Labor in power
The post-election party is over as Labor's reshuffled cabinet faces up to the cold reality of governing at a time of global economic uncertainty and rapid technological change.
We are two weeks post-election, and the general shape of the next three years in politics is beginning to take form. Labor has selected a cabinet from its vastly expanded party room, and both the Liberals and the Greens have elevated new leaders even as they lick their wounds.
The shock of Labor’s outsized thrashing of the Coalition followed a drawn-out pre-election period, during which grinding inflation and cost-of-living pressures had commentators speculating whether Peter Dutton might manage the unthinkable: toppling a first-term government.
Of course, that didn’t happen. Such was the scale of the victory that Labor seems to be all but guaranteed another term after this one. But now, the cold reality sets in. The reshuffled cabinet, announced this week, is left with a handful of loose threads from the Albanese government’s first term and earlier to deal with.
New Industry Minister Tim Ayres, who reaped the spoils of the post-election factional bloodletting at the expense of Ed Husic, greets a cautiously optimistic tech and innovation sector who, as Bronwen Clune reported, hope he puts his foot on the accelerator when it comes to artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing. With another six years potentially on the clock for Labor, the runway for its Future Made in Australia agenda gets longer — but the expectations of concrete results get commensurately higher, too.
