Imagine a politician. He is a 61-year-old man, from a centre-left party and traditionally connected to the labour movement. He took over as party leader after a devastating election loss in 2019.
Despite originally hailing from its left faction, the party tacked back to the political centre under his leadership, eschewing redistributive policies that, rightly or wrongly, were blamed for alienating middle-class voters. Indeed, he dropped most of the party’s policies altogether, heralding a “small target” strategy aimed at not giving his opponents much to scaremonger about. He placed a premium on competence and reliability, at the risk of appearing dull.
Having assured key constituencies he was a safe pair of hands, he led his party to victory at the subsequent election—one of vanishingly few leaders of his party to do so from opposition. However, his party’s nationwide vote share dropped to historic lows. They won votes in the right places, but not with an emphatic national mandate, nor much public goodwill.
His victory was aided by the party’s main conservative rivals fighting enemies on multiple fronts. Yet the winners themselves also lost ground to insurgents, in the form of the local green party and independents in multicultural constituencies. Their majority is safe for now, but built on rocky foundations.
You probably assume I am referring to the UK’s new prime minister Keir Starmer—and I could be. But I could equally be describing the Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese, and his Australian Labour Party (ALP).
I recently moved more than 10,000 miles from Melbourne to London but, observing the recent UK election campaign, it often felt I’d hardly moved an inch. The leaders of my old and new home countries are eerily similar in a variety of ways.
This is partly an understandable coincidence. At moments of profound electoral disappointment, both Labo(u)r parties turned to “safe” leaders with similar instincts—cautious, pragmatic, methodical. Since then, however, their similarities haven’t entirely been an accident. Key Starmer aides have reconnected with their sister party down under. According to Politico, Morgan McSweeney, the director of campaigns for UK Labour and one of Starmer’s closest advisers, received regular briefings from Paul Erickson, national secretary of the ALP, throughout the campaign, to the extent that McSweeney started “mimicking Erickson’s turn of phrase”.
It’s no surprise that Starmer’s team would draw lessons from their Australian counterparts, as the latter have always been a few steps ahead. Australia has three-year electoral cycles at the federal level, so the ALP faced an election in 2022. Its victory with a dour, pared-back platform confirmed the inclinations of those leading UK Labour, who then doubled down on that strategy in the 2024 election.
For Britons, Albanese’s performance in his two years in office could be instructive. Given Starmer has taken cues from Albanese’s example in opposition, he may well continue keeping tabs on “Albo” in government. In particular, the Australian case will be important as Starmer makes a crucial choice: will he remain cautious, or will he grow more radical in Number 10, as some commentators assure us he will?
Australia’s record will not reassure those hoping for boldness. Albanese has not grown more radical in office. His abundance of caution shown in opposition has calcified into a stubborn inoffensiveness in government. His is perhaps the Labor government most acquiescent to the status quo in Australian history, and most willing to cede ground to its enfeebled opponents for fear of them attaining an advantage, and to trade in stop-gap measures.
Take, for instance, Labor’s recent policy package for students. One key plank was a “practical payment” for students undertaking mandatory work experience, which currently entails hundreds of unpaid hours. However, the payment is around $8 per hour (£4), only for students in four specific disciplines, and subject (as practically everything in Australian policymaking is) to a household means test. Oh, and it won’t be brought in until July 2025. The caveating, delaying and downscaling of worthy ideas is a hallmark of federal Labor’s approach.
This reservation is highly unusual. The ALP was historically considered the “engine of Australia’s national progress” for its reformist zeal, most notably by the late historian Manning Clark. Clark periodised Australian political history as long stretches of inertia under centre-right Liberal-National Coalition (LNP) governments, punctuated by great leaps forward under Labor. The Curtain and Chifley governments saw the nation through the Second World War and “won the peace” in an Attlee-esque manner; the Whitlam government buried backward social and immigration policies, cast off colonial deference in foreign policy and expanded the size and ambition of the federal government; Hawke and Keating liberalised the economy while establishing universal healthcare and the superannuation pensions system; Rudd and Gillard, while far more sclerotic, established a National Disability Insurance Scheme and National Broadband Network while seeing the country through the global financial crisis virtually unscathed.
If Albanese were to resign tomorrow, he would be an outlier compared to his predecessors, and not in a good way. His one major policy gamble—a referendum on a constitutionally-enshrined Voice (advisory body) to parliament for Indigenous peoples—was defeated by voters unconvinced of its purpose (and bamboozled by right-wing misinformation which Albanese failed to effectively counter). He has modestly tilted the industrial relations landscape in workers’ favour, rejigged his LNP predecessor’s inequitable tax cuts, and boosted childcare subsidies. But against the weight of contemporary crises and progressive expectations, these are drops in the ocean. His government has mostly tempered expectations and managed decline.
This might be justifiable for some, were he accumulating political capital to be cashed in during a second term. But he is now less popular than ever. Unless he turns things around, Albanese looks likely to cede territory at the next election, due by 2025. Recent polling shows he has slipped behind the LNP in the key battleground state of New South Wales. On current course, Albanese may still scrape into a second term, but probably with a parliamentary minority, leaving Labor dependent on the Greens and independents to pass bills. Albanese’s personal approval rating has also hit a new low, with just 42 per cent of respondents describing him as “decisive” compared with 52 per cent for the leader of the opposition, Peter Dutton. In opposition, vagueness and limited horizons can be assets. But in office, voters eventually expect leaders to actually lead.
Albanese, who once styled himself as someone who loved to “fight Tories”, is landing too few blows. To paraphrase the former Australian prime minister Paul Keating, it’s “like being flogged with a warm lettuce”. Or as the Australian satirical news website the Shovel’s recent headline read: “Albanese Calls Keir Starmer to Offer Advice on How to Slowly Squander a Majority by Appeasing the Opposition and Avoiding All Risk on the Way to Losing Voter Confidence”.
The Starmer government has hit the ground running in its first week, with a flurry of announcements including planning reforms, overturning the ban on onshore wind turbines, scrapping the Rwanda scheme and more. All are commendable and exhibit an in-vogue “supply-side progressivism” befitting many of the moment’s challenges.
The one thing these moves have in common, however, is that they don’t cost much money. Eventually, Starmer will exhaust these low-hanging fruit. Even if Labour can revive sluggish economic growth, you can’t complete an estimated £1.5m of necessary maintenance and upgrades on each of the nation’s secondary schools with “stability”. That problem requires public spending. As does the crumbling NHS, infrastructure and much more.
Thus, we come to the elephant in Starmer and Albanese’s rooms: tax. In Australia, the treasurer Jim Chalmers has at times mooted a conversation about tax reforms that would properly fund the increased social spending the nation needs, as the population ages and care needs rise. Yet Albanese has repeatedly favoured tinkering at the edges of faltering programmes.
In government, Rachel Reeves as chancellor has softly signalled she might open her mind to tax reform, despite shying away from it on the campaign trail. She has requested a review of public finances by Treasury officials this week, amid calls from Labour MPs to raise the capital gains tax to boost government coffers.
The key question for Starmer is whether he enables Reeves to pursue more ambitious changes, or sticks to the no tax rise promises for fear of electoral backlash. Britain’s five-year electoral cycle might provide an advantage here, as electoral judgement isn’t as constantly imminent as in Australia. By the time the next election is called, many voters will have forgotten a tax backflip and see the benefits of the spending it enables.
This is where the Australian example should serve as a warning: If a progressive leader shrinks too much, they can disappear entirely. Rather than follow his Australian counterpart, Starmer should chart his own course. Perhaps he could even teach the Albanese a thing or two.
