I don’t want Dutton. That’s the only reason anyone can give to justify casting a vote for Labor. 

The harbinger of right-wing populism in Australia, Dutton is Trump down under, or so they say. In comparison, the Australian Labor Party stands as the last defender of the old order, the post-war consensus, the Fair Go. And that’s what the Left is about, isn’t it? 

Dutton stands for big business and would watch on with glee as companies reached record-high profits. By contrast, as a responsible party of government, Labor has addressed cost-of-living pressures. Last year, they modified the Liberals’ tax cuts to benefit lower-income taxpayers. The wealthy still got a tax cut, of course, but a smaller one. 

Setting aside the small detail that income is not the source of most of the wealth of the rich, this is a positive change, right? Labor also provided a $300 energy rebate to every household; how generous! A more ambitious government might have seen public ownership as a response to energy inflation, but that’s not aligned with the Overton Window. 

Labor has stimulated wage growth. They supported increasing the minimum wage (the Fair Work Commission, which controls award arbitration, is independent of the federal government and continued to give pay rises under the Liberals). Labor cut billions of student debt, by linking the indexation of HECS-HELP loans to the CPI in 2023. Jason Clare MP, Minister for Education, has also promised to wipe 20% of all student debt if re-elected. It’s strange that a system as good as HECS has needed to be modified twice in half a decade, but this is the best we can do. 

It seems harder to buy a house today than ever before. Labor’s response? Increasing supply. A good move! How? Not through a mass construction of housing by the government; that would be too radical (although this approach cemented the post-war boom in property ownership). No, Labor has supported responsible policies, working with state governments and property developers to build 1.2 million homes between 2024 and 2029. So far, we’ve fallen short of the targets needed to reach this goal, but that could change. Pressure from the Greens has secured some concessions around public and social housing, but is pressure all the Left can be? Pressure for a return to progressive capitalism? It seems so—after all, it’s better than the alternative. 

Dutton has responded to Labor’s tepid supply-boosting housing reforms in the inverse. While Labor’s economic approach focused on the supply side of the demand-supply equation, Dutton espouses a need to cull demand for housing by cutting immigration. Attacking immigration is a tried-and-true tactic for Australian conservative politicians, and Dutton’s scaremongering is hardly surprising. Labor has appeared to partially give in to this anti-immigrant sentiment by (briefly) cutting the intake of international students and showboating with some tough-on immigration rhetoric. Both parties may agree that, in the short term, immigration needs to be lower, but, in the long term, both parties also agree that high immigration is a great way to shore up a declining population and poor economic growth.

Labor’s recent commitment to strengthen bulk billing pleasantly surprised me, but this was slightly undercut by the Liberals’ immediate agreement to do the same. Nonetheless, if the past three years had included more announcements like this, the Left would be much less hostile toward the Labor Party. But is that not the problem? Have we really regressed so far as to be happy with slight adjustments to a healthcare sector that ultimately remains in the hands of private ownership? 

This past year, the issue that has damaged Labor’s left-wing credentials most significantly is undoubtedly Palestine. Labor was in remarkable lockstep with the United States over the course of the war, though it is worth noting the points at which Albanese trod differently. Unlike Biden, Labor did not attack the ICC’s ruling, and Labor has been more generous in providing visas to Palestinians than other Western nations. This might be some comfort for Labor’s progressive-minded members, but for most of the Left, this term of government is permanently tarnished by Labor’s passive support of Netanyahu’s war. 

On this issue, Dutton would, of course, have been worse. But a ceasefire has been reached. The future of the Levant now depends on Donald Trump, not on Peter Dutton or Anthony Albanese. 

Labor’s decision to completely gut the most powerful blue-collar union in Australia, the Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees Union (CFMEU), over dubious allegations is dangerous. Labor still claims to be the party of organised labour, but with union membership in Australia being increasingly dominated by white collar unions, and with union organisers being more frequently drawn from the youth of the Labor Party rather than the workplace floor, the continuation of the slow divorce of the union movement and the blue collar working class seems inevitable. Other blue-collar unions such as the Electrical Trades Union have made moves to distance themselves from the ALP, but the long-term consequences remain to be seen. 

Of course, Dutton promises to be even tougher on unions, but Labor placed the CFMEU into administration with far less trouble than a Liberal government would have faced. In this respect, Labor is a better manager of class relations than the Liberals are, and that is a fact they are very proud of. 

What am I forgetting? Indigenous justice? Labor has shown little interest in this policy area since the failure of their poorly handled referendum in 2023. Abortion? Dutton has repeatedly indicated he is deathly afraid of being seen as a cultural conservative crusader, he has no intentions of taking aim at abortion, and even if he wanted to, abortion is legislated at the state level. The environment? No one wants to hear about that—not when Trump has reset all of Biden’s climate legislation, not when one call from WA Premier Roger Cook was enough to kill years of work from Labor’s environmentalist wing. 

Many on the Left are dissatisfied with Labor, including me. I joined Labor in 2022 as Albo ushered in the first non-Liberal government that many my age could really remember. Albo was a breath of fresh air after the turmoil of Morrison: finally, the adults were back in the room, and Albo was even from the party’s Left! 

Slowly but surely, however, this optimism turned sour. More “pragmatic” aspiring politicians were slowly ground down by the party, putting their values aside in the short-term in order to secure a better future for Australia in the far-flung future. It’s not clear when that future will come.

Frustration with Labor’s passive liberalism has pushed many on the Left who may have formerly belonged to Labor’s left wing to turn elsewhere for political representation. This has led to a small resurgence of an anti-Labor Left. Either through parliamentary alternatives, such as the Greens or the Victorian Socialists, or for the more radical, smaller activist grounds such as Socialist Alternative. Yet despite all this effort, what do any of these groups do apart from protest and “pressure” Labor? In effect, everyone from the Greens to Socialist Alternative are merely acting as the left wing of the Labor party. The Greens seem committed to a theory of change focused on obtaining balance of power and securing negotiations from that position. This strategy led to some short-term success, but now we are starting to see Labor call this bluff, as exemplified by the fiasco regarding the ‘Help to Buy’ scheme last year. 

The Greens will only be a viable vehicle for radical change if they commit to building an authentic mass movement that can truly contest all levels of government. This requires party-building and recruitment. The various scattered socialist sects are currently only capable of student activism and protests, a far cry from historic means of real socialist power, which has only come from organised labour and mass socialist workers’ parties. 

Whatever part of the Left you turn to, the situation is the same. The only option in light of the extinction of the Left is to pressure Labor for a more “progressive” form of the status quo. 

So, I want Albo to win. 

Do you?

Conaugh Dwyer is a member of the Australian Greens and the Platypus Affiliated Society.