After nearly two months surfing the waves of goodwill in Europe, Asia, and the Pacific, Anthony Albanese has come home to the chill winds of political reality where his nascent administration faces a constellation of challenges as diabolical as any encountered by an incoming government.
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Broadly, they fall under three headings: national security, economy and health. Each of these frames affects the other.
How Albanese reconciles them will determine the longevity of his premiership.
Right now, the picture is mixed with not enough evidence in any column to make conclusive judgements.
Although (unreasonably) criticised for spending too much time abroad in his first weeks in office, the Prime Minister has forged important personal contacts, repaired vital international bonds, heralded Australia's constructive re-engagement in global affairs, and begun a project in the near-abroad that should enhance national security.
But as necessary as this is, it is also the low-hanging fruit. Apologising to long-time partners for the slights of a bad predecessor doesn't require self-debasement so much as it does, common decency.
Many Australians will have felt relief to see their new PM rebuilding the clumsily botched relationship with France's Emmanuel Macron.
Ditto for reinforcing ties with Jakarta and Pacific neighbours, and arresting the descent of our cascading relationship with Beijing.
The last of these, China, will be a work in progress akin to repainting the Sydney Harbour Bridge - which is to say, never finished. But if conducted well, it will at least allow the traffic to pass efficiently in both directions on the deck below. This is, after all, our biggest trading partner.
So Albanese will tread thoughtfully. The government-to-government thaw will be painstaking, gradual and punctuated by difficult moments, any one of which could lead to setback or collapse. In the US last week, Deputy PM and Defence Minister Richard Marles underlined the perilous dual-track approach Australia is attempting which entails talking tough while also hoping to continue talking.
Just days after Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong held the first minister-to-minister talks with Beijing in more than three years in Bali, Marles told the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC Beijing's ostensibly peaceful security pact with the Solomon Islands was anything but benign, declaring it made for "a tougher strategic environment".
In America to affirm the new government's strong commitment to AUKUS - which carries the promise of nuclear-powered submarines for Australia as a direct foil to an expanding Chinese naval capability - Marles warned against a "catastrophic failure of deterrence" if breaches of the rules-based international order were normalised.
Of course, he is largely if not entirely correct. While the nuclear subs will take longer, cost more, be mainly built elsewhere, and bring myriad new problems, the idea that the Sino-Solomons deal could never evolve into a forward facility of strategic navel value, is wishful thinking.
Domestically, Australia's ultra-low jobless rate of 3.5 per cent in June, which was virtually identical to the job vacancy rate of 3.4 per cent, shows Australia has now surpassed what used to be termed full employment. Yet wages growth lags inflation in the mid-5 per cent range and heading higher, causing a cost-of-living crisis across the country. The contradiction of an extremely tight labour market and flat wages growth shows the wage setting machinery has failed. The vaunted flexibility that award rationalisation and enterprise bargaining was supposed to deliver, has ossified into rigidities incapable of responding for employees. That's good for company profits. Bad for employees.
This dovetails with the health challenge. A budget deficit of gargantuan proportions would make further direct government assistance difficult to justify in ordinary circumstances, but even more so when the Reserve Bank is using its only tool to tame inflation, interest rates. Another 0.75 per cent hike is possible next month.
More than $300 billion in pandemic stimulus spending since COVID arrived has helped save the economy but is now over-revving the recovery, presenting the government with an exquisite dilemma - how to respond to health and economic conditions as severe as they looked in 2020 but with none of the budget capacity to do it - nor the political licence.
This is the backdrop against which the new government tried to justify cutting one-off $750 payments for those casual workers testing positive to COVID-19 and required by law to isolate even though they have no sick-leave to rely on.
Health Minister Mark Butler argued the government had "inherited" the previous government's decision to end the payment scheme on June 30, which had cost about $1.9 billion over the two years to then - i.e. chicken feed to the wastage paid to employers from JobKeeper.
While the new government is understandably eager to control spending, both the public policy bona fides and the politics of this decision were abysmal.
Not since the Gillard government's disastrous decision to transfer single mothers from the parenting pension to the lower unemployment benefit, had Labor so egregiously failed the very people the party exists to protect.
It left some voters wondering what was the point of a change of government if the new one simply continued the poor decisions of the last one?
Butler, one of Labor's best talents, said the government wanted to replace the pandemic leave payment with "more targeted" assistance.
But what could be more targeted than directly assisting on a case-by-case basis, the least-wealthy, least-secure employees to stay home and not infect others as the pandemic threatens a deadly new wave?
And what about protecting our hospitals and front-line health workers?
READ MORE MARK KENNY COLUMNS:
Belatedly, the government reversed course on Saturday after a meeting of the national cabinet.
It was the right decision. It was also the government's first backflip.
It turns out, this governing thing is pretty hard. Never more so than right now.
- Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute.
Mark Kenny
Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast. He writes a column every Sunday.
Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast. He writes a column every Sunday.
