Though it is a minor event in global terms, the election of the Albanese government is of a significance from which much can be read. Coming to power with a slim majority of three in overall terms (77 seats in a 151-seat parliament), it has an effective 30-seat lead on the Coalition, due to the election of three Greens and eight community independent ‘teal’ candidates. They can all be relied on to guarantee confidence and supply in a crisis, so the working majority is secure. Yet the Greens and ‘teals’ fell just short of a slightly perverse dream: Labor falling just short and relying on the crossbench for support. Had that occurred, Labor would have been in a difficult position, but Australian progressivism would have been in clover, capable of making a series of major demands in exchange for passing other more centrist legislation.

With Labor’s majority, the opposite has occurred. The Albanese government has tracked sharply to the right of where many people—even grizzled veterans of Labor disappointment—thought it would go. This is particularly so in social-cultural matters. Labor’s refusal to reverse the stage-three tax cuts is, here, not particularly significant. Less an economic move than one about honesty in government—Labor promised to honour the cuts in the 2022 election campaign—it is not of itself a free-market shift. But Labor’s language and policy direction, as registered in the recent jobs summit, shows that in political economic terms it has now been transformed entirely by the logic of capital. Labor, a party founded to take some sort of control of capitalism and run it for workers, or abolish it for socialism, has now rejected and removed the last skerrick of that way of thinking, the last idea that there is anything outside capital. That was present to some degree in the Rudd government, with its notions of a top-flight public broadband service connecting public education and health systems, in a virtuous circle of steady uplift. Contained within capitalism, it nevertheless had a tilt towards a post-capitalist future.