Labor now rules the centre right. The left is on the brink of irrelevance

Much has been made of the crisis of the right in the wake of last Saturday’s federal election. Little, though, has been made of an equivalent crisis of the left, if that word still serves to name those forces that define their role as progressive.

Both share the new, yet unspoken, reality of Australian politics: that the ALP is no longer a party of the centre left but the new party of the centre right. However competent and formidable it might be, the party cannot disguise its move away from its more radical past by simply waving a Medicare card at every photo opportunity.

Nature abhors a vacuum: as the Liberals mounted a Jack Russell race to the MAGA right, Labor moved into the high country they vacated. Labor abandoned any pretence of being a party of the environment, as it was in the ’70s, ‘80s and ’90s, and, if it still cosplays as being a party of social justice, its reforms are timid and piecemeal.

Yet even if its leader seems to like arriving at a barbecue in a billionaire’s helicopter and its policies are deferential to corporate Australia, being centre right is, as the election confirmed, infinitely preferable for many more Australians than the dark MAGA fantasies of the Liberal Party, the same fantasies that are wreaking such destruction in the US and globally.

But not being MAGA does not make Labor a party of progress. If Labor has ambitions, they are not of changing society but of preserving its own power into a third term by consolidating itself into the status quo of an increasingly unequal 21st century society as the new party of corporate Australia.

Notwithstanding the MAGA lamentations of Gina Rinehart, as Elizabeth Knight, this masthead’s business columnist, noted: “That whoosh you heard on Sunday, as Labor did its victory lap, was a collective exhale of relief from the big end of town”. Knight goes on to report that as Westpac chief executive Anthony Miller “sees it, Australia has jumped to the top of the league tables as an attractive place for international business to invest and international talent to make a new home”.

Labor’s victory is a paradox: Hawke won in 1983 with half the primary vote (49.5 per cent), while Albanese won last Saturday with just over a third (34.75 per cent) – a proportion that would have been seen as catastrophic 20 years ago. Labor’s great victory came not from the drying dam of its primary vote but the rivers of preferences flooding in from independent and Greens voters. In the opposite of a Reservoir Dogs Mexican stand-off where everyone points a pistol at everyone else and almost all die, the preferential system sees avowed enemies electing each other. Thus, Labor and the Liberals collude in preference deals where they are challenged by independents or Greens, yet Labor’s successes against the Liberals are bound up in getting Greens and independent preferences. Without them, the Liberal Party’s problems today could well be Labor’s in the not-so-distant future.

Meanwhile, out on the now eerily emptied savannah of the left, the same paradox haunts what remains: fewer independents and Greens. And yet, the national vote for independents keeps going up and the federal Greens vote remains close to its peak.

While the Greens harbour a romance of an alliance with Labor, that is ever less likely as Labor shifts further right and delights in its utter contempt for them. The Greens, though, like a spurned lover, keep seeking to be embraced by the ALP once more. As well as preferencing Labor in almost all electorates, the Greens went into the election sounding not like an environmental party but the unloved left of Labor – the same party that election after election uses the Greens for preference harvesting and then rejects its advances. Green-shaming is Labor’s political equivalent of slut-shaming.

The only way out of this vicious dilemma that sees the two main parties continuing to decline as a popular force but dominate as an electoral force would seem to be some new alliance that seeks to create a closer working relationship between independents and Greens. With this kind of agreement, they would preference each other at elections rather than Labor, and work more closely together in parliament on the matters on which they are agreed.

None of this would be easy: while voters have liked the crossbench co-operating on issues such as gambling reform and an integrity commission, they are less happy when they think an independent is electorally aligned with others. Despite the unremitting propaganda wheeled out through the election, independents are not Greens, and on many issues are far from the Greens’ positions, while the Greens in turn find some independents’ positions anathema. The problem for all is that the left is becoming an increasingly Balkanised landscape. The possibility of a new national ecology party forming to pursue the goals the Greens have abandoned only worsens the picture.

Unless some way of coming together can be found, the alternative will be the spectre of the left’s growing irrelevance. In an Australia where the vote for non-major parties is the size of the vote for Labor – and growing – the crossbench could begin reimagining its ranks as the place out of which governments of the future can be built. If independents could re-conceive their roles not just as individual representatives but as future national leaders, finding within themselves the ambition to ultimately aspire to create a government of allies, they may escape being condemned to the sidelines of history and show the larger, as yet unrealised, possibilities of Australian democracy.

In some ways, the plight of the left today mirrors the crisis in which crushed conservatives found themselves in the 1940s when Robert Menzies united 18 anti-Labor groups into a new, single force of conservatism that would become the most electorally successful federal political party in Australia’s history: the Liberals.

Whether there is a comparable figure or figures on the left today who might bring together these disparate but important voices into some form of partnership or alliance that can hold Labor to account is a question only time can answer. But it is the question that must now be asked.

Richard Flanagan won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North. In 2024, he won the Baillie Gifford Prize (for non-fiction) for his most recent book, Question 7. He is the first writer to win both prizes.

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