and then you've got to defend it.

But in all Fenners, the Greens are our best hope I think for environmental policy, but they're probably too far away at the moment to be able to do much except get onto television, get onto radio, get onto TikTok, and keep spooking the issue.

This is New Politics, available through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, Audible, and YouTube, and also available to support it Patreon, sub Stack, and at our website New politics dot com dot aure.

This all gets us to the point that we've been trying to make today, which is what is the point of this labor government and why are they actually there?

And David, we are great believers in that idea of being in government has to be a lot more than just being in government.

And if you're there just to be a seat warmer, what you may as well just go and do something else, run a corner shop or ice stream shop or something like that.

But politics might not be for you.

And this is always going to be our biggest criticism of this Labor government.

And I think maybe we started complaining about two and a half years ago and people might be a little bit sick of it, but that's our biggest criticism of this Labor government.

That is his main ambition seems to be in government for as long as possible, and there's a whole lot of reasons for that, which we talked about before, but that's the main reason, and managing what is already there instead of being a reforming government, and just remembering that.

This is what Prime Minister Anthony Albenezi said on the first day of parliament back in July twenty twenty two.

So I say to everyone here, all of my parliamentary colleagues, don't miss the chance.

Because you're not here for that long.

None of us will be.

And when you're sitting on the porch thinking about what you did, you can either have a source of pride or a source of regret.

No middle path, no middle path, make it a source of pride.

And a lot of people were certainly supporters of the Labor Party.

I think they took that at face value.

No regrets you're still all the things that the Labor Party is well known for or supposedly left a center party is supposed to do.

But it's just that we've had very little of that, and that's why I think there's a lot of disappointment hanging around, certainly from us anyway.

And people can say, oh, look, the Labor government has been a very competent government and on so many levels, well, yes that is true, but all it is doing is managing what was already there, what has been left behind by the decades of the Liberal Party being in government, and a lot of that is not working, and it hasn't been working for some time, and it does need to be fixed.

After the nine years culminating in the Morrison Crisis Center, in which it didn't fix crises, it formed them, and with the disgraceful robodebt in which all involved there should have been jailed, not just the politicians who approved it, but the public servants who pushed it through knowing that it was illegal.

Maybe being a bit harsh there, but certainly the ministers involved should have been jailed, I think, or at least tried.

But I think with the overwhelming evidence they should have been jailed.

Now, I think you've got every right to be.

Harsh, and yeah, yeah, yeah, and you have to be harsh.

This cost lives.

Now, I know how many lives are at stake, But once you go over the number zero and yes I know mathematician zero is the number, I know, but once you get more than zero, that's it.

You look at why Now we can look at the Pink Bats and there were four deaths in the Pink Bats, but that was through dodgy contractors in Queensland cutting corners.

Nowhere else in the country was at a problem.

And with Robodet the deaths were suicide and we don't know how many were just from heart attacks and strokes and things caused by stress that are much harder to quantify.

That point about legacy politics is a funny game going with the biggest vision, of course, and circumstances are against you.

If we look at the Curtain government, one of the greatest governments that we ever had, it was stymied in a lot of what I think John Curtain would have wanted to do because there was a war on and Chiffley did a fair bit of what Curtin wanted to do with a little bit of his own.

Although the two men were very close, they were genuinely close friends.

You can look at the Hawk government.

The big one, of course, is the Whitlam Labor government, which seems to have not left much of a legacy except for the notion that universal health can work, that universal education can work.

Multiculturalism does work.

Despite what John Howard said the other day.

He said, apparently do not I know multiculturalism hasn't worked, and tried to give some merely mouthed excuse that amounted to I'm not racist.

But John Howard hasn't worked.

Yeah.

If you look at the legacy of Howard, it's a legacy of disaster.

It's a legacy of destruction.

It's a legacy of making Australia a smaller place, less open place, a less happy place.

No, it's not completely all of those things, let's be fair.

People still migrate here and love it.

But it was certainly a smaller country after Howard's era, which Australia was a bigger country after nineteen seventy five, it was a bigger country after nineteen ninety three, it was a bigger country after twenty thirteen.

And I don't understand why as a politician, you wouldn't say what legacy can I leave and try and leave that legacy.

Of course, it's not always going to work.

Things get in your way, events happen, events, dear boy, who was at McMillan, the British Prime minister.

You have people on the other side politics trying to stop you.

That's okay, You're used to that.

You want that.

That's part of the training, that's part of how you make things better.

You also have people on your side of politics, asked Julia Gillard, how well.

Did she do?

I think that she Yeah, she could.

Have done a lot better with a better party.

I'm not trying to say she was absolutely hopeless and had no achievement.

That's not true.

But she spent a lot of time trying to deal with a federal party, as did Malcolm Turnbull.

Well, Labor has already been in my office for three and a half years and pretty much by any measure that you use, and based on the last election results, of course, well they're in for at least six years.

Going back from twenty twenty two, they'll be in office for at least six years, problem more than likely nine years.

They'll probably get the next term as well, but we never know what's going to happen around the corner and maybe even twelve years.

And one thing that I keep hearing is is this idea of just wanted to see alban Ezy in the next term.

It's going to be elbow taking on the Tories or whatever.

He said, you know, I'll fight Tories.

And but the point is that that's at least two years away twenty twenty eight.

First of all, he has to win that election, which as I just explained, is very likely.

But then you've got to have legislation put in, you've got to have the Rgi Bargie debates and all that sort of stuff.

And I don't know what exactly what we'd be waiting for anyway, because we've just not got no idea about what they'd want to do in twenty twenty eight and beyond.

And I just think that if the alban Easy government does last twelve years, that it's just not going to be too much different from these first three and a half years.

And that's because governments announce who they are very quickly when they come in.

Whitlam did it immediately, so did Bob Hawk.

So to John Howard and whatever you think of John Howard, and obviously I don't think very much of John Howard, but most of his defining changes occurred between nineteen ninety six and the year two thousand.

So the question is, well, what are Anthony Albanese's reforms And a lot of it has been tinkering and it's almost as though we've got a labor government that's managing someone else's program and that's essentially that Howard era neoliberalism and some of which labor helped to create.

And the attempts at reform, not that they were big ticket items, but the Voice of Parliament and the National Anti Corruption Commission failed.

That was a dismal failure.

And the Knack is a basket case.

I think they've only prosecuted one case of corruption over the past two and a half years.

Housing policy, well, it's become this slow, constipated process and it's used as a weapon against the Australian Greens.

Hex is still there.

Although they had the change to indexation just for this year, the housing model is still broken.

So this is a government that's tinkering at the edges.

But if you're running a system that you inherited from somebody else, but just a little bit more competently or more competently, I'll grant them that.

What's the point of winning government if you're not going to introduce your own agenda.

It goes back to the I think the question we all should be asking, not what is labor?

That's been answered a million times in very excellent ways.

Frank Boniono's book on Labour's very good, for example, came out recently.

It's a great rate why is labor?

And what has happened over the last thirty years that has made labor governments so timid?

If you look at state governments, we have a min's government which is barely not completely, but barely recognizable from its predecessors Victoria.

Dan Andrews was stymied a bit by the fact that he had to deal with COVID and dan Andrews did a lot of reform and is considered by most people who have been a good to even great Victorian premier, depending on where you stand on the spectrum.

Think he does have his statue in Treasury Place coming up pretty soon.

He does have his statue, much of.

The chagrin of the conservatives in Victoria.

Poor old Jeff Kenned who fell short two hundred days from getting a statue.

It's all about the statue in politics, isn't it, David.

It is can you get a building named after yourself?

And maybe that's the way Richard Casey left a legacy, whether you liked it or not.

And he gets the building, the Richard Casey Building in Canberra named after him and a suburb.

Casey becomes Governor General, and he's Foreign Affairs Minister, and he's a treasurer in the thirties and has a long distinguished career on the other side of politics, and is appreciated because he was independently wealthy and didn't have to go into politics at all.

And I'm using Casey as an example of someone who most of our listeners.

Would highly disagree with, but he left a positive legacy mostly.

The Vietnam War was a bit of a problem.

Of course, the great left reformers.

I don't really have to go into you all know them, so yeah.

I struggled to see what it is that you get into the government.

You've spent all those years in opposition against the corrupt government, who each time you go to beat them you get blown apart by internal roofs in your party.

It's only from what's say, twenty thirteen through, it's nine years before you're able to beat them, And with a hostile press, with a skeptical electorate, you want to think now we want to not only do we want to change things, we want to show you that these changes benefit you, that there is a reason to vote for us.

It's not just we're not liberal, we're not the National Party, you know.

Well, is it also a case of maybe we are expecting too much from a government or any sort of government.

I don't think we are.

We should actually be expecting a lot from any sort of government.

And I'm just reminded of that story about Bob Hawk when he was asked about what was the first thing that he noticed when he went into the Prime Minister's office for the first time and as prime minister.

And I think the journalist was expecting Bob Hawk to say something about the nice, colorful curtains or the nice fountain pen that he got as prime minister.

But the first thing that Bob Hawk said about what he noticed when he walked into the prime ministerial office was the limitations of power.

That was the first thing that he noticed.

But as analysts, we've got to remember that the government can't do everything.

Oh sure, And we haven't got a dictatorial sort of system in Australia.

We've got the Westminster system, which is based on the go and there are limitations of power.

But even still Bob Hawk managed to achieve a lot of things, and so to Gough Whitlam, so to John Howard, a lot of bad things, but he still did it.

And it's not as though these governments had access to some kind of magical system that Anthony Albanese doesn't have.

All of those leaders had the same constitution.

The size of the Senate is exactly the same, seventy six seats.

There were one hundred and twenty five seats in the House of Representatives in nineteen seventy two, one hundred and forty eight seats in nineteen ninety six, one hundred and fifty seats in the House today, So all of these numbers they're not that different.

So it's the same system in place.

The constitution hasn't changed, well, I think it changed once in nineteen seventy seven, but it hasn't changed since that time, so it's got the same rules of Parliament, everything is the same, and I think that Anthony Albaneze has got a far more favorable Senate than any of those prime ministers at that time, so what is the excuse.

There might also be a case where the Labor government they actually got a landslide victory after their first term, so they might be thinking, well, this is what we do to stay in office the bare minimum.

We're safe, we're managerial and low risk.

We just manage what's already there.

But I just don't think it's going to be enough day.

But I just think that it would be better to be a short term government of six to eight years where you do a lot of things, implement your agenda, and sure that needs to be better down, but you just do as much as possible in that, you know, than six to eight years.

That's not really short term, but that should give you enough time to implement a good agenda.

I think that's much better than being a twelve to fifteen year government where you just don't do very much except be there for twelve to fifteen years.

And if all you're doing is managing someone else's agenda with a bit of tinkering here and there, I'm sure, you might be doing that a lot more competently.

You get your portrait up in Parliament House and then you fade away.

What's the point of that?

Yeah?

Would you rather be a chapter in the book than a line in the table.

Or the footnote?

Yeah?

Yeah, yeah, you don't want to be a footnote, you know, and Whitlam you'd want to be a few chapters in that book.

Yeah.

I started many years ago, and I don't know that there's the market for it, which is why I abandoned it.

Basically an annotated bibliography of the prime ministers and what was written about them in significant terms.

And Whitlam has had the most books written about him, followed by Billy Hughes, followed by I think Hook comes in next, but Whitlam has had something like sixty books written about him.

Might have been something like that, He's had twelve.

Both were very prominent prime ministers, and of course both men have had multi volume biographies written of them, Jenny hawkins excellent biography of Whitlam and fitz Harding's two volume biography of Hughes, which was done in only seventy five but is still definitive.

But I guess the point is.

It's not so much about the portrait in the Parliament House or anything like that, or how many books you get published after you finish your prime ministership.

It's actually about what you do, exactly.

It's about the effect that you have on the nation.

Yeah, exactly, and it might be a great effect.

You might be a beloved figure like Hawk and Rudd.

You might be a respected but not terribly liked figure like Fraser at the time.

You might be you don't want to be a McMahon to just take off, give our usual suspects a break, swan into government, swand into the prime ministership having backstabbed everyone along the way and achieved nothing or achieves very little.

And yeah, it's if you're going to be prime minister, be a Whitlam or a Menzies or a Howard rather than a McMahon or a Cook or any of the others who when you're reading the lists and you've never heard of them.

That's it for this episode of New Politics.

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