The new year in Australian politics, an all-important election year, began on a high with a host of Albanese government policy initiatives taking effect from January 1, 2025.
Among these, and there are many, are pay rises of up to 13 per cent for aged care workers, an increase in the Medicare safety net threshold, multinational corporation anti-tax evasion laws, mandatory climate reporting for businesses, new vehicle emission standards, and the criminalisation of wage underpayment as wage theft, just to mention a few, all of them opposed by Peter Dutton and the Coalition.
These reforms, which come into effect this year, are just the most recent in a broader set of policy initiatives for which the government has received too little credit, if any, and which seem strangely invisible to the ‘objective’ media eye.
These include the introduction of Medicare bulk-billing urgent care clinics, the largest minimum wage increase in over a decade, cheaper prescription medicines, paid domestic violence leave, expanded childcare, making banks and social media companies responsible for scams which have cost vulnerable people thousands of dollars, protections for gig economy workers, reducing inflation from over 6 per cent to 2.8 per cent, and finishing the NBN with fibre to the premises, instead of Malcolm Turnbull’s old copper wire disaster.
Corporate tax evasion
One of the most significant of this raft of new laws that came into effect this month is the Albanese government’s landmark transparency measures to combat multinational corporate tax evasion.
Described by the UK Financial Times as ‘one of the world’s strictest tax disclosure laws’, these new financial transparency laws are projected to yield Australia billions of dollars in additional revenue from previously lost profits, overturning decades of corporate failure to pay taxes. Who knew?!
The Centre for International Corporate Accountability & Research (CICAR) hailed the transparency laws as setting ‘a new bar’ in curbing multinational tax evasion.
Stolen by corporates
They said the Albanese government showed ‘real leadership by standing up to huge pressure from corporate lobbyists’ against it; and that, ‘corporate giants, with ever-growing profits, have stolen funding from public health, education and a sustainable future for far too long.’
Yet despite the global praise for ‘one of the world’s strictest’ multinational tax evasion measures, the government’s corporate tax evasion measure scarcely rated a mention by our own supine media.
Productive week
This was just one of more than 40 government bills successfully negotiated through the hostile Senate in the final sitting week of 2024. This remarkably productive week saw the passage of the government’s two housing bills after months of delay by the Greens, the signature Futures Made in Australia Bill to drive local industry investment in renewables and manufacturing, much needed Reserve Bank governance reform, social media limits for children under 16-years-old, and a supermarket code of conduct, among dozens more.
These passed through the Senate and into law with barely a murmur from the mainstream media that had already settled on a focus group-driven mantra of a ‘disappointing’ prime minister and a ‘do nothing’ government, neither of which could be sustained had our erstwhile political commentators bothered to look at what the government has actually done.
The stabilisation of our shredded relationship with China for instance, described by Professor James Curran as ‘a genuine achievement for Australia and the government’, not only saw the lifting of punitive tariffs in a huge boost to industry and agriculture, but led also to the successful negotiations for the release of Australian journalist Cheng Lei.
Assange free
The years of incarceration of Australian journalist, the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, coupled with the fear of extradition and life imprisonment or worse in America, ended with the government’s negotiated release last year. Assange’s lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, acknowledged Albanese’s ‘principled leadership in opposition, and then his statesmanship and diplomacy as Prime Minister’ as key to securing Assange’s release.
It was here that the relentless claims of a ‘do nothing’ government butted up against the political reality of a government that is doing, well, quite a lot actually.
Taken together, the scale of these reforms, each of which reflects an election promise now met, is undeniably impressive.
Bizarre media preoccupation
Yet as they made their way through a fractious Senate, bearing all the strategic hallmarks of Albanese’s long stint as government leader in the House under the minority Gillard government, what emerged was a bizarre media preoccupation.
It was not with the legislation that had just passed, but with a single piece of legislation that hadn’t even been put before the parliament that week, let alone voted on.
This was the ‘Nature Positive Environment’ legislation for which, not having a majority in the Senate, the government had not yet secured enough votes to pass, so will bring it forward next month if parliament is still sitting.
The bill aims to establish ‘Environment Protection Australia as a statutory commonwealth entity to undertake regulatory and implementation functions under a range of environmental commonwealth laws’.
Nevertheless, this ‘bill that wasn’t’ became the focus of media attention, to the exclusion of any sustained analysis of the more than 40 new government laws that had actually passed the Senate and were now in place. After all, this is a ‘do nothing’ government.
The wild card in that particular bill was elected Labor senator turned independent, Fatima Payman. The ABC reported at the time that Payman’s support for the Nature Positive Bill was not secure, following her meetings with the West Australian Mining Council.
The ABC reported, ‘Senator Payman played a critical hand in derailing what had been a written agreement between Greens leader Adam Bandt, independent senator David Pocock and the government … it followed a meeting between her and Minerals Council of Australia CEO … who was described as “camping out” in the senator’s office.’
Tabloid froth
The resultant claimed an ‘Albanese-Plibersek’ rift reduced these complexities in the Senate voting matrix to a tawdry political soap opera, all tabloid froth and no substance. It was a perfect deflection that left us all none the wiser about what the government had in fact done, and allowing the cynical shibboleth of a ‘do nothing’ government to continue unchecked.
One of the most puzzling aspects of the enraged ‘do nothing’ riposte is that this extends to claimed government inaction on climate change.
After a decade of Coalition climate denial and inaction, we finally have a government prepared to drive a national transition to renewables and to meet Australia’s international emissions reduction commitments.
We are now on track to deliver a 43 per cent reduction from the 2005 baseline in emissions by 2030, and to meet our target of 80 per cent renewables in the total energy mix also by 2030.
Peter Dutton, meanwhile, has refused to release the Coalition’s 2030 target. Every year, new solar and wind farms are established or coming on stream, including the Australian company Sun Cable’s world’s largest solar farm.
Critical infrastructure
These critical infrastructure developments are progressively opening over the next few years, exponentially increasing our renewables delivery forecasts. South Australia is already producing up to 85 per cent of its energy requirements entirely by renewables, and Victoria meets over 40 per cent of its energy share from renewables. In September 2024, we reached a ‘turning point’ in this transition, when the national share of coal, traditionally the biggest source of generation in Australia’s main grid, fell below 50 per cent for the first time. These are advances to welcome while recognising there is always more to do.
Peter Dutton has pledged to stop these advances in renewables development and transition should he form government, taking us back to the fossil fuel reliance we have spent the last three years finally moving away from.
The specious political narrative of the Albanese government as ‘doing nothing’ on such important matters is only fuelling that possibility.
♦ Emeritus Professor Jenny Hocking is an historian, political scientist and award-winning biographer. Her latest book is The Palace Letters: The Queen, the Governor-General, and the Plot to Dismiss Gough Whitlam.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
