Anthony Albanese, Penny Wong, Richard Marles, Katy Gallagher and Jim Chalmers stood together at parliament house shortly after they returned from Government House. I watched all of them process their new reality in real time. They were in government. This was actually happening. They were in the Blue Room. This was not a drill.
A short time later, Albanese was in Tokyo reacquainting himself with Joe Biden and introducing himself to the prime ministers of India and Japan. Wong went to Tokyo and then separately to Fiji, flying headlong into the geopolitical challenges that will define this period in government. While the election vote count grinds on, and on, and on, the transition has been lightning fast.
For Albanese and Wong, critical figures in the Rudd-Gillard era, returning to the government benches carries significant emotional freight because they understand from experience just how easy it is to botch the opportunity conferred by voters. Chalmers knows this too, as a senior adviser to then treasurer Wayne Swan during that whole period. These people endured the consequences of gaining power, losing it and watching their opponents dismantle their legacy and write the first draft of history.
So this group understands at a cellular level that voters have given them the last opportunity of their professional lifetimes to be a Labor government.
Labor is coming to government in incredibly complex times. The pandemic is not yet over, and reducing the current death rate will require sustained public health interventions that the Australian public may not be happy with.
Sticking with the natural way of things, events will of course shape the Albanese prime ministership. China is on the march in our region, elevating the imperatives of national defence and healthy alliances with major powers nurtured by muscular middle-power diplomacy.
But domestically, the progressive bent of the new parliament will be complex for Albanese to navigate. Labor is set to govern in majority, which makes life easier than the parliamentary conditions he was called upon to manage in the 43rd parliament.
Electorally, Labor has to maintain and consolidate its terrain between the teals and the Greens, while holding its traditional blue-collar territories, because as the Liberal party has just learned, taking your heartland for granted is a recipe for a swingeing defeat.
So, enough. Stop posturing. Get on with it.
Teals: bring the voices of your communities into these deliberations, and model democratic representation done differently.
