Above politics

Near-universal welcome for the federal government’s massive $130 billion JobKeeper package leaves Labor in a quandary. Support for direct wage subsidies was emerging as a major point of policy difference between the Opposition and the government – now the prime minister and treasurer have backflipped and stolen Labor’s position. Manager of Opposition business Tony Burke was graciously supportive in a press conference this afternoon, reassuring that Labor would work with the government over the detail of the package, and work to speedily reconvene parliament to pass enabling legislation. Burke claimed the package was a vindication for Labor, and got in a niggle: “If this had been done when we were first calling for it, there are hundreds of thousands of people who might not have had their lives turned upside down over the last two weeks.” This is no doubt true, but the fact will be lost in the wave of public relief if the government manages to get Australia through this pandemic with minimal loss of life – as is starting to seem possible for the first time – and with a recovery underway due to unprecedented Commonwealth spending.

There is a limit to how much credit is given to politicians who claim to be governing from opposition. When he was a shiny new Opposition leader, Mark Latham tried it in 2004, forcing John Howard to abolish the generous parliamentary superannuation scheme and to protect the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme from the US Free Trade Agreement. Latham crowed, but voters couldn’t have cared less. In a somewhat similar vein, Bill Shorten was hardly rewarded for forcing the Medivac laws onto the Morrison government. The general public cares about outcomes – much more than who said what first – and the best Labor can do now is to remain constructively engaged on both the big-picture response to the pandemic and the policy details. The Greens, also seeking to claim a measure of policy vindication, are in the same position.

So far, it does seem that the all-hands-on-deck spirit of constructive engagement is prevailing. Editor-at-Large Paul Kelly wrote [$] in The Weekend Australian that senior Labor sources had confirmed that while the Opposition “believed in being bipartisan and constructive on the fiscal package, it disagreed fundamentally with the strategy in place to fight COVID-19 … These differences will be critical at the next election.” Well, those differences keep evaporating – largely because Morrison keeps adopting Labor’s positions. The Australian’s Troy Bramston today attacked [$] the Opposition leader for dissing the national cabinet as “really just phone hook-ups of COAG”, and the headline read: “Albanese’s posturing sinks national unity”. Tosh. 

Labor is being constructive. Witness the close cooperation between ACTU secretary Sally McManus and Attorney-General Christian Porter, also reported [$] in this excellent piece in The Weekend Australian.

In today’s press conference, Tony Burke demurred on whether Albanese had breached the spirit of bipartisanship by saying the government should deal with health and the economy “in that order”. Burke explained: “The best thing you can do to have a strong economy is to have a healthy Australia. And that’s why if you get the health response right here, then the economic response becomes a much easier pathway. And I was with Anthony at that presser here in Sydney that day and that was the exact focus that we were making.” 

Any Labor attempt to make political mileage out of the government response to the coronavirus pandemic would backfire assuredly and swiftly. Burke acknowledged as much this afternoon. “If anyone right at this point is thinking about the next election then they’re missing the point,” he said. “The nation’s in a crisis right now. And our role, entirely, is to make sure that when the government puts forward something that’s good that we are there to make sure it can happen as quickly as possible. And where we can see gaps, like we did with the wage subsidy, we argue it, and when the government says no that won’t happen, we keep arguing it. We keep making the case so that, both for business and for workers, we can get outcomes like we got yesterday.”

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