Australia has consummated a second man date with the prime minister. Now it’s time to clear the air about what we have consented to and the nature of the relationship we will share with him over the next three years.
Despite general dissatisfaction with the state of the field, we chose the steady guy whose main trick is his lack of tricks over the tough guy withradioactive ideas.
While they had some performance issues in the lower house, the Greens, whose result in any other cycle would have been heroic, emerge as the nation’s preferred chaperone with the power to shepherd or stymie the government’s agenda.
Different actors will interpret the election result to align with their own objectives; especially those who want Labor to be more ambitious after its thumping win. This week’s Guardian Essential report shows that proposition is contested.
Interestingly, while a strong majority of respondents want Labor to stick to the policies it took to the election, there is significant appetite among progressive voters, including those who actually voted for the government, to push harder.An election mandate is a tricky thing to articulate. At its heart it is what has been put before the electorate: the specific promises made, the declared no-go zones, the self-set KPIs. Within these parameters there’s a broader vibe that also demands respect.
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Beyond the specific transactions on cost-of-living relief such as Hecs debt reductions, cheaper medicine and childcare, energy bill support and a wafer-thin tax shave, the nature of the Albanese government’s mandate reveals itself like a pathway.
The first element is embedded in Labor’s campaign tagline “Building Australia’s Future”, based on the proposition that the foundations had been set in the first term for a second term of focused delivery.
Executing this part of the mandate is not about conceiving new policy, but building things: affordable homes, renewable infrastructure and the health services required to meet the ambitious promise of 90% bulk billing for Medicare.
This shift in emphasis from regulating to doing embraces the provocation at the core of US commentators Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’snew book Abundance, a compelling critique of progressives as the champions of inertia.
Progressive lore, they argue, is laden with heroic battles for another piece of government regulation, another rule, another restriction. Many of these campaigns have been noble and necessary, but what happens when each victory places another constraint on action?
Observing that the most progressive US states have the highest rates of homelessness, Klein and Thompson argue that while the right hates government and wants to render it impotent for ideological reasons, the left does as much damage by loving it to death.
These words of caution may come too late for the US, where government has been Doge-d, but they are prescient for a Labor government setting itself hard targets the public now expect it to meet.
A separate question shows the extent to which the public is up for acceleration, with very few believing that the key elements of Labor’s agenda should be slowed down or reprosecuted.
A second element of the mandate lies in the aspiration consistently invoked by the treasurer throughout the campaign to make the economy more “productive” – a woolly turn of phrase that vested interests use to promote their agenda.
But if we take the productivity challenge at its true meaning – working smarter to get more value out of both capital and labour – this opens up a compelling case for the government to shape the way workplaces will be affected by AI.
Last year’s Nobel prize in economics was awarded to Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, who argue that technological change only renders genuine productivitywhen it is a tool designed by workers, not a cost-cutting magic bullet imposed on them.
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This is a profound insight that UTS’s Human Technology Institute hasconfirmed in researchwith nurses, retail workers and public servants: workers are the best guides for the design of AI in their industry, identifying the positive use cases, the guardrails and the red lines.
We know that the biggest barrier to adopting AI is the (totally warranted) lack of trust people have in the technology and its deployment.
As with the renewable energy transition, AI’s social licence is under challenge, with many people seeing it as an extractive rather than generative technology. Designing rights to empower workers becomes the key to unlocking the productivity the treasurer yearns.
The third aspect of the Albanese mandate only fully emerged in the generous speeches of victor and vanquished on election night – when kindness, respect and civility, for a fleeting moment, took centre stage.
While the election campaign was robust, it was not fought with hate; the centre held, the angry voices on the left and right underperformed in a time of global chaos. Clive Palmer threw millions of dollars at a vote that was never cast.
The civility challenge is multifaceted : from protecting news media to addressing online harms, placing a duty of care on platforms and enforcing the social media ban on children. All will be vigorously opposed by the tech overlords who now have a tariff-wielding president to fire bullets on their behalf.
Sadly, the two ministers who had done the work on two of the most important building blocks for building a more civil society, the former attorney general, Mark Dreyfus with his privacy reforms, and the former industry minister Ed Husic with his AI guardrails, have been replaced in a factional hit.
Continuing their work and landing these important structural reforms is not just central to the government’s election mandate, but critical to its capacity to keep the public discourse tethered.
While opaque, the Albanese mandate is neither lacking in ambition nor consequence: execution, productivity and civility, channelling the seismic changes in energy, technology and democracy for the common good.
If the new government can find a way to weave these three strands into a coherent whole, rising above institutional inertia to embrace the complexity of emerging challenges in a collaborative way, this may become more than just a casual liaison.
Peter Lewis is an executive director of Essential, a progressive strategic communications and research company that conducts qualitative research for organisations including the ALP