Politics with Michelle Grattan: Paul Kelly on why Albanese is ‘misunderstood’ and Taylor needs to stay

In more than 50 years of covering Australian politics, journalist Paul Kelly has “certainly never seen a crisis like this”.

Kelly is editor-at-large at The Australian newspaper and an author of major histories of Australian politics from the 1970s on. His latest book, “The Twilight of Exceptionalism”, shines a critical light on the often wasted years of prime ministers Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull, and Scott Morrison.

Today, the Liberal Party finds itself in a worse position than after last year’s devastating election loss. Many of its voters have turned to One Nation. The party is on its second leader of this term, and its long-term future is in question.

But as Kelly explains in his new book, some of the Liberals’ present troubles originate in the Coalition’s troubled years in government from 2013 to 2022.

He joined us on the podcast, reflecting on why the Liberals are facing an “existential crisis” the likes of which he’s never seen before, and how the Labor government is trying to tighten its grip on power.

The Liberals’ ‘daunting’ challenges

Kelly describes today’s Liberal Party as “bedevilled by this combination of really dangerous forces”.

It’s just extraordinary that we’ve had these polls now for quite a while showing that Pauline Hanson leads the major parties on the centre-right, and some of the polls showing that she was even ahead of the Albanese government. So what we’re seeing is we’re seen a cultural and political crisis on the centre-right of Australian politics.

[…] Now I’m not saying the Liberal party can’t recover, I wouldn’t say that. But I’m saying the task of recovery for the Liberals is going to be truly daunting. And what Angus Taylor’s got to do above all else [… is] to get the Liberal primary vote ahead of One Nation.

If you can’t do that, if he goes into the next election with the One Nation primary vote ahead of the Liberals, then the results will be a catastrophe in the subsequent parliament for the Liberal Party.

Yet Kelly argued the Liberals shouldn’t gamble on yet another leadership change before the next election to solve their problems.

I think the Liberals have got to stick with Angus Taylor. A lot of people won’t agree with that. I think continuing to change the leadership of the Liberal Party is a mistake.

I like Andrew Hastie very much, and I respect him very much. But it’s a mistake for the Liberals to use as the sole criteria for the leadership who makes the toughest comments about Pauline Hanson.

[…] If the party can’t unite behind Angus Taylor, then I don’t really see how it’s going to unite behind anyone else. So I think they’ve got to live with the situation they’re now in and make the most of that.

How past PMs ‘misread’ Australia

But Kelly said it’s unfair to blame all of the Liberals’ woes on its current MPs. Instead, he concluded that successive Coalition governments from 2013 to 2022 “misread the times and misread the country”.

When Tony Abbott first won in 2013, there was a tendency to think this would be business as usual, another successful Coalition government, just like John Howard. But in actual fact, the country had changed. And the country wasn’t prepared for some of the Liberal policies, in particular, the first Abbott-Hockey budget [in 2014].

[…] The other really important point to, of course, is that the government was bedevilled the whole period of time with leadership instability, leadership rivalry, divisions over fundamental policy.

And at the end of the day, when they lost the final election in 2022, the electorate had decided they didn’t trust the Liberal Party anymore, they didn’t have confidence in the Liberal party. It had chopped and changed its policies too much and there was a confusion about what the party actually represented.

Why Hanson ‘is not a viable’ national leader

As for the Coalition’s biggest challenger from its right flank, One Nation, Kelly said he suspects the party will lose some support over coming months.

I think the One Nation vote will come off from where it is. I don’t know how far it’ll come off. But the point I’d make is at the end of the day, I think that the Australian public are not going to cast a vote without cognisance of the governing merits of the political parties.

Now, as far as I’m concerned, and I think this is a view widely held, Hanson is not a viable contender in terms of any role in governing Australia.

Her policies are a mishmash, to the extent one can sort out what they actually mean. They are really dangerous for the country. They would damage our living standards, damage the ordinary household, and turn Australia into a pariah nation, frankly.

On Albanese’s ‘long game’ – and troubles ahead

Kelly said Anthony Albanese’s first term as prime minister was “careful and cautious. He didn’t want to upset the horses.”

But that early caution had meant Albanese is now a “misunderstood and misinterpreted prime minister in many ways”.

I’ve argued that Albanese is a transforming prime minister. Not in any particular week or month or year. But essentially, he’s playing a long game. And he’s playing a game in which he hopes to get – or at least assure for the Labor Party – a three-term Labor government. Well, we’re not even at the halfway mark of that.

And […] we can see that he is transforming the country. He runs a big government, a big spending agenda. He is committed to ambitious targets when it comes to climate change and renewable energy. He’s transformed the industrial relations system in favour of the union movement. He’s committed to a number of social initiatives, in particular with the care economy.

[…] If this continues at the current rate, at the end of three terms, this Labor government will have transformed the country […] in a way that the centre-right will have a lot of trouble reversing.

But Kelly predicted harder times ahead for the Albanese government – and Australia.

[The government’s] economic policies are failing and they’re failing big time. And I think that if we look at what’s going to happen over the next 12 months, it’s going to be a pretty frightening scenario for the government.

Because essentially we are locked into now a low-growth situation, stagnant living standards, flat-line productivity, falling real wages, inhibited investment. So this is, overall, a really daunting and challenging situation for the government. I think they’re going to be in a lot of trouble.

Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.