Managed from the top: Marcus Strom takes a look at the ALP’s 2025 election campaign review.
The Australian Labor Party’s 2025 election campaign review reads less like political analysis than a management consultant’s memo. Its animating concern is not the mobilisation of working-class power, but the safe oversight of Australian capitalism by a professionalised parliamentary elite. In this sense, the review is an honest document: it faithfully reflects the banal and narrow character of the ALP leadership as a thoroughly pro-capitalist, managerial grouping whose horizon is stability for capitalism, not urgently needed transformation for the working class.
It is a bureaucratic manifestation of Anthony Albanese’s dream to clothe John Howard’s ‘relaxed and comfortable’ Australia in Labor clothing.
But it only takes a cursory look around Australia, around the world to know that reality will soon catch up with this vacuous managerialism. The international order is crumbling. And Australia can only play the game of being both China’s mine and America’s military base for so long.
Meanwhile domestically, the ALP keeps anti-union laws on the books, making industrial action largely unlawful; rampant anti-democratic forces seek to silence any dissent against Australia’s complicity in Israel’s genocide against Palestine; the housing crisis is creating a layer of renters who feel left out of the ‘Australian dream’, with a growing number of young workers reliant on the precarious ‘gig economy’. Meanwhile Australia’s resource-drunk ruling class becomes richer and more venal by the day.
With global relations ever more turbulent, the cautious approach of the ALP leadership is like treading water ahead of a tsunami.
The ALP leadership thinks it can bob on a surfboard looking for the next safe set of waves, but that is not what is heading to these shores.
ALP parliamentary majority: broad by shallow
Labor’s 2025 victory was broad but shallow. While the ALP’s parliamentary majority is the largest since the Second World War, its first preference vote was the sixth lowest at any federal election.
This reflects a fragile mandate resting on an increasingly hollow social base. Nonetheless the review does note that swings to the ALP in both outer suburban low and middle income seats as well as in seats with high university education helped deliver the victory.
But with the implosion of the traditional conservative support in polls and its perhaps temporary transition to the right populist One Nation, all that could be to play for.
While acknowledging that all seats are potentially marginal, the review never seriously grapples with this contradiction politically. Instead, it treats electoral success as a technical problem of message discipline, community “engagement” and organisational efficiency. Politics, in the substantive sense of class interests and social power, is conspicuously absent. This could prove difficult in areas where One Nation support is surging.
The review has 23 findings and 27 recommendations. Most are of a highly technical nature, emphasising message discipline. There is consideration of tactical voting in Teal seats (referred to as “independents in traditionally safe Coalition seats”). There is also mention of managing Labor-Green contests without going into any political detail.
Recommendation 9 does say that ALP candidates in these Labor-Green contests should maintain “positive focus on delivering and communicating real change on cost of living, housing, climate and healthcare”, a revealing nod to the challenge to the left of the party on what should be core ALP reform issues.
The core finding of the review could not be clearer: regardless of how the decade unfolds, Labor’s prospects are best served by “maintaining Caucus unity and stability”. This is a profoundly conservative conclusion. “Unity” here does not mean unity of the working class around a program of democratic socialist transformation; it means top-down discipline within the parliamentary party. Stability is valued not as a condition for struggle, but as an end in itself – reassuring capital that Labor in power remains a reliable custodian of the system.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the review’s light treatment of international politics. The ALP leadership continues to operate within the crumbling fiction of a benign, US-led “rules-based international order”, even as Washington’s increasingly erratic imperial behaviour exposes that order as a lie. There is no questioning of the strategic alignment with a declining world power, and no recognition that militarism and imperial rivalry are structural features of contemporary capitalism. This silence is not accidental: challenging the imperial order would require confronting the class interests the Labor leadership seeks to balance, not overturn.
Conservative implosion
The self-implosion of the Liberal and National opposition and the rise in the polls of One Nation is a gift to the Albanese leadership – but the authors of the election review are smart enough to know this is likely to be temporary.
The review says: “Since the election, much has been made in the mainstream media and on social platforms about the rise of One Nation and anti-immigration sentiment. However, electoral data and research indicates that such narratives have limited traction among the majority of Australian voters.”
While this is partly true and most of the shift in sentiment is from the LNP to One Nation, a reorganised opposition rallying around a program to ‘crackdown’ on immigration is not out of the question. And it cannot be assumed that recent migrant populations won’t be won to the politics of ‘lifting the ladder’ and supporting anti-immigrant candidates.
In general, the LNP remains the ruling class’s preferred governing team. Albanese seemed genuinely hurt that he failed to win bipartisanship after the Bondi antisemitic massacre: ‘Haven’t I been playing the game?’ he seemed to lament.
Natural party of government?
Albanese, like Bob Hawke before him, dreams of turning the ALP into the natural party of government in a capitalist Australia. The bruising he received, first from Peter Dutton over the Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum and second from Sussan Ley in the wake of the Bondi massacre, should show that the ALP is a convenient Second XI when the conservative parties are in disarray as they are now.
The divisions in the LNP not only reflect personalities and competing careerists, they more critically reflect divisions between the hyperconservative resource (mining and agricultural) fractions of capital and the more urbane finance, retail and services fractions of capital.
Angus Taylor has now risen to the job he always thought befitted his meagre talents. It is not surprising his first public statements as Opposition Leader were aimed at being “tough on immigration”, in an attempt to stem the bleeding to One Nation.
The difficulty the LNP faces is how to carve out an electoral base that is conservative and largely anti-migrant, while managing capital’s growing need for migrant labour and engaging with the reality of climate change. Until they can do that, the LNP vote will continue to leak electoral support to One Nation on the right and to the Teals on its liberal ‘left’.
ALP membership: annoying but useful
The review does at least acknowledge one real problem: the difficulty of retaining party members. But its explanation is evasive, and its remedies are laughable.
Members are explicitly described as an electoral “advantage” to be “harnessed” – foot soldiers, in other words. In parliamentarians’ offices we are referred to as ‘branchies’, sometimes affectionately, more often as a necessary nuisance to be managed while the junior staffer maps out their career path.
Little wonder people drift away once they realise branch life has no meaningful impact on policy or priorities, all of which are decided by the parliamentary party and its factional machines. Branches are interminably dull and largely apolitical affairs.
MPs are not accountable servants of the membership or the working class; they expect the reverse, to be treated like celebrities by the membership. Too many of whom fall into line. No wonder professional politics if often referred to as “show business for ugly people”.
In response to a declining membership, the review offers “modernising the membership experience” – vacuous nonsense that sidesteps the central issue that members exercise no power in the party.
Without democratising the party, without bringing MPs under the control of the membership, without transforming conferences from a mostly stage-managed rallies into sovereign decision-making bodies, no amount of digital polish will reverse decline.
Distorted expression of class interests
From a Marxist perspective, at this stage, working-class votes for Labor today are best understood as a negative, atomised expression of class interest in the absence of a serious socialist alternative. They are often votes against the Liberals, not for working-class power and social change.
Labor Tribune’s perspective has never been to prettify this reality, nor to indulge the illusion that the ALP can truly become a socialist party. Our task is to open the ALP up as a democratic united front of the working class where we can fight for our socialist politics while exposing the limits of Laborism.
This review confirms those limits. It is a document of managerial Laborism at a time when capitalism, imperialism and democracy itself are in crisis. The tragedy is not that the ALP leadership refuses to go further; it is that, by design, it cannot.