First-term failures don’t always need to be fatal
All first term governments are f--k-ups. Not since the Menzies era has Australia had a new party in power that hasn’t gone off the rails in its initial outing. Even the two greatest governments since – those of Hawke/Keating and Howard/Costello – were plagued by mistakes in their first terms before going on to be lionised in the political pantheon.
The fatal flaw by both major parties ever since is not that they too made mistakes but that they never gave their leaders a chance to learn from them.
The most insightful line ever written about John Howard is that he made every mistake in the book but only ever made it once.
That made Howard the most successful prime minister of the past half-century. Contrast that with those who succeeded him: all knifed in their first term and replaced by a new leader who made their own mistakes and was thus knifed in turn.
And so on into oblivion.
The difference between Howard and the rest of them is the difference between actually learning from your mistakes and simply thinking you can fix them.
And so the question for Anthony Albanese and his government is not whether it has made mistakes – it undoubtedly has – but whether it has the capacity to learn from them.
Internal party coups aside, a new government in Australia generally follows a pretty predictable pattern.
First it enjoys a lengthy honeymoon period during which it is a blameless new face running around hosing down the outgoing government’s spotfires and mending broken fences.
For Rudd this was a reset on climate policy, for Abbott it was stopping the boats, for Albanese it was patching up things in the Pacific.
Then, as the new PM looks around for a legacy, it attempts to implement some bold new agenda. For Rudd this was his beloved emissions trading scheme, for Abbott it was the drastic fiscal and economic overhauls embodied by the 2014 budget and for Albanese it was the Indigenous Voice to Parliament.
If you think you are starting to see a pattern here you are right: they were all absolute, unmitigated disasters.
This brings us to the third stage of new government: the wheels falling off as you realise that implementing big reforms is incredibly difficult, especially when it’s your first time.
For Rudd and Abbott these failings were fatal – their characters were killed off before they even made it to the final act. Albanese, however, has the chance to reveal what he is really made of, what his government really stands for and – more important than those two combined – what it can actually deliver.
The scale of this challenge cannot be overstated. Again, just consider this: the last prime minister who successfully transformed first term failure into long term success was John Howard, more than a quarter of a century ago.
Howard lost three ministers in a travel rorts scandal, a thousand times more votes by backflipping on his pledge not to introduce a GST and almost lost the 1998 election to boot.
Yet today he is remembered as an electoral master and a byword for success and stability.
He is remembered as a man who knew what he stood for. Albanese stands at the same crossroads.
Uncannily, he too reversed a core pledge on taxation because he simply could not reconcile it with his core beliefs.
And as with Howard this broken promise actually aligned his government’s policy with his true values, which is perhaps why the taint of dishonesty does not seem to have stuck much to either.
Then there is the thorniest matter for the modern Labor Party: border protection. When borders are secure the issue recedes behind more pressing day-to-day concerns but it only takes the slightest crack to catapult it square into the government’s goolies.
Thankfully, the government has finally provided a fix for the detainee crisis – even if the Greens and the Coalition don’t want to let them fix it for their own political purposes – but Labor needs to show that it genuinely takes this issue seriously and is not just trying to make it go away.
On the fraught issue of religious discrimination – both towards and by religions – the PM is cleverly playing the Greens and Coalition off against each other and it is vital that people are protected from discrimination because of their sexuality as well as because of their religion – it is a sad thing that these two rights so often collide.
Labor needs to also prove that it genuinely respects and embraces people of faith and is not beholden to the sneers of trendy inner-city atheists.
Lastly, on an issue some 60,000 years in the making, the PM has regrouped from the bruising trauma of the Voice debacle and laudably plunged billions of dollars into backto-basics Indigenous services such as housing and education.
So yes, the PM has made mistakes. But he has so far only made each of them once and he appears to be striving not to repeat them.