Albanese does not need to sacrifice his agenda. On the contrary, he could say so, as the addition of green amendments to labor legislation in the lower house should act as insurance against any possible obstruction of the Greens in the Senate. The Greens would not want to suddenly appear as the party of the mess.
Albanese should rule as if he were already in the minority. It should also approach states and territories with the same notion in mind. Remember that Morrison’s best days as prime minister were when he was able to share the podium with prime ministers and prime ministers during the first wave of the pandemic.
While the Albanian can expect wall-to-wall Labor governments on the continent in the short term if Daniel Andrews returns to Victoria and Dominic Perrottet falls to NSW, history says the state cycle will end up moving in the opposite direction. Albanese must incorporate a new model of cooperative federalism before it begins to lose Labor colleagues at the state government level. Otherwise, you risk a future like Morrison, where prime ministers help decide a federal election.
The new federal parliament is nothing like the last one because it suddenly looks more like the nation it is supposed to serve. It’s more feminine and more diverse, but the twist is that no party, not even the winning Labor side, came close to catching a sector representative of the Australian people on 21 May. The independents and the Greens who claimed 10 of the 20 seats they changed hands were noticeably whiter than the general population. The exception was Dai Le in Fowler, west of Sydney.
Meanwhile, eight of the 10 Labor seats in the Liberal Party were in more diverse constituencies than the general population. The exceptions were Boothby in Adelaide and Robertson in NSW, the only seat that changed hands in the regions.
This is not a bad thing because the successful candidates in each contest looked like their constituents. But it does underscore the paradox of a more representative parliament. The ruling party faces opposition and a cross-bank from parts of Australia that are potentially beyond its own life experience.
To understand the dynamics, it is important to appreciate the subtle difference between the young Australia of the inner city suburbs and the middle ring, which helped fuel the green and green uprisings from Perth to Brisbane, and the new Australia of the center and outside. -suburbis, where work has traditionally enjoyed a natural advantage.
In the run-up to the election, Labor had 35 of the top 50 non-English speaking electorates, the Liberals 14 and Greens leader Adam Bandt had the other in the Melbourne electorate. These seats are where Albanese got his most support. Labor won five non-Liberal seats: Reid, 11th for non-English speakers, and Bennelong (14th) in Sydney, Chisholm (16th) and Higgins (45th) in Melbourne, and Swan (36th) in Perth, while Fowler gave in. to an independent.
The Green Blades picked up two of the Liberals in the top 50, namely North Sydney (38th) and Josh Frydenberg’s Kooyong (40th). The other four – Goldstein in Melbourne, Wentworth and Mackellar in Sydney and Curtin in Perth – were all out of the top 50, as were Green’s three gains in Queensland, Brisbane and Ryan from the LNP and Griffiths from Labor.
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This suggests that the threat of greens to Labor is not yet at the same level of existential crisis as the greens present for the Liberal Party. The Liberals’ problem begins with the counting of people in the Coalition’s joint party hall. The Queensland LNP has 21 members in the lower house, while the NSW and Victoria nationals have 10 more. There are only 11 Liberals in the city outside Brisbane, and there are 16 regional Liberals outside Queensland.
The successful Labor governments of the past that made social and economic reforms, and a long term in office, had two advantages. First, their leaders had served in previous failed Labor governments, most notably Curtin and Chifley, then Hawke and Keating. The second advantage was the perpetual division on the Conservative side of politics.
Albanese has both factors in his favor, as an eyewitness to the lost opportunity of the Rudd-Gillard years, and as a beneficiary of the liberal implosion in the cities. If he is true to his promise to return to good governance, he will have to include many more voices in our national conversation than the 77 Labor members of the House of Representatives.