Albanese's tactical decisions have come to wag the nation's strategic tail

For many, other than the true believers, the working premise will be that they will be explaining why Labor failed to win a second term. As some of the better chroniclers, such as Niki Savva, know from experience it is still possible that anything could happen, with some early chapters drafted to explain why the party began to circle the drain having to be quickly recrafted, as part of a narrative of patience, luck and ultimate triumph. For both those expecting disaster or hoping for some miracle will begin their labours by marvelling at the party's turn of fortunes.

The first half-term saw Labor consistently ahead in the opinion polls, and most Coalition realists expected that they could not hope to retrieve government for at least two terms. Albanese was consistently more popular than Peter Dutton, who, in any event, had chosen to lead by moving the party further to the right, rather than towards the centre that Scott Morrison had decisively lost, partly to the Teals.

No one could have accused Albanese of trying to do too much too quickly, or of having failed to meet the explicit election promises. The budgets of his Treasurer, Jim Chalmers were consistently careful about the way that they managed taxpayers' money.

Much money that might have funded spending programs, in say health, education, Indigenous affairs or community welfare was used instead to retire public debt.

On a host of signature policies - for example an anti-corruption commission, or reforms of the stewardship of money, Albanese was focused on not going too far. He sought, but only rarely obtained, some consensus with the Coalition.

Most famously, and perhaps fatally, he persisted with efforts to get the Coalition on board with its own earlier policies on the Voice referendum. On issues such as the anti-corruption commission, he seriously weakened the legislation, to the dismay of Greens, independents and the Teals, so that he could get Coalition support.

He's now enduring three reverses which seem to signal a turn in the party's fortunes. First, he has failed, so far, to conquer inflation, and rising costs, generally increasing at a faster rate than wages, are hurting Australian households.

He is limited in the relief he can offer those suffering households because economic contraction is essential if the budget is to be repaired.

Yet, at the same time, he remains committed to a major tax cut for wealthier Australians. His rationale is that these were the third stage of a program of tax cuts that Labor supported going into law, even if they were promised for periods much later than the year of appropriation.

Second, Labor had recommitted itself to the cuts in the election campaign because it was terrified that the Coalition would use any backtracking as evidence of a high-spending, high-taxing government.

These were political, not economic reasons. In fact, most of those who will benefit from the stage three tax cuts were among the major beneficiaries of the money irresponsibly splashed around the private sector during the COVID years. Paying off this massive increase in the national debt - paying the Morrison government's credit card bill - became Labor's primary political task during 2022-23.

The decision to embrace AUKUS in such a way that Morrison could not, as he seemingly intended, use it as a wedge to attack Labor was also a political decision, not one based on a proper Labor assessment of where its defence and foreign interests lay. It was a decision made by Albanese and Penny Wong in an afternoon, with minimal consultation with the wider party, again for fear that Morrison and Dutton would exploit any defence differences to imply that Labor was "soft" on national security.

But it was Albanese, in power, who took an agreement in principle further to the point that he was committing Australia to spending hundreds of billions in the future on nuclear-powered submarines, and a technology-sharing operation.

It quickly became clear to me that the effect of the agreement was to tie Australian defence policy so closely to the United States, with only limited opportunity for devising policies suited to our geography, our national interest or our national character, whether in relation to Australia's neighbours and partners in South East Asia and the Pacific, or with China, or, it soon became apparent, Ukraine, and Israel's interests in the Middle East. As with the tax policy, Albanese's tactical decisions have come to wag the nation's strategic tail.

The problem for Labor and Albanese is that the next 17 months do not provide much in the way of clear air in which to establish a distinctly Labor difference from the Coalition. The world is an unsettled place, and Australia's influence is limited. If we were engaged in diplomacy with our best interests in mind, rather than with our options heavily mortgaged to the US, we might have a little more room to manoeuvre.

Over the year ahead, Americans will choose their next president. If the polls are any guide, the next president might be Donald Trump. Australia survived his last presidency intact. But it became swept up in an anti-Chinese furore, largely whipped up by Donald Trump to appease American nationalistic interests.

Our defence and intelligence establishment became prophets of and enthusiasts for an actual shooting war with China, one which had the capacity to hurt Australia rather more than it hurt the US. Even without the dubious benefits of our alliance with the US, the general US bellicosity, along with an aggressive Chinese response, not to the US, but the yapping dog represented by Australia, had a substantial effect on trade, growth and harmony within the region.

If Trump were to be elected, there is every prospect that he would become even more erratic and irresponsible than he was in his first term. American politics have become highly polarised, and the increasingly isolationist, white nationalist and protectionist direction in which the Republican Party is going represents a significant danger to the environment, world peace, balances of power, and international economic recovery.

That may increase the Australian interest in seeing the re-election of the other likely geriatric candidate, Joe Biden. But Biden, like Trump (and Albanese) is playing his foreign policy rather more for domestic political advantage and popular prejudice than on consistent, predictable, and until relatively recently essentially bipartisan lines.

It goes without saying that any Australian intervention in the election campaign are unlikely to influence the general American electorate, or otherwise to serve Australia's defence or intelligence interests. It is bad enough that some of our intelligence advisers have an entirely American perspective on world affairs and consider that Australia's interests are very small beer in the Western alliance. Alas, that means that an influential section of them openly barrack for Trump.

But Trump, if he wins, is as likely to remember those who didn't, and may consider that the AUKUS deal is just the sort of indefinite unlimited overseas commitment that America should avoid. And the present Republican congress has recently vested any future US president with the power to halt the transfer of submarines or technology if he cannot certify that it is within the immediate interests of the US. (Nor has either the US or Australia given much consideration to the likelihood that the third AUKUS partner, Britain, will increasingly become an international irrelevance, simply unable to sustain its promises because of its social, moral and economic decline.)

The American election year may also be the primary battleground for two conflicts of enormous significance to international stability. Australia is, willy nilly, deeply involved in both, even if it has seemingly used little strategy or regard for the future in setting its actions and its policies. The odds are that neither will be working in Australia's favour.

First is the conflict in Ukraine. Biden has been largely successful in the short-term in maintaining the US supply of weapons and munitions to Ukraine, despite a complete lack of Republican enthusiasm for the struggle. But Europe's will to continue is wavering. Many European politicians doubt that Ukraine can hang on, and, much as they dislike the possibility, most are thinking about their Plan Bs.

For Ukraine, the unpalatable plan B would likely involve recognition of facts on the ground in eastern Ukraine and Crimea (that is to say, accepting Russian annexation); Ukraine staying out of NATO, perhaps with some Russian security guarantees, for what they are worth, to other NATO countries on or near the Russian border. Russia might not play so hardball on the question of membership of the European Community, expecting as Vladimir Putin will that a diplomatically defeated Ukraine would be a long-term heavy economic burden on the European Community, aggravated both by the continuing endemic corruption and the political disintegration likely to follow any unfavourable settlement.

In the nearly two years of war following the Russian invasion, Ukraine has offered strong defence and a defiant national spirit. Initially, Russian troops were badly led, and involved soldiers with low morale and an apathetic Russian electorate. But the conflict has increasingly depended on the supply, by America, Europe and even countries such as Australia, of modern sophisticated arms and missiles and other equipment. The war has drained ammunition stockpiles, requiring major investment in renewing stocks, and exhausted most of the West's supply of surplus military hardware.

That is to say that resupply is now biting into the resources nations require for any defence emergencies. Just as ominously, Russia now suddenly seems to have injected its campaign with more vim and zest. The Russian effort is now better-led, more readily resupplied from vast stocks, including imports from China, North Korea, Iran, and the West's notional Quad ally, India. The Quad is apparently an alliance, at best against China, not Russia.

Australia has done its best, better proportionately than some European countries, to help Ukraine in its struggle. But no-one will do more than pretend to ask its opinion if it comes to peace negotiations.

Australia, likewise, is unlikely to have any place of significance in any negotiations about the future of Palestine after the events of October 7. But like all of the nations that initially responded only to the sound of agony from Israel, it has discovered that the politics of Palestine are domestic as well as international. Even the US, still in practical terms the most committed supporter of Israel, is protesting the brutality and lack of proportion of the Israeli retaliation on Hamas, and as an automatic incident of this, the Palestinian population of Gaza. A death toll 10 times the size of that caused by the Hamas incursion - and every bit as indiscriminately brutal on civilians - has pretty much stripped Israel of the initial sympathy and support it received.

Moreover, controversy over Israeli tactics and the intransigence of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and senior Israeli military spokesmen has again opened deep international discussion about the justice accorded to Palestinians, many of whom were hunted out of their homes, never to be allowed to return, when Israel was created. The continuing occupation of the West Bank, and the aggressive and illegal Israeli settlement policy, and the practical support given it by the Israeli government and armed forces has also acquired a fresh and sinister dimension.

No one disputes that hatred of, and discrimination against Jews and other Semites on religious or ethnic grounds is wickedly antiSemitic - the crime against the Jewish people that caused the Shoah or Holocaust. But opposition to Zionism - the idea that the Jewish people have a special Biblically based right to Palestine - is not antiSemitic, despite the efforts of a powerful lobby to say so. Indeed, many Jewish people explicitly rejected Zionism, whether as a theory or a practical reality. And, certainly, opposition to the policies carried out by the Israeli state is not and cannot be antiSemitic, unless the criticism is based not on rejection of those policies, but mere hatred of Jews.

One can, at one level, understand a determination on the part of Israel to deal with the menace and hatred of Hamas once and for all. But, as Israel complains, members of Hamas live amid a general population, flourishing in part because of the everyday practical discriminations and ill-treatment from the IDF and Israeli officials. A "right to self-defence" - a very foolish phrase used by Penny Wong when Hamas, whatever it is, is not a state actor - does not involve a right to fire indiscriminately into a crowd, a street, a school or a hospital which may contain some member of Hamas. Nor does it involve the withholding of vital supplies needed to sustain the civilian population, even if there is a risk that some of it may feed Hamas members. Indeed, members of Hamas may have shown themselves to be brutal and merciless, as IDF soldiers sometimes are. But they are not "animals" as some have said, and they have not, individually or collectively, forfeited the right to life.

As it is, it appears Israel has practically flattened Gaza, rendering it almost uninhabitable. Peace in Palestine requires the restoration of the city, the forced and forcible evacuation of illegal settlements in any part of the West bank, Jerusalem and Palestinian land, and formal progress towards a political two-state solution. Thanks to sustained Israeli policies, this may now happen sooner rather than later, but probably with a lot less regard than before for the anguish of Netanyahu, the Jewish Diaspora financing the settlements policies, and those Christian fundamentalists who have come to think that a fully restored Israel is a necessary precondition of the Apocalypse. We have had apocalypse enough.

Somehow, I cannot see any involvement by Anthony Albanese or Penny Wong being of much further help to Israel. And to help the other side, something they are belatedly and inadequately doing, does not get much in the way of brownie points if you have invested your all in the moral credit of the US.

If Labor fails at the next election - particularly to a politician such as Peter Dutton - there will be little point in Labor arguing that the times were against us. Labor will have - already has - squandered its time and its opportunities. It needs leadership of guts and vision, not timidity, caution and mortal terror of offending anyone.