MARK RILEY: Labor should be riding high. Instead, they’re fighting for survival and there’s one man to blame

Despite their sharp ideological differences and more than a touch of personal political enmity, Paul Keating and John Howard were both motivated by the same central doctrine as prime ministers.

They believed that no matter how much noise there was in the daily news cycle, if they got the policy right as leaders the politics would take care of itself.

It was Keating’s constant refrain when he and Bob Hawke revolutionised the Australian economy in the early 1980s by floating the dollar and dismantling the economy’s historic layers of mercantilist protectionism.

The profound shift away from a fortress economy drew an anxious, uncertain response from voters and ignited fierce structural resistance from the embedded defenders of regulation who warned of “financial Armageddon”.

But it was the most consequential re-imagining of the economy of the post-war period, setting the groundwork for decades of export-driven prosperity.

The policy was right. And the politics did sort themselves out.

Howard would deliver the same assurance to settle his own nervous party room when it was under pressure over major changes.

The greatest example was his backflip on the GST, which threatened to make his government a one-term wonder going into the 1998 election.

Howard told his troops that good, sound policy would eventually win over the electorate if the government held its ground.

He was right. It did. Just.

But the Albanese Government now appears to be on a quest to challenge that enduring aphorism.

It is chalking up victory after victory on major policy and yet still managing to get the politics horribly wrong.

Some of it can be put down to a universal dissatisfaction with governments at present, fuelled by persistent cost-of-living pressures and a general belief that institutional authority has divorced itself from the challenges of daily life.

That is the mass malaise which is driving people towards disruptors like One Nation.

But most of the Albanese Government’s political problems have been self-inflicted.

Its decision to break its central economic promise and change negative gearing and capital gains taxes set a challenge to rival Howard’s on the GST.

And so far it has failed.

All the governing legislation is now either through the Parliament or on its way.

The deal with the Coalition this week to remove the unintended threat of a so-called “widow’s tax” on properties held in deceased estates removed the final impediment to the reforms’ passage.

But it has taken 14 long, fractious weeks of bare-knuckled politics since the Budget to get there.

And that is with Treasurer Jim Chalmers at the frontline, a man still considered by his Cabinet colleagues as their most effective political communicator.

Now Health Minister Mark Butler, who challenges Chalmers for that mantle, faces the enormous challenge of implementing profound changes and deep cuts to the NDIS before a distressed disability community and a mixture of resistance and unpreparedness from State and Territory colleagues.

That Budget legislation also passed this week. But the real fight is just beginning.

The quest to slash $38 billion from the scheme over the next four years — the biggest cuts to a social program ever — will have real, human impacts on hundreds of thousands of families across the country.

It will literally change lives. And in some cases, not for the better. People with disabilities will have their support reduced. Children with autism will be shifted onto State-based schemes that largely don’t yet exist. And Butler will need to convince those families that it is all for the good.

That challenge begins as the Government’s well of political goodwill is still being drained by the unmitigated disaster of Anthony Albanese’s Melongate podcast appearance.

That single encounter has raised more questions from average voters about Albanese’s character and conduct as Prime Minister than any of the controversies his Government has faced since taking power.

Government MPs tell me that voters are literally stopping them in the street and asking incredulously: “WTF?”

At a time when his ministers need him to lead the battle on policy, Albanese has been ducking and weaving and actively avoiding scrutiny because he got the politics so horribly wrong.

Mark Riley is the Seven Network’s political editor