Was Justin Trudeau right to cast Anthony Albanese as a ‘progressive’?

No-one left behind. Support for those who need it most. A symbol of hope and inspiration. Ambitious climate action. Immense courage. Those are but some of the descriptors threaded throughout Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s 163-word submission on Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s inclusion in Time magazine’s annual 100 most influential people list, published last week.

“Progressives around the world are united in the idea that we should leave no-one behind,” Trudeau wrote. “Few politicians embody that journey as Anthony Albanese does.”

Distilled, the choice phrases and the unyielding idea they combine to evoke — the notion that the arc of political morality bends almost inexorably towards justice and unshackled possibility for all — should be intimately familiar. After all, precisely the same rhetoric underpinned Albanese’s march towards electoral victory 12 months ago and were directly echoed by him on election night.

“It says a lot about our great country that a son of a single mum who was a disability pensioner, who grew up in public housing down the road in Camperdown, can stand before you tonight as Australia’s prime minister,” he memorably told the country.

“During this campaign,” he went on, “I have shared the two principles that will be part of a government I lead. No-one left behind, because we should always look after the disadvantaged and vulnerable. But also no-one held back, because we should always support aspiration and opportunity.”

Political rhetoric, however, is one thing; political rhetoric unmoored from reality, quite another — and it’s the latter that finds reflection in Albanese’s election speech and Trudeau’s rousing depiction of the (muted) ambition of what we might call Albanese the progressive.

In truth and by contrast, Albanese has on more than one occasion since assuming the Labor leadership been surprisingly frank and unguarded about what accounts for Labor’s new politics and where, accordingly, his overriding loyalties and aspirations lie.

In the months before the 2022 election, for instance, he told The Monthly that “his job”, as he put it, wasn’t about fashioning a politics and policy platform that corresponds with or earns the salutations of those who already vote Labor or lean progressive. It more precisely turned on the need to persuade 1 million or so voters who didn’t support Labor in 2019 to shift their allegiance in 2022.

“One of the principles I’ve always said I’ve always been about is being successful at winning elections — I’m not about shouting from the sidelines,” he said in answer to the suggestion he was running the risk of losing his defining values. “My job isn’t to get people who are already going to vote for me to get their pen and mark the [number] ‘1’ with more intensity.”

The same sentiment manifested three years earlier, in the weeks of political purgatory that shadowed Labor’s ignominious and largely unforeseen defeat to Scott Morrison in 2019. There Albanese told Guardian Australia that the politics of the present moment demanded that Labor “examine things as they are” as opposed to what they wished them to be.

“If you don’t start at that point, and the need to win over at least 1.2 million people who didn’t vote for us,” he said, “then we are not going to be successful.”

But rather than define a political strategy that remained grounded in traditional Labor values, a new approach focused primarily on those elusive 1.2 million voters was born.

Few in this connection disagree Labor has readily embraced what’s widely been described as small-target politics on the major policy fronts and challenges of our time. But most continue to see it as a symptom of political timidity — the idea that substantive reform in most areas is too fraught or too chancy to contend with, at least until policy incrementalism has worn thin with the electorate.

The competing narrative is that this smallness of politics — this inaction or incrementalism witnessed in the realms of tax, welfare, housing and the environment — is more an omen than an outlier or brief encumbrance on an otherwise progressive government.

On this view, the fog of small politics has become so pervasive, so weighty of late that it’s looking increasingly less like hypocrisy or regrettable political timidity and something closer to the efflorescence of a new political grammar — one that embraces the lingua franca of aspiration and privileges the interests of Albanese’s wealthy and upwardly mobile above those he associates with his election mantra “no-one left behind”.

It would explain Albanese’s unapologetic insistence, for example, that a $200,000 wage is “aspirational” rather than “top end of town”, and why he has ostensibly remained blind to the tension that resides between Labor’s support for the stage three tax cuts and its refusal to increase JobSeeker to the poverty line.

It would also explain Labor’s temerity to define its deferred and extremely minor tweaks to the superannuation perks of multimillionaires as “modest, calm, balanced”. And, no less, why it has in recent weeks repeatedly cautioned against substantive cost-of-living relief for low- and middle-income earners in the budget by pointing to the spooky menace of inflation, all the while resisting calls for sensible anti-inflationary interventions to the same end, such as a super profits tax.

Similar conclusions ensue when the same lens is applied to Labor’s refusal to raise the Medicare rebate or pause the annual indexing of student debt, its intransigence on policies that overwhelmingly favour the wealthy, such as negative gearing and franking credits and, not least, its otherwise inexplicable decision to postpone substantial reform to the perennial funding inequities besetting the nation’s public school system.

In other words, it’s plain the political faultlines emblematic of the former Coalition government between those who “have a go” and those relegated to less fortunate circumstances by virtue of the lottery of birth endure in many spheres of government decision-making, even if the divisive language of the past has been erased.

This isn’t to suggest Labor no longer frames its politics around the question “Do we best support you?” but it’s now a question mainly directed to those swinging 1.2 million voters and, increasingly, disenchanted small-l Liberal types, not the true believers and progressives. Whether the policy manifestations that follow benefit the latter is, under this gambit, somewhat immaterial.

On this view, the lesson Albanese took from Labor’s 2019 defeat wasn’t simply how to win the 2022 election or how to navigate a pathway to office notwithstanding the obstacles presented by a largely sceptical or otherwise hostile media. It was, as he’s pointed out, instead focused on how to sustain a natural majority of Labor.

“I firmly believe Labor should be the natural party of government,” he told The Saturday Paper on the eve of the election. “Which is why I’ve spoken about two dates: this election and the next one.”

There’s obviously nothing radical or surprising about a party devising strategies congenial to political longevity. But there’s a difference between winning and winning at all costs, the latter of which includes strategies that ultimately hijack the foundational values of a party. Few, in this respect, could forget how readily and ruthlessly the Coalition has embraced the latter in recent times, leaving both its reputation and the standard of politics in a thoroughly debased and scandalous state.

For over a decade, it played a form of what writer David Graham has termed “total politics”, supplanting the question “Do we best support you?” asked of voters with an aggressive pendulum swing between “Who shares your resentments?” and “Can you trust Labor?”. Underlying all this simmered a toxic brew of culture wars and institutional arson, typified by rank mendacity, corruption and division.

No-one in Albanese’s Labor subscribes to this perverse and norm-shattering approach to politics, which lives on under Peter Dutton’s leadership. And indeed, it’s precisely the contrast elicited between the Coalition and the current government that both sustains and burnishes that almost sanctified image of Albanese.

But in at least one important respect, Labor too has embraced a strategy of winning at all costs. How else to explain the volley of unnecessary concessions it has made to the right in the areas of integrity — so far as the anaemic national integrity commission is concerned, defence — as typified by its uncritical adoption of AUKUS and its curious war powers reforms — and climate change, as the weaknesses of the safeguard mechanism attest.

Similar observations apply in the areas of immigration — as the continuance of offshore processing and the race to strengthen the character test reveal; in transparency, housing and even the Voice to Parliament — so far the capitulation on the question of a Yes/No pamphlet is concerned.

Pull back the curtain and what’s laid bare is a rapidly changing political landscape: one in which Labor has consciously stepped into the small-l conservative void left by a now feral opposition bent on electoral obsolescence and fringe issues, and one that asserts Labor as the natural centre-right party of government: economically conservative when it comes to the poor, fiscally populist when it comes to Albanese’s aspirational, while progressive on most social and cultural issues.

The clarity of this narrative is hardly lost when cast against Labor’s victories to date, which span its inquiries into robodebt and Morrison’s secret ministries, stronger protections for workers, childcare reforms, its diplomatic repair work and the decision to abolish the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, among other things. As Crikey has recently pointed out, these were always easy pickings — the low-hanging fruit left by unquestionably the worst government this country has known.

If anything, the narrative is strengthened by the reason former Greens leader Bob Brown recently offered for the particular animosity with which Labor has long held the Greens. “The Greens are morally where Labor should be and used to be on many issues,” he told Crikey. “That is why they hate us — we remind them of where they once stood.”

In other words, the Greens are a thorny, inconvenient reminder of how very far Labor has strayed to the right. Lest there be any doubt about it, recall Paul Keating’s own recent words, where he described the tendency of the policy positioning by the so-called left of the Labor Party, typified under Albanese, to recast Keating himself as a Bolshevik.

The tragedy, of course, is that it’s questionable whether Albanese’s strategy was even necessary. The political landscape of 2022 was vastly different from that of 2019, with the Liberal Party having drummed itself into electoral oblivion and voters attuned to the scare tactics of both the Murdoch press and Clive Palmer.

Whether Albanese opts to change course remains to be seen. What is known is that if he chooses not to, and the politics of today represents the best the soul and conscience of the country can hope for, then history will condemn his record, defining his victories, such as they are, as narrow and unworthy of praise.

This isn’t to say Albanese won’t succeed in his overriding ambition to lead Labor to more than one election victory. But it will be under the banner of “Albanese the conservative”, not “Albanese the progressive” — a truly sorry indictment for a political warrior who once said he’d devoted most of his adult life to “fighting Tories”.