Clown Car Redux

When Australians turfed out the Coalition in 2022 and ushered in the Albanese government, many thought they’d signed up for an era of competence. Instead, they got a nostalgia tour back to the Rudd years. Bloated government, splurging money like a drunk sailor, and wielding regulation like a blunt instrument. If it all feels like déjà vu all over again, that is because it is.

And not just in policy. Take a look around the cabinet table. It is less a team of trailblazers and more the same well-worn cast of characters, reheated and rebranded. Not the best and brightest. Not even the adequate and acceptable, but the plodders and the plodder-in-chief.

Recall that Rudd strode in back in 2007 vowing to end the “Howard era” with grandiose nation-building, sweeping climate measures, and a hyperactive government that was going to fix everything by throwing money at it. The Albanese government, following the script almost to the letter, has reached for the same levers.

Billions poured into childcare, aged care, and renewables; union-friendly industrial relations tinkering; grand centrally planning industrial policies; and a general attitude that Canberra knows best. Rudd might have called it nation-building. Albanese dresses it up as “progressive patiotism.” But let us be real; it is nothing more than Peronist central planning with a heavy coat of marketing gloss.

Then there’s the revolving door of personnel. Albanese himself was Rudd’s infrastructure guy, famous for big-ticket projects that mostly lived on glossy brochures. Penny Wong is still doing her steely-eyed thing, bringing the same meticulous and mendacious style but little change in ideological direction, this time at Foreign Affairs, with all the ideological verve of a grey filing cabinet.

Tanya Plibersek, once the face of housing and human services, now presides over environment and water with the same brand of managerialism. Chris Bowen, previously Rudd’s Assistant Treasurer, is now busy strangling the energy sector with climate zealotry.

Tony Burke has dusted off his old ministerial briefings and simply swapped agriculture for home affairs. Jason Clare, Richard Marles, Mark Butler—same passengers, same clown car, new destinations.

And as if that weren’t enough, other ghosts of the Rudd era still linger like a bad smell.

Kevin himself is in Washington as ambassador. His incompetent yet treacherous former Treasurer Wayne Swan wields indirect influence through his National Presidency of the Labor Party and his equally inept padawan Jim Cygnet Chalmers who follows dutifully in his fumbling footsteps.

Stephen Conroy, the “brains” behind the NBN, now lobbies for corporate interests, while Greg Combet steers the Future Fund into dubious nation-building “investments.” Once Team Rudd, always Team Rudd. Australia’s tax dollars at work.

History’s lessons aren’t exactly obscure here. Rudd’s lofty ambitions were sunk by bungled execution: a home insulation scheme that literally killed people, an NBN rollout that became a monument to over-promising, and a budget that collapsed under the strain of the GFC. Albanese is already replaying the tape.

Energy bills remain sky-high despite billions flung at renewables. Housing is a pipe dream for most Australians despite endless programs and promises. And with the global economy looking shaky, Albanese’s spendathon will leave him just as cornered as Rudd once was—without the excuse of a financial crisis.

The scoreboard is not pretty: productivity flatlining, debt and deficits ballooning, households squeezed, inflation humming along. In short: déjà vu all over again but worse.

Instead of course correction, the Albanese government seems convinced the problem was never the policies—just the politics. That’s the kind of self-serving hubris that paves the road straight to disaster. And with an opposition barely fit to organise a sausage sizzle, the Albanese government is free to drive the economy and society off the cliff, unchallenged.