Albanese's Labor: Unity Over Debate at National Conference

In his curtain-raiser speech to Labor’s national conference, the South Australian premier, Peter Malinaukas, jokingly acknowledged the activists in the party’s ranks.

“There are people with placards, chants and a list of unrealistic demands – and we’ve given them all delegates passes,” Malinauskas said, to howls of laughter from the MPs, trade unionists and rank-and-file members gathered in the Adelaide Convention Centre.

There are indeed activists in the modern Labor party, such as the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union, which had circulated a left-wing manifesto advocating everything from a wealth tax, to free university and the removal of the union jack from the Australian flag.

But this is no activist party. Not under Anthony Albanese.

The staged-managed, conflict-free national conference shows that a culture of compliance that Albanese has fostered in Canberra is pervading the entire party.

Once a stage for the movement’s biggest brawls – including ones involving Albanese himself – this conference may very well conclude on Saturday without a single actual debate on the floor.

That is largely a product of the conference process. The draft platform was developed over several months by the Labor Policy Forum, a working group chaired by Albanese and the outgoing party president, Wayne Swan.

The prime minister’s involvement meant the most divisive issues were all but settled before delegates arrived in Adelaide.

Conference delegates did agree to push the government to end fuel subsidies for mining companies, strengthen its crackdown on gambling advertising and give cabinet cover to raise taxes on gas exports.

Yet Albanese’s decision to swiftly rule out a gas tax bluntly affirmed who controls the agenda.

The peace and order is a measure of the enormous and unchallenged power of Albanese, who has spent decades building alliances inside the labour movement.

It is also part of a deliberate strategy he is pursuing in response to Labor’s most pressing political challenge: the economic anxiety pushing voters to Pauline Hanson.

Stability, unity and “practical” policies are the defining features of Albanese’s Labor, points of contrast to the “chaos” and disunity of its political opponents, particularly One Nation.

“We choose outcomes over outrage,” the prime minister said in his speech to the conference. “We choose real change that makes a real difference”.

His approach was validated with the thumping 2025 election defeat of Peter Dutton.

The question is: Will it work against One Nation, whose surge in the polls is partly due to voter disillusionment with conventional politics and politicians?

Therein lies the risk. Unity, discipline and policy pragmatism could come to be viewed not as virtues, but as flaws that further alienate voters.

There is a lone voice inside the party sounding that alarm.

Ed Husic.

After breaking ranks to renew support for a gas tax, back Indigenous truth-telling and press for stronger criticism of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, the former minister warned the party’s allergy to “dissent” could become an electoral liability.

“It’s almost we have become so obsessed about not showing disunity because we figure that that translates into some negative sense in the public’s mind,” Husic told the ABC on Thursday.

“I’d actually argue the counter: the public want to see people, politicians, particularly in our camp, that stand up for something. We don’t sign up for the status quo. We sign up for change.

“That is not always going to be an easy process, and the thing is, if you can’t argue your point on a conference floor or in a caucus room, how do you argue it outside?”

Husic has spent the past 12 months cultivating a status as the voice of Labor’s rank-in-file, championing causes his parliamentary colleagues are unwilling to touch.

The floor of the national conference should have been his stage.

Instead, he has been pushed to the periphery, reduced to interventions on television and at a press conference in the wind-swept forecourt outside the convention centre.

That will change if Husic gets his wish to speak during debate on Israel and Palestine on Saturday morning.

That is considered unlikely.

This is Albanese’s Labor, after all.