Holidays for pollies? Nope, the nation can no longer be led from a caravan on the coast

Nobody gets to relax over summer any more. We spend those weeks fearing fires and floods, forced to take side-hustles and staycations to ease the pinch. And because we can’t relax, our elected representatives can’t either.

Anthony Albanese has known for six years that summer is no longer automatic downtime, since Scott Morrison skived off to Hawaii as the nation burnt, had his staff deny it, and then protested that a prime minister didn’t “hold a hose”.

Albanese told his Labor caucus members at their final 2025 meeting on Tuesday that they can’t just put their feet up. He reminded them that his own early return in January this year had caught then-opponent Peter Dutton and his Coalition snoozing, and they never recovered.

Emphasising that the election might be over but the fight is not, Albanese gave them a laundry list of seasonal constituent conversation-starters for their socials – road safety, bushfire awareness, the under 16s social media ban and, for when school resumes, “fair” education funding. But these are stocking stuffers in lieu of what his MPs are actually asking for: forward guidance on what’s next for their government.

Labor backbenchers are starting to seek clarity on the agenda for the rest of the term. Albanese has spoken about universal childcare but not how to get there. What’s the plan to pay the bills and grow the economy?

Year two of an electoral term is traditionally the time for tough love and big, hard-sell decisions. Yet continuing high inflation has all but obliterated rate-cut hopes and, with energy subsidies expiring, hard choices are getting harder. Once again, economic circumstances threaten to encourage the government to prioritise short-term help over long-term reform. Voters are going to want both.

The backbenchers’ questions reflect what’s coming back from the electorate. Independent qualitative research conducted since the May election has detected a distinct expectation among people who voted Labor that the government will go big. Rebecca Huntley, director of research for consultants 89 Degrees East, says while these voters returned Labor to office deliberately for reasons including a relevant, real-world policy program, and a Coalition alternative that seemed to come from another planet, even they were surprised – almost shocked – at the size of the win they delivered.

Huntley says Australians understand that turning around things such as the housing crisis will take decades. But they want to see effort in tackling other intractable problems, and the tax system is one that’s coming up a lot. Crucially, on the pressure they’re experiencing, they no longer subscribe to the view that this, too, shall pass.

“The community recognises the problems that face us are structural and not cyclical,” Huntley reports. There’s an emerging sense that voters intended to impose a course correction on the Coalition for drifting too far from where they live and accidentally gave Labor a sizeable “windfall”.

“What are you going to do with this thing that’s landed in your lap?” is how Huntley describes their message to the government. “We gave you the world … What are you going to do?”

These voters argue that with no opposition to speak of, and an electoral margin with room for risk-taking that tighter elections don’t provide, there’s no excuse not to go for it.

That suggests they may not think the kind of brutal both-sides-to-the-middle game that Albanese and Environment Minister Murray Watt played this week to secure landmark changes to environment law is quite enough. It was certainly an important forward step policy-wise. It was also a political triumph that left the Liberals utterly demoralised and prompted Greens environment and water spokesperson Sarah Hanson-Young to declare her party “the real opposition”.

The dramas that saw the Liberals end the political year outmanoeuvred and in existential shambles, and the Nationals beg Barnaby Joyce to please stay, obscured the whopping challenges looming for the government in 2026.

Imposing an arbitrary negotiating deadline on the environmental overhaul further upped the pressure on others and ensured that the issue dominated media attention. Without it, the Liberals might have gone harder on the alarming rise in inflation.

The government’s admission that Australia’s greenhouse gas reduction rate is badly sub-par to its own 2035 target came deliberately too late for the Coalition to do much substantive with it. And while Opposition Leader Sussan Ley had a respectable and sustained crack at Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen over his weird shared COP31 presidency deal with Turkey, she might have been able to unpick it properly if not for all the focus on the frantic negotiations. Maybe. But overall, she and her colleagues were sidetracked from the main game – the economy. Again.

The results of the annual Australian Election Study, published this week, surprised nobody in confirming the cost of living as voters’ greatest concern. It was registered thus by 36 per cent of respondents, up from 32 per cent three years earlier. The respected survey, which the Australian National University and Griffith University have been undertaking since 1987, confirmed there was literally daylight to the next greatest concern – health and Medicare – on 13 per cent. Climate change was seventh, registering half of what it was in 2022, now at 5 per cent. The environment was ninth, falling from 7 per cent to 3 per cent, and level-pegging with national security.

But the real stinger for the Liberal Party was the finding that Labor has stolen its traditional mantle of better economic manager. As ANU politics professor Ian McAllister observed, “it’s going to be very difficult for the Liberals to get an advantage back in that area”.

There was no shortage of other free advice for the chaotic Coalition.

Echoing the current prime minister’s closed-doors holiday guidance to his own side, former Morrison adviser Yaron Finkelstein gently suggested that Ley and the Liberals seize the “summer of opportunity”, especially on energy reliability and power prices.

“It shouldn’t be a quiet summer for the opposition,” Finkelstein told Sky News on Thursday. “This is a genuine chance to lay some blows, and Sussan Ley would know that. So let’s hope that we’re not seeing holiday schedules. Let’s hope that they’re actually going to be getting stuck into the government every opportunity they can.”

It was a scorching coincidence that former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull came to town to see his official portrait unveiled on the very day of the Liberals’ parliamentary humiliation. Turnbull praised the teal independent who now holds his old seat of Wentworth, Allegra Spender.

“I mean, she has more to say, as one crossbencher, about tax policy, economic policy, productivity, than the Coalition does – that’s crazy,” he observed. Turnbull spoke after obliging the line of well-wishing independents who had queued to pose for photos with him and his likeness. A trio of his former moderate Liberal ministerial colleagues – Julie Bishop, Christopher Pyne and George Brandis – also gathered to remember the happier times before their kind shrank into obscurity. On whose fault that is, debate continues.

As the environment legislation passed on Friday morning, Spender offered her own thoughts.

“For those on the conservative side of parliament, I say: conservation is actually at the heart of being conservative. This is about protecting our environment for future generations.” As Spender spoke, Sussan Ley scrolled on her phone.

This week has done little to improve Ley’s longevity in the job. Business is despairing that it can no longer rely on the Coalition to deliver. That has serious implications for its donor base. Albanese’s insistence on squeezing some of what business was seeking into the Greens deal only made it worse. Business gets a partial prize and the Coalition gets no credit.

Talk is again turning to alternative leadership tickets to Ley and deputy Ted O’Brien, including among some of the moderates who installed them. Others see no option but to dig in and hope Ley can recover over the silly season. Even frontbencher Alex Hawke, the factional power behind her elevation, is talking up the benefits of a “new generation, a Millennial generation”. On ABC Radio National last week, ostensibly referring to new state Liberal leaders Kellie Sloane in NSW and Jess Wilson in Victoria, Hawke seemed to then range more widely.

“You’re starting to see people come through our ranks and take leadership for the future,” he mused.

Some of Ley’s would-be ousters are holding off until a major stumble, maybe even until after Ley’s budget reply speech next May, but sooner if the opportunity arises.

Things are so bad that some Liberals are privately cheering Barnaby Joyce’s departure from the Nationals and possible defection to One Nation, muttering that their own party might have been better to stay split from the Nats for a while.

With the legislative decks finally cleared at 9.45am on Friday, Speaker Milton Dick declared the House adjourned until January 3. This might have caused a flicker of panic among those already facing a summer somewhat on the tools, except it was a mistake that Dick had made before. Fear not, it resumes in February. Albanese knows his limits.

Nevertheless, the time apart won’t be those lazy hazy days of past decades, when a prime minister could clock off and a deputy could lead the nation for weeks from a caravan on the NSW North Coast, checking in with bureaucrats from the payphone at the local shop. They’re long gone. And now leaders have nowhere to hide.

Karen Middleton is a political journalist and author.

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