In 2023, Albanese faces the biggest opportunity he’s ever had

A year ago Anthony Albanese was out and about, lecturing Australia’s incumbent prime minister. Scott Morrison needs to get out, go to medical centres and find out what’s happening, he said.

“People are having their vaccine appointments cancelled, and there is a national shortage of rapid tests because he didn’t order enough,” said the Labor leader. It was all part of Albanese’s grand plan, that “kick with the wind in the final quarter” thing that’s now part of Australian political folklore.

Whether it was carefully calculated genius or the usual mix of perspiration and plain luck, we can argue for as long as the pubs and cafes are open.

It was, at least in hindsight, a brilliant start to one of the better years the Australian Labor Party has had in the past quarter century. Pretty well everything went right and even the spectacular disasters — day one on the campaign trail anyone? — were mere speed bumps. Labor was in better shape and Albanese ultimately saw Morrison and his clown car government off the national stage.

The emergence of a majority Labor government was bad enough for the conservative side of politics, but this humiliation was worsened by the running of the electoral boards by the Greens, which picked up three new seats from the inner-urban ring in Brisbane, and a new insurgent crowd: centrist, female independents tagged as “teals”.

The most enduring jewels in conservative crowns and tiaras like Kooyong in Melbourne, Wentworth and North Sydney in New South Wales, and Curtin in Perth were dragged across from the Liberal column to independent. Now, it’s year two. Labor has had eight months in office, having made the most of it in every way. Albanese and his ministry of the competent and coherent have wasted little time. They’ve methodically, properly and — for modern Australia — uncharacteristically gone about the business of doing what they’d said they would.

Election commitments have been fulfilled and promises met. Any voters paying attention have been shocked. Those glancing casually are pleased.

No wonder Labor and the new prime minister ended the year on top in the polls with a rise of five to six points since the election (a preferred vote of 57% and a primary share of just under 39%).

Albanese has a net satisfaction rating of plus 32% while the LNP’s Peter Dutton is minus 10%. They are 68% apart in the preferred prime minister stakes.

Making good on those election pledges is critical in rebuilding trust after more than a decade of unfulfilled expectations, broken promises, lies and deceit, but the creation of an agenda for the future is just as vital.

Albanese, his treasurer Jim Chalmers, the rest of the leadership team, his campaign boss Paul Erickson and personal office consigliere Tim Gartrell know that whenever the next election rolls around, voters will pay on what’s been done for them lately, not on fulfilling two-year-old pledges and preventing disasters.

This is why Albanese and Chalmers — shaping up as the most formidable prime minister and treasurer team since John Howard and Peter Costello — will have to craft a big agenda for 2023.

There are plenty of opportunities that can be distilled into two-time blocks. 

First, the build-up to the 2023 budget in May. The government is going to have a shelf-load of reports handed to it in the months leading up to and after the budget. It began last week with the latest numbers on our population illustrating a workforce challenge — something that’s going to be brought into sharper focus next month when the Productivity Commission lays down an analysis of the future of work.

Chalmers is uniquely suited to step up on this front. More than five years ago he wrote, with former NBN boss Mike Quigley, Changing Jobs: The Fair Go in the New Machine Age, an often overlooked book. The pair wanted a conversation about one of the biggest policy, societal and political challenges on the table in those quiet days of 2017 (although myriad, evolving, constantly moving targets have since rendered that challenge to just another item on the to-do list).

If Chalmers has the courage to follow through with some of the ingredients he’s been tossing into his own future-of-work gumbo over the years, we could have a substantial plan for where the country goes in a workplace world put into a higher gear by COVID-19.

Down the corridor, Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen is rolling out a few consequential reports in his wheelhouse, including former ANU professor Ian Chubb’s much-anticipated review of the integrity of the Emission Reduction Fund’s carbon credit guidelines. There will be a concerted effort to give the current emissions safeguards policy some teeth (it’s likely this will evolve into what’s effectively an emissions-intensity emissions trading scheme).

Beyond these high-calorie policy helpings, others are just as rich. In March, the future of the Reserve Bank will be on the table, at about the same time Defence Minister Richard Marles will have a roadmap for where we go on the next generation of submarines and the broader, comprehensive defence strategic review.

Any one of these has the makings of an agenda-setting way ahead, one built on whatever’s in the May budget. They also provide a context for the next chapter in the Albanese story. There are plenty of “what about” corners of public policy demanding attention, and these will be worth attending to after the budget in the lead-up to Labor’s other significant event of the year: its national conference in Brisbane in August. This is hard stuff with some hard choices to be made. But in these opportunities lies the kind of agenda Bob Hawke and Paul Keating shaped 40 years ago.

Medicare is in crisis and needs national leadership to bring it back from the abyss. Funding for the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) is also under siege, and there’s a housing crisis that’s getting worse by the day. New natural disasters not only expose the fragility of our environment in these times of change but also point to an insurance market that’s at breaking point.

If Albanese and Chalmers can’t make something of all this — and a few other peripheral challenges — they are, to paraphrase Keating, just camping out.

Albanese, as seeped in Labor history as any leader and prime minister for half a century, will have a chance to shine when he presides over the conference. He understands the visceral passion Keating described when he talked about the Labor Party decades ago, particularly regarding what it means to be in the federal caucus.

“That dash across the political heaven, going after the things that matter, that get the heart beating faster, that make it all worthwhile,” said Keating.

“And, of course, of being there — at the centre of the action.”

That’s where Albanese sees himself. We’ll see in seven months whether he makes it.