Albanese, the progressive patriot, now owns the centre. His next task? Holding on to it

Anthony Albanese has a quick answer for anyone who thinks he has an iron hold on power after crushing the Coalition at the election. The prime minister is deeply wary of anyone who says Labor is certain to rule for another six years.

And he has a word of warning for any colleagues who think the Liberals and Nationals are simply incapable of rebounding fast enough to win the next election.

“Politics changes from day to day, and you cannot take anything for granted,” he says.

It is true that the Coalition has been put through a blender and reduced to a political puree of just 41 seats at last count, while Labor has risen to 93 or more. Even so, Albanese is suspicious of commentators who forecast his future for another two terms. “Some of those same people were writing us off six months ago,” he told our Inside Politics podcast this week.

Albanese cannot give way to hubris, of course, and his caution about the future makes sense. He cannot sound cocky about the next election when he is telling Australians he is humbled by the last one. Everyone in the government has to restrain themselves, even when they feel exhilarated by the outcome.

One lesson from history might worry them all. Campbell Newman led the Liberal National Party to a thundering win at the Queensland election of 2012 and reduced Labor to just seven lonely seats in the state parliament. He seemed unassailable, only to be driven from power three years later when Labor stormed back to win 44 seats under Annastacia Palaszczuk.

Sussan Ley may dream about repeating that history as opposition leader after winning the ballot on Tuesday for the Liberal leadership. A similar staggering turnaround – unlikely, but not unprecedented – would add something like 37 seats to the Coalition’s 41 seats, enough for a majority.

The master planner who helped engineer the May 3 victory, Paul Erickson, knows there are no guarantees about the next contest. Erickson, the Labor national secretary, ran campaign headquarters and mapped out the recovery in the government’s fortunes over the past six months.

He is yet to go public about how he and his team did this, but he has agreed to speak at the National Press Club on Wednesday next week. Depending on how much he reveals, it could be quite a lesson in campaign tactics.

What does Erickson say to those who predict another six years of Labor? “Labor doesn’t take anything for granted about the next three years and will remain focused on delivering our agenda,” he says. “Until the Liberals understand the message they’ve been sent at the last two elections, they risk being seen as permanently out of touch.”

Implicit in that comment is the truth that the Liberals failed to listen to the message from Australians at the 2022 election. For all the talk about the cost of living over the past three years, Peter Dutton and his colleagues – including Ley – put too little work into major policies to fix the problem they talked about so much. Erickson is not wrong: they really were out of touch.

In fact, the Liberals swerved into culture wars, climate wars and arguments about the Middle East far more often than they talked about compelling policies for Australians. Remember the tax deductions for business lunches? That idea was released in January and landed like a stale bread roll on a restaurant floor.

Albanese is confident about six more years, of course. He was like that in the days after the 2022 election as well. He could see a way to push the Liberals to the margins and shut them out of power, knowing it would be hard for them to reclaim the “teal” seats and defeat Labor elsewhere. He said as much to journalists during a flight to the Quad summit in Tokyo a few days after the 2022 election. He has been proven right.

This can easily sound like idle talk and arrogance, except for one thing. Albanese is already setting out what he wants to do to cement Labor as the natural party of government. He has a rallying cry about what he thinks Labor can offer Australians to make it happen.

The key phrase is “progressive patriotism” and it has been used in the UK for several years. Mark Kenny, a former chief political correspondent at this masthead and now at the Australian National University, wrote about it in Meanjin in 2022.

Sean Kelly, a columnist in these pages, noted it during the campaign. Some have traced the concept to George Orwell, who embodied it in so much of his writing. “Patriotism has nothing to do with conservatism,” he wrote.

Albanese used the term for the first time in public in this masthead’s Inside Politics podcast with a claim about holding the middle ground of Australian politics. His intent is very clear: to expand the middle ground and leave the Liberals and the Greens to the edges. Some of his MPs are certain this is happening because they can see how different voting groups came back to Labor on May 3.

What does it mean for Albanese? “That we’re enriched by our diversity, that we have respect for people of different faith, that we try to bring people together, that we don’t bring turmoil overseas and play out that conflict here,” he says.

Nothing is above politics, so there is a patently political aspect to the phrase. Albanese also makes it about Labor policies that are embedded in Australian society and often set this country apart from others. Medicare, for instance, which he wielded against Dutton in the campaign by holding up a green and gold card.

There is no mention of Donald Trump in the Labor message, but the American president hovers above it all. The idea of “progressive patriotism” is a riposte to the populist takeover of the White House and the false notion that only conservatives can be proud of their country.

This is not political wordplay. Albanese presents his version of patriotism as a shield for Australians against the global shocks unleashed by Trump. He also wields it as a protection for Labor against the diatribes from the Liberals about the Middle East. His message: do not use foreign conflicts to divide Australians. His message to the Greens will be the same when they, inevitably, attack from the other end of the spectrum.

To his critics, however, this patriotism is merely a veneer for the usual Labor social policies. Medicare, childcare, aged care, hospitals, schools and housing: Albanese promises better services the Australian way, but it all comes with another hit to a weak federal budget.

The usual political lines may blur on national security and other questions. Albanese promises to deliver on the AUKUS submarine pact, spend more on defence, reduce net migration, turn back refugee boats and keep convicted criminals in immigration detention if he can. His version of the national interest does not look “progressive” at all to his critics on the left, but his appeal to national loyalty may help him deflect complaints when he tries to hold the political centre.

One observer of the election, British political analyst Marc Stears, found a global message in the way Albanese framed patriotism as a solution to Australian division — and he suggested British Prime Minister Keir Starmer watch and learn.

“That solution refutes the idea that progressives must compete with the populists and nationalists on their own terrain,” Stears wrote in The Guardian. “But it does not solely focus on progressive voters in the big cities, at the expense of a working-class base. Instead, Albanese has pursued a distinctly social patriotism, proudly Australian but grounded in ordinary people’s lives.”

Stears did not write this with any advice from Albanese – he simply saw it happening as the campaign played out. And he was right. The prime minister now has a key phrase to describe what he was seeking to do in the campaign. It also frames what he will attempt in the term ahead.

Albanese may succumb to the arrogance of assuming he gets another six years in power – and then lose because of this. But he widened the middle ground at the last election; now he has a guiding principle that could help him hold that ground at the next.

David Crowe is chief political correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

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