Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, fresh from collaring US President Donald Trump for a corpse-rigid selfie, has been in the UK over the weekend, inciting some mild controversy for addressing the UK Labour Party conference with his “mate” Sir Keir Starmer.
In a grand speech about Australia and the UK’s responsibility to “defend democracy itself”, one sentence stood out to us. Referencing his and Starmer’s leadership forebears in the aftermath of World War II, Albanese noted “Clement Attlee and Ben Chifley and their Labor governments worked to build societies worthy of those who’d fought to defend the world from fascism and tyranny”.
Without wishing to valorise anyone too much, just how have Albanese and Starmer gone about earning those kinds of comparisons so far?
Chifley and Albanese
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As Australia’s wartime treasurer and then its first post-war prime minister, Chifley oversaw a hugely ambitious program.
As Mungo Maccallum noted in his The Good, the Bad and the Unlikely, after winning the 1946 election Chifley “initiated the great post-war immigration program, started up the motor vehicle industry, subsidised the state hospital system to provide free public wards … and inaugurated an independent news service for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to compete with the anti-Labor media”.
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In 1946, the Chifley government greatly expanded the federal government’s ability to maintain social welfare via one of the few successful referendums in Australian history, which altered the constitution to allow the feds to legislate:
the provision of maternity allowances, widows’ pensions, child endowment, unemployment, pharmaceutical, sickness and hospital benefits, medical and dental services (but not so as to authorize any form of civil conscription), benefits to students and family allowances
As Frank Bongiorno notes in Dreamers and Schemers, the High Court struck down Chifley’s most ambitious move: the attempt to nationalise (over, it must be added, Chifley’s own reluctance) the banking and aviation industries.
So, Albanese’s greatest nod to Chifley is perhaps the failure of his most ambitious policy, the attempt to institute an Indigenous Voice to Parliament in his first term. Elsewhere, the descriptors most associated with Albanese’s time in office have been “tinkering” and “small target“. Would his thumping victory this past May allow him to initiate more lasting and structural change? Not according to Albo!
“Our government’s vision and ambition for Australia’s future was never dependent on the size of our majority,” Albanese told the National Press Club. “But you can only build for that future vision if you build confidence that you can deliver on urgent necessities. How you do that is important too — ensuring that the actions of today anticipate and create conditions for further reform tomorrow.”
Attlee and Starmer
The contrast is even more stark with Attlee. The second Labour prime minister in his country’s history, Attlee oversaw the creation of England’s welfare state, most crucially the institution of the National Health Service.
Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw wrote in Commanding Heights of the Beveridge Report, on which the reforms where based and which proposed social programs that could slay the “five giants” afflicting English society: Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor, and Idleness (unemployment):
The report’s influence would be global and far-reaching, forever changing the way not only Britain but also the entire industrialised world came to view the obligations of the state vis-a-vis social welfare.
Implementing the recommendations of the Beveridge Report, the Labor government established free medical care under a newly constituted National Health Service, created new systems of pensions, promoted better education and housing, and sought to deliver on the explicit commitment to ‘full employment’.
One only needs to read George Orwell or Harry Leslie Smith to see what a transformative effect this had on England’s understanding of what the basic level of life could be.
Opposition Leader Sussan Ley has accused Albanese of “swanning” about on the taxpayer dime with his “left wing mates”, which, lol. Sir Keir Starmer followed his landslide victory in 2024 by pretty much instantly entering crisis mode. And it certainly wasn’t because of bold, risky attempts at Attlee-style reform. As the BBC noted in a piece wondering how a triumphant PM could so quickly escape the “honeymoon period”:
In so many crucial areas — social care, child poverty, industrial strategy — the government’s instinct was to launch reviews and consultations, rather than to declare a decisive direction.
