CAMERON MILNER: Average Albanese feeling the heat as Jim Chalmers has eye to Labor’s future

They say a week’s a long time in politics, so the next six months of Albanese will subject Australian voters to a very special kind of purgatory.

Albanese, even by his own standards, has had a shocker of week. It started with the negative gearing “drop” that saw Albo left all alone with the microphone. Like a stand-up comedian at a yoga retreat nothing he said came out right.

He tried to duck and weave and resorted to the language he’d used to lie before of “not my plan, not my policy”. The same lines he’d used time and again until his backflip on Stage 3 tax cuts. Not his policy right up until it was his policy.

Australians don’t like politicians on a good day, but in the midst of the worst cost-of-living crisis in a generation he’s looking more than just tricky, he’s being called a liar on national TV, on radio and in print, to say nothing of the socials.

Chris Dore in The Nightly generously conceded Albo should be forgiven because he’s only ever been average while the editor of the Saturday Paper opined that Albo had the policy bravery of a fart.

Albanese is struggling with the political schizophrenia of wanting to be a hard core Leftie warrior that pulled the chicks at a dive bar in Western Sydney in his uni days and someone so scared of his policy shadow he daren’t stand for anything.

His one big vanity project, the Albanese Voice didn’t just lose, it lost so badly Albo will be forever remembered as the whitefella who mansplained for First Nation’s leaders because after all it was ‘just a modest ask from a Leftie looking for a spot in history’.

The problem for Albo is that Australia desperately needs reform. It needs new ideas to last longer than 48 hours and that won’t wilt under the pressure of breakfast TV.

Labor is best when its being reformist. Chifley, Whitlam, Hawke, Keating and Rudd. All visionaries. All wanted to leave the country a better place. They might have all risked being there for a short time, but for Albo he only looks like he wants to be there for a good time.

Labor should be able to have a mature, challenging conversation with voters on equity and fairness within our tax system.

Labor under Shorten took negative gearing and capital gains tax changes to the electorate to ask for a mandate. It lost, in my view, not because of these proposals in 2019, but because of the addition of franking credit reforms.

Whitlam introduced tariff reforms and opened our economy to the world. Keating floated the dollar.

Swan even commissioned Treasury oddbod, Ken Henry to scribble down some ideas to change the tax system in Australia. A younger Jim Chalmers worked for Swan at the time.

Henry’s work laid the foundations for the Carbon Tax and the Mining Tax, neither of which went so well for Labor when announced, but at least they were bold ideas, just delivered terribly by Swan.

Labor might have lost badly in 2013 off the inability to argue the case for reform, but at least under Shorten and Bowen Labor developed a tax reform plan from Opposition and took it to voters and came within one seat of winning from nowhere.

Fast forward to the small target era under Albanese where Labor’s grand ambitions have been put on a heavy diet of Ozempic and been slimmed right down.

The Greens are out there capturing the imagination of young voters, even if the ideas are simply nuts. The union movement is bereft of policy reformers. The days of Michael Costa and enterprise bargaining or the grand architecture of the Accord under Bill Kelty simply passes Sally “I hate Setka” McManus by.

Chalmers by contrast was constantly urging a re-think of Stage 3 tax cuts, despite being slapped down by Albo. In the end persistence paid off and Albo implemented Jim’s changes.

There’s a great saying of President Ronald Reagan: “When you can’t make them see the light, make them feel the heat”. Well Chalmers is bringing the heat and now breathing down Albo’s neck.

Chalmers didn’t go to Canberra to be a time server. He didn’t go to get on the piss and collect travel allowance. He’s not content with long stints in Opposition like the 20 of the 28 years Albanese has been in Parliament.

He brings a refreshing sobriety to public policy debate and its why Albanese sees him as such a threat.

Chalmers stands in absolute contrast to Albo. Across the detail, policy smart. While Albo was swanning around at a Grand Final function having lost his Sydney Swan’s scarf, Chalmers was just back from China, still on the job putting the final touches to his second surplus announcement.

Australian politics is best when it’s a contest of ideas and the voters get to judge who is best to lead.

The problem with Albanese is he thinks just being there is an end in itself.

Shouting into the echo chamber of Canberra politics “Dutton is unelectable” doesn’t pass for a re-election strategy. Winning the pats on the back of Albanistas - a weird menagerie of spoon-fed bottom feeders and policy gimps - doesn’t mean that punters are voting for you.

It’s going to be a long hot summer ahead for voters as Albanese waits for luck to turn his way, for a cool change or a thunderstorm to blow that stale fart smell from the office.

Expect more policy breakouts, more days lost to a PM unable to say a simple ‘Yes or No’.

And a lot more time for Chalmers to continue to show that hard work, policy guts and a clear eye for Labor’s future looks like.

Cameron Milner is director of GXO Strategies and a former ALP State Secretary with three decades’ experience on Labor campaigns