Labor might have won the Eden-Monaro by-election this weekend, but Anthony Albanese’s victory smile looked about as certain as an exotic animal at a Chinese market. Whatever brave face “Albo” wants to put on it, he knows he’s got a lot more to worry about winning than Scott Morrison has about losing.
On the face of it, this should be an important victory for Labor. Eden-Monaro is regarded as Australia’s leading bellwhether seat: for 40 years, the party that won Eden-Monaro at a general election also won government.
So, why should Albanese be worried?
Firstly, because Labor’s win was decidedly Pyrrhic. Secondly, because yet another Labor Banquo’s ghost has started haunting Albanese’s footsteps.
It would have been astonishing if the Coalition had won Eden-Monaro. It’s an iron rule of politics that governments do not win by-elections. The only time in Australia’s history that a federal government won a by-election was Kalgoorlie, in 1920.
In fact Labor suffered a heavy swing of just over three percent against it. The two-party-preferred vote result was a knife-edge 50.4 – 49.6. The Liberal’s primary vote actually exceeded Labor’s. It was only the preferences of a motley crew of minor parties that helped Labor limp over the line.
Labor’s preferences were aided immeasurably by outright political bastardry, both from Nationals’ leader John Barilaro, and the the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party.
The Nationals are the Liberals Coalition partners. The Liberals are furious that the Nationals ran at all in Eden-Monaro. In key contests, the two parties will usually agree to let the party with the best chance run uncontested. “If the Nats hadn’t run a candidate, we would have won the by-election,” said one Liberal.
Even worse, Barilaro openly sabotaged the Liberals’ campaign by telling National voters to preference Labor.
Barilaro’s betrayal only just exceeded that of the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party. The Shooters, Fishers and Farmers have risen to prominence on the back of rural conservative voters disaffected by the leftward drift of the Coalition. Yet the SFF’s preferences mainly flowed to the Labor candidate.
This puts the SFF on the same side as the Greens and Labor. Rural conservative voters haven’t been this badly shafted since Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor, both supposedly representing conservative rural seats, delivered the Prime Ministership to Julia Gillard in 2010.
In fact, it’s the Gillard era that Albanese may well be looking back on with terrified deja vu.
When Julia Gillard wrested the Labor leadership from Kevin Rudd in a spectacular coup, Rudd seemed consigned to the dustbin of history. But never underestimate a former Labor leader scorned. Rudd became Labor’s Mrs. Rochester. The more unstable Gillard’s reign became, the more fires Rudd set in her attic. Eventually he escaped and burned Labor’s house right down.
Now, it looks like Labor has another mad ghost in the attic.
On the very day of the Eden-Monaro election, former Labor leader Bill Shorten came out of the political shadows to announce his “policy vision for a post-pandemic Australia”. Shorten also has a major essay forthcoming in The Tocsin, the magazine of Labor think-tank, The John Curtin Research Centre.
Shorten’s “post-COVID” policy prescriptions are exactly the same nostrums he took to the last election: more government, more spending, more grievance politics and class warfare rhetoric.
Shorten is also trying to capitalise on intra-party power shifts. The ALP’s national office is broke, now that those Aldi bags of Chinese cash have stopped. The cashed-up Victorian Right are on the warpath. They’re hacked off with both the party’s left and its NSW branch over everything from Chinese influence (ironically enough, given Victorian state Labor leader Daniel Andrews’ cosiness with Beijing) to its over-enthusiastic recruiting from Sydney’s Muslim community, and a suspiciously concurrent rise in support for Palestinian activism – and anti-Semitism.
Shaoquett Moselmane summed up the “NSW disease” in Labor: a Muslim puppet of Chinese influence, whose brother blamed “Zionists” for his downfall.
Shorten seems to think that the stars are aligned in his favour. Anthony Albanese is from both the party’s left and NSW. There are few other serious contenders for leadership. He also apparently thinks that the lukewarm socialism rejected so emphatically by voters in 2019 has a chance for a second-run in a post-COVID political landscape. But will voters buy it?
Voters rejected Shorten’s policy proposals once already. The soft-left ground has largely been claimed by Scott Morrison – for better or worse – with his big-spending COVID-response packages.
If all that isn’t enough, those historic rape allegations aren’t going away.
Still, Shorten obviously thinks that the Labor party needs him as leader again – and that says more about the tragedy of the modern Labor party than anything else.
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