Following the Farrer earthquake, there’s a bigger political event to come

In politics – as in life – you cannot know what a thing will feel like until it happens. An obvious statement, perhaps. But Saturday night reminded us that it is one of the most important rules in politics. David Farley’s victory for One Nation in Farrer was widely anticipated. And yet it felt like an explosion.

On many occasions, Pauline Hanson has spoken of getting “our country back”. But in Farrer, in the aftermath of that shockingly decisive victory, the same phrase landed differently. As Rob Harris wrote, the result was “what that looked like in practice”. To her supporters, it no doubt now felt like a prophecy. To many of the rest of us it felt, suddenly, dangerous – closer to a threat.

Hanson’s triumph has, too, changed the atmosphere into which the Albanese government’s budget will arrive tomorrow.

Labor did not run a candidate in Farrer. But Labor has, over recent months, attempted to mount an argument against One Nation: that while it promises to stand up for workers, in practice it fails them. On Saturday night, it became blindingly obvious those arguments have not made a bit of difference. What use are politicians’ words to angry voters?

Actions, though – that may be a different story. Of course, we don’t know with certainty what is in the budget or how it all fits together. Recall how much Labor enjoyed, last budget, surprising everyone with tax cuts. Not long ago, the prime minister, speaking of rumoured changes to taxes on property investment, said, “I know there’s been a bit of speculation, all of it wrong.”

An exaggeration perhaps, but an important reminder that knowledge of – and responsibility for – the budget lies with a handful of people. One reason political decisions are difficult, so heavily weighed, is that ultimately a small group takes the risk – and bears the brunt of failure.

And there is risk because even those people have no idea what will happen next. The moment a policy goes from being rumour to being fact, everything changes. The air shifts.

This moment has been anticipated for some time. If Labor was ever going to act more boldly, it was going to be this year. This, remember, is how Labor approached its first term. It was in the second year that it tried something difficult, on the Coalition’s stage 3 tax cuts. Should Labor change taxes on property investment, the similarities will be striking: a change to taxes, at the expense of the relatively well-off, by breaking a promise in its second year. Prime ministers get into habits – and so here we are again.

I wrote, back then, that Albanese looked suddenly assured. Perhaps, I wrote, it is easier to make the case for something you believe in. Perhaps we will see all this again. But we can’t know. If the government does what it promised not to during the campaign, the attacks on the prime minister for lying are likely to be ferocious. One of the reasons politics is unpredictable is that it involves people – and how Albanese will handle those attacks is unknown.

What we do know, though, is that he likes to turn his enemies’ “roads into cul-de-sacs” – and that he has demonstrated skill in this. John Howard achieved this in 2004, turning attacks on his honesty into a strength, by asking voters “who do you trust?” By this, he meant that governing the country well was what really mattered. Labor obviously wants to do the same. Yes, it might do things it promised not to. But it is still dependable, the implication goes, because you can rely on it to respond to what a moment needs in a broadly Labor way.

The gripping display of anger in Farrer will help Labor make the case that this is what is required – that challenging unfairness, inequality and a broken social contract is the most urgent and important thing.

Labor’s hitherto cautious approach is part of what makes this week’s likely changes seem so bold: the comparison is flattering. But that caution has the potential to haunt this decision, too. It means that the government is inexperienced in making hard arguments, in the art of persuasion, in announcing large and complex policies. Mistakes will be made. In fact, it is possible that the government has already made a mistake by broadening its changes to the capital gains tax discount beyond property to other assets, opening a whole other front in the debate.

That said, mistakes need not be fatal. Tuesday night is significant – but only the beginning. Budgets come in phases. Broadly, there is budget night, the 48 hours that follow, the fortnight after that and the legislative process. If the policies announced on Tuesday are significant, and if they largely make it into law, that will be a vindication of Jim Chalmers’ long-held desire to do more in this space, his use of last year’s economic reform summit to expand the political sense of what was possible, the prime minister’s political judgment and the abilities of the government – most crucially Albanese and Chalmers – to carry an argument.

Perhaps even more important, such changes will signal Labor’s understanding of the scale on which a federal government can act. Its stage 3 shift was tiny by comparison, involving only income tax cuts – which are always temporary and soon forgotten. This time, Labor is restructuring a market and taking on a taboo. And perhaps that will mark a turning point, in the reminder that governments can reshape the country in significant ways: that the assumptions and conventions on which a nation operates do not have to be eternal.

Farrer may be even more significant than we realise. It might signal that Labor is already too late: that it did not act early enough to stop the far-right fire that is now raging. But it is possible, too, that Tuesday night and the weeks that follow will be the more decisive events in the long run, proving that Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers can change not only the approach of their government, but the course of both this country and its politics.

Sean Kelly is a regular columnist and a former adviser to prime ministers Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.

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