Malcolm Turnbull lost more than his voice this week, he washed up on the losing side of a critical political battle.



The Coalition came back from the summer with a simple political strategy: strand Labor uncomfortably on energy policy between its inner city progressive supporters and its traditional working base.

This was Turnbull’s big political fightback – energy prices, energy security, eyes firmly on the household – to paint Labor into the green-left corner and the mad incompetence corner, with a hip-pocket hook that voters could connect to.

Energy fightback was always a house of cards on the substance, and the government initially overplayed the negative rhetoric on renewables – which it later had to correct – but at least it was something to talk about.

Right-aligned media and the usual talkback ranters were busy amplifying the government’s line obediently, and government backbenchers had their tails up for the first time since they all almost lost the election.

The funereal atmosphere around the government lifted, briefly.

Then along came the penalty rates decision.

Despite having months to war-game a response, the government had no clear strategy – or none in evidence in any case – once the news came through that some of the lowest paid workers would be getting a pay cut.

The only plan in evidence was to blame Bill Shorten, which voters don’t give a stuff about. If you are a government, you are supposed to do things, fix things, not snivel like a toddler about whose fault it is.

Right in front of our eyes, the government worked through its various feelpinions and cascading reactions, as if it was processing the various stages of grief.

Some in the government were astonished to hear the prime minister on 3AW last week going full empathy with the affected workers, rather than focusing on the broader economic rationale for the decision.

Then there was the sophistry of supporting the tribunal but not the decision itself.

It took a couple of days to mount the argument Scott Morrison eventually crafted – which is that workers can’t work in businesses that can’t afford to stay open and offer them the hours.

By week’s end, the government was in the first stage of retreat. Perhaps the Fair Work Commission would phase in the cuts to penalty rates over several years to offset the proposed reduction in take-home pay.

Turnbull told reporters the government was “very supportive of the commission managing this transition in a way that ensures that take-home pay is, as far as possible, maintained”.

So to cut a long story short, the week was another hot mess.

But that’s not the worst of it for the government. The big blow of the penalty rates decision is its potential to neutralise its big energy wedge.

Labor now has its own equal and opposite campaign to help burnish its credentials with working people – a campaign that says this government doesn’t care if your wages get cut, and won’t care if this penalty rates decision flows on to other industries.

You can summarise the tag line as: “You could be next.”

That’s potent at a time when Australians are fretful, for very sound reasons, about their income security and their job security.

Labor can also deliver the campaign, boosted by the union movement and progressive activist groups – institutional power which the government well understands, having been to this rodeo once or twice before.

I’ve mentioned more than once that Shorten is one of the luckiest people I’ve seen in 20 years covering politics.

Quite reasonably, he would counsel me that this is more than luck – it’s about hard work, dare we say being agile, and about translating opportunities.

On the same day this week that Malcolm Turnbull got uncomfortably hoarse at the dispatch box, I watched Shorten hit cruising altitude at a town hall meeting in Canberra.

Shorten is looking like a man who believes the political times suit him. He’s in stride, not breaking a sweat.

The times do suit him.

But one of the most underreported realities in Canberra at the moment, courtesy of the government’s cascading woes, is the interesting cross-current beginning to form in Labor about where the party positions itself for the next election.

The ALP did a lot of heavy policy work in the last term of opposition, and the current caucus is studded with bright next-generation types who are keen to keep pushing the policy envelope – as well as beginning to discover the wing span of their factional power.

A bunch of up-and-coming leftwingers – and one prominent rightwinger, the former treasurer Wayne Swan – have a burning fire in their belly about rising inequality, and there are already nascent internal conflicts about how assertively progressive Labor needs to be by the time the next poll rolls round.

This is a debate the centre-left is having right around the world as it attempts to counter the rise of the reactionary right. The centre-left is struggling to remain relevant to the working people drifting in the direction of reactionary rightwing populists, who peddle empathy.

The right is busy recruiting globalisation’s biggest losers by feeling their pain and validating their anger, and more pain is coming, with the inexorable rise of automation.

Swan delivered a speech on that theme this week that you would characterise as fully fired up.

Take my advice. Watch that space. I reckon it will be worth watching.