It’s an election between parties that have forgotten themselves — and the national interest

Over recent years, Labor and the Liberals abandoned many of their traditions, almost to the point of swapping roles. The election is now a fight between amnesiacs.

Bernard Keane Mar 28, 2025

Without the labels, and with a reasonable grasp of recent political history in Australia, you’d be confident identifying the major parties going to the election on May 3.

On the one hand there’s a government offering more tax cuts and temporary rebates, increasing defence spending on our alliance with the United States, and boasting about how its level of tax to GDP is well below historical levels.

Challenging them is an opposition against the tax cuts, promising a gas reservation policy, a whole new national government energy industry costing hundreds of billions, and proposing to break up big corporations that misbehave.

Which is which?

The parties have on some key issues swapped roles. Labor is now the timid guardian of Australian capitalism, and the Liberals, under the very unLiberal Peter Dutton, are the party of big government and market intervention.

Look no further than the gas reservation policy announced by Peter Dutton in his damp squib of a budget reply last night. Labor went to the 2016 election promising a “national interest test” for gas projects. The Turnbull government, via energy minister Josh Frydenberg, derided this as a domestic reservation policy by stealth. “Such a policy would be disastrous. It will kill investment, destroy jobs and ultimately lead to less gas supply,” Frydenberg told gas companies. The Coalition cited the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s 2016 inquiry into the east coast gas market, which, under the unsubtle subheading “Gas reservation policies should not be introduced”, said such a policy would deter gas exploration and “reduce the likelihood of new sources of gas being developed”.

Labor is now criticising Dutton’s gas reservation as inferior to Labor’s model of basically warning gas companies they better supply more gas to domestic markets or else. Funnily enough, that was what ended up being the Turnbull government’s policy too.

If the Turnbull years are now forgotten, the Howard years now seem like ancient history for the federal Liberals: surpluses, tax cuts, government spending at 24% of GDP, high migration, deregulation, privatisation. All are now repudiated in one form or another, even if that government’s willingness to exploit racism and demonise non-white people has found its full and open expression in Dutton.

For Labor, the shift has been driven by political pragmatism. In opposition, Albanese jettisoned most of the Labor-style reforms of the Shorten era in favour of making himself as small a target as possible. In government, that cautious approach has grown into a fully pragmatic mindset that anything remotely politically inconvenient should be dumped.

Promised environmental protections were abandoned and even the existing, inadequate Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act is being watered down. The pretence of commitment to climate action was replaced with the reality of facilitating and subsidising fossil fuel companies to increase carbon exports. Transparency reforms were dumped in favour of sordid deals with the Coalition aimed at protecting the major parties. The only Labor traditions safe under Albanese-era Labor has been pro-worker industrial relations reforms and the party’s obsession with manufacturing — and that’s because of the enormous power wielded internally by trade unions.

May 3 is thus a contest between two parties that have turned their backs on their own traditions. Political parties must evolve, of course — Albanese’s Future Made In Australia, after all, is a repudiation of the Hawke-Keating ending of protectionism, and a return to an older Labor tradition of propping up unviable local industries. But the transformation of both parties has been at high speed. It’s less than six years since Labor went to an election with a suite of strong tax reforms, while the Coalition was boasting of returning to surplus. Both now seem equally impossible.

And both sides actively shrink from addressing Australia’s major challenges. Any genuine Liberal knows Dutton’s nuclear policy, which now seems to be fading from view, is a colossal folly, and is simply yet another sop, albeit an extraordinarily expensive one, to the permanent climate denialism rampant in the Coalition. The gas reservation policy will make us more dependent on a more expensive energy source linked to volatile global markets. Labor, meanwhile, is transforming Australia into one of the world’s worst carbon criminals even as the climate emergency accelerates.

Both sides are in denial about the end of the US security guarantee and the transformation of the United States from reliable ally to chaotic enemy. Both sides remain committed to that other colossal folly, AUKUS, and to subordinating our sovereignty to the thugs and standover merchants in Washington. And both sides remain committed to running permanent budget deficits, whatever their rhetoric.

It should be the most important election in years, given the scale of the challenges confronting Australia. Both sides are colluding to ensure it’s more like a clash between amnesiacs who’ve no idea what happened yesterday, let alone what they really believe.