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Shock results in two Victorian by-elections, in suburban Prahran and the outer metropolitan Labor stronghold of Werribee, have put a bomb under Anthony Albanese’s prospects of winning the forthcoming federal election.

While counting of postal votes is still continuing, the Liberals have secured over a 10 per cent swing in Werribee and over 12 per cent in Prahran. The Liberals have taken Prahran from the Greens and, at the time of writing, the seat of Werribee was on a knife-edge.

By-elections offer voters an opportunity to vote against incumbent governments, so a swing against the state Labor government was expected. What was not anticipated, however, was the massive size of the swings. The swings reflect recent national opinion polls that put the Coalition ahead of Labor, and Peter Dutton ahead of Albanese as preferred prime minister.

Crisis Point

The dominant issues in the two by-elections also reflect national concerns: inflation as measured in supermarket prices and the cost of insurance and other services, the soaring cost of housing, and crime.

While the Labor Government has put in place power subsidies to relieve the cost of living crisis, it is clearly seen as inadequate.

Further, part of its solution to the housing crisis is a promise to build two million additional houses before 2029, a target which is already well beyond the Government’s reach. In the first year of the plan, Labor fell about 100,000 behind its target, and this is certain to continue with low approval levels for homes that are still to be built.

A second leg of its housing policy, to take an equity stake in home buying, will make little impact on current prices, and is problematic for many home buyers who are uncomfortable with governments having equity in their homes.

Immigration

The Albanese Government has failed to acknowledge that its policy of virtually uncontrolled immigration from 2022 to 2025, which allowed a net increase of around 500,000 immigrants a year, created the acute housing shortage being experienced around the country.

Attempts by Labor Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Finance Minister Katy Gallagher to blame the preceding Liberal governments for the housing crisis do not pass the pub test, given that federal Labor has been in government for almost three years, and the housing shortage has only worsened in that time.

There are things that might help Labor over the next couple of months. First, Labor is expected to win comfortably the forthcoming WA state election, where the Liberals have been in disarray for some years.

Second, the Reserve Bank of Australia is expected to begin the long-delayed reduction in official interest rates at its next meeting, giving the Government the opportunity to claim that its policies have laid the groundwork for a fall in home loan repayments over the next year.

Whether the electorate buys this argument is an open question.

Certainly, the Albanese Government seems to have a tin ear to the public’s main concerns. It has done nothing to tackle the increasing concern about the emergence of crime gangs, often based on ethnic nationalities, that have terrorised suburban neighbourhoods, and seems to be connected with the huge number of attacks on tobacco stores across the country, and the rise of anti-Semitism following the Hamas atrocities in Israel.

Wrong Priorities

On the other hand, it has just announced what amounts to a $573 million subsidy for menopausal hormone therapy and contraceptive pills, euphemistically called “women’s health”, when thousands of Australians are living on the streets.

The announcement in February, just before the 2025 election is due to be called, seems to indicate that the Government is more concerned with placating the feminist lobby than dealing with the concerns of ordinary Australians.

The Victorian by-elections also contain lessons for the Liberals. In both seats, most of the decline in the Labor vote went to small parties rather than to the Liberals. Nevertheless, the bad news was felt mainly by Labor and the Greens, who lost a seat they had held for a decade.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, Labor MPs told The Australian after the by-elections that they were unsurprised by the massive swing against Labor, and feared that the State Labor Government’s poor standing would adversely affect Labor in the federal election.

Another sign of Labor’s woes came when Jennie George, former ACTU president and Labor MP, wrote an article in The Australian of February 8 – the latest of several such articles by her – in which she criticised Labor’s renewable energy policy, saying it could never deliver affordable and reliable power.

Labor’s troubles are mounting as the 2025 election looms.

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Republished with thanks to News Weekly. Image courtesy of Shutterstock.