The long postwar boom collapsed in 1974, just as the newly elected Whitlam government was implementing its ambitious program of big-spending reforms conceived in the prosperous 1960s when the economy seemed to take care of itself.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) had quadrupled the price of oil, setting off an inflationary recession in all industrialised capitalist economies, including Australia. But to a Coalition, shocked to find itself on the opposition benches, it seemed Australia’s increasing economic woes were caused by an irresponsible and incompetent Labor government. The solution was to return itself to government so normality could be restored.

But once back in govenment it was soon clear that economic prosperity could no longer be assumed. Economic management was now a core government priority, where it has remained. Unemployment and inflation were both rising. Fraser fought inflation first, cutting government spending and containing wage demands.

Fraser assumed that with the Coalition back in charge, long-term prosperity would be restored. This didn’t happen, and he was famously resistant to the neoliberal ideas circulating by the early 1980s. After Labor took up the neoliberal challenge under Hawke and began deregulating the economy, Fraser was turned on for missed opportunities.

Fraser’s most enduring legacies are in Indigenous land rights, immigration and multiculturalism. In a spirit of bipartisanship, Fraser largely accepted the recommendations of the Woodward Royal Commission into Aboriginal Land Rights established by Whitlam. This granted Indigenous groups freehold title to Northern Territory reserves and established land councils to manage them. The Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 was the first law by any Australian government to recognise Aboriginal rights to land.

While Whitlam had dismantled the last vestiges of Australia’s race-based immigration policy, it was Fraser who made the end of White Australia a visible reality with his government’s generous acceptance of Indo-Chinese refugees, including boat arrivals.

Whitlam had abolished the Department of Immigration, in part because of its history in administering the White Australia Policy. Fraser restored it, adding Ethnic Affairs to its title and concern with the special needs of ethnic communities to its responsibilities.

Whitlam’s first Minister for Immigration, Al Grassby, had rejected the longstanding policy of assimilation, in which ethnic cultural differences would dissolve, and argued instead for multiculturalism. This was little more than a slogan until Fraser.

Fraser was deeply anti-racist, and opposed the persecution of racial and ethnic minorities. He welcomed Australia developing into a multicultural nation, and accepted the recommendations of the 1978 Galbally report into post-arrival programs and services to migrants. The most significant of these was the establishment of SBS.

In the following decades, it became clear many Liberals were uneasy about multiculturalism, and for a time John Howard even refused to use "the m word". But as racially non-discriminatory migration continued, and as ethnic communities grew, the term became a taken-for-granted vernacular description of Australia’s social reality.

Former prime minister Tony Abbott judges Bob Hawke to be Labor's greatest prime minister. It's an interesting choice, given wartime leader John Curtin often receives that accolade from those within Labor ranks. Curtin was Hawke's hero.

But Abbott has a point.

Curtin's place in history was centrally determined by the time in which he served. If he hadn't been leader in wartime, he wouldn't have left such a legacy. Hawke's leadership was less tethered to a dramatic period, although international circumstances partly delivered him the opportunity to preside over Australia's economic transformation in the 1980s. In these years, the Australian economy was opened: the dollar floated, foreign banks let in, tariffs slashed.

Even for his day, Hawke pushed the accepted boundaries for a political aspirant. In today's more correct age, he probably wouldn't get to first base. But at the time the drinking, womanising and general bad behaviour appealed as epitomising the Australian larrikin myth. By his entry to parliament, Hawke had cleaned up his act. But the man-of-the-people image was embedded.

Politically, his charisma was a gold coin. The much talked-of Hawke love affair with the Australian people, and theirs with him, meant he was trusted as well as liked. Even when his government broke promises, people were willing to listen to why and give it the benefit of the doubt. In a community still recovering from the divisions of the Whitlam-Fraser years, voters related to his "consensus" mantra.

When his supporters were seeking to persuade sceptical journalists Hawke should replace Bill Hayden as Labor leader, one argument was that he'd be a "chairman of the board" sort of prime minister (so not a risk). In reality, the appropriate description was "captain of the ship". He gave his crew their heads, but he understood what the public, or important stakeholders, would accept and steadied the vessel when he believed it necessary. The Whitlam government delivered as much (though very different) substantial reform as Hawke's, but its record was marred by upheaval and ill-discipline.

No prime minister can be successful on their own. Hawke's career in the ACTU formed a foundation for his government's formal "accord" with the union movement, a two-way relationship that enabled major economic reforms (in return for tradeoffs). Without it, there would have been much industrial conflict.

Hawke also had a creative, ambitious treasurer in Paul Keating, and some exceptionally talented ministers, making a lively cabinet that improved policies by contested discussion. Good governments learn from their predecessors' mistakes: the Hawke team was determined to avoid the shambolic aspects of Whitlam's time.

Judging a leader is always a matter of weighing the ledger. The Hawke government had its share of scandals, sackings and serious stuff-ups. Finally, the man who'd stormed his way into the leadership failed to accept it was time to manage his way out of it. When they judged Hawke, who had won Labor four elections, would be unlikely to clinch a fifth, a majority of caucus blasted him out.

Despite the messy exit, Hawke has a strong claim to be judged Australia's best postwar prime minister from either side. On his watch, Australia readied itself, economically, to move into the 21st century.

A polarising figure – inspiring to some, arrogant to others – Paul Keating was a bold and uncompromising prime minister whose vision for Australia’s future was built on his distinctive interpretation of Australia’s past.

His reputation for forthright leadership was forged during his time as treasurer in the Hawke government, where he helped restore Labor’s reputation for economic management by implementing key reforms such as floating the dollar.

He became prime minister in December 1991, but his reputation was damaged by the early 1990s recession: not helped when he called it "the recession that Australia had to have". The high unemployment and high interest rates of that era remain inseparable from many people’s memories of Keating. His unlikely victory over John Hewson in 1993 gave him new assurance.

Keating’s vision for a new national story unfolded around three themes: breaking with Britain by becoming a republic, reconciling with Indigenous Australians through recognition of our history, and looking to Australia’s multicultural future as part of Asia. He did this in both idiosyncratic and brave ways, for example, kissing the ground at Kokoda to honour Australian soldiers who died there defending their country in the second world war.

Most astonishingly, in his 1992 Redfern speech, he was the first Australian prime minister to acknowledge that "we took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life […] it was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us."

Crucial in this speech, written by Don Watson, was the use of "we". In reinforcing continuity between past and present, Keating implicated all Australians in the ongoing mistreatment of Indigenous people. It was an essential acknowledgement, but also incendiary to many Australians. The speech has reverberated through Australian politics ever since.

The Keating government responded to the High Court’s Mabo decision with the landmark Native Title Act of 1993. The result of complex, difficult negotiations, its passage represented a significant and symbolic recognition of Indigenous rights.

Keating was also a keen advocate of the arts as a vehicle for national identity. He praised the film Strictly Ballroom not just for its depiction of multicultural Australia, but as a metaphor for modern Australia. His government also introduced Creative Nation, the first Commonwealth cultural policy in Australia’s history.

Keating’s legacy is bound up with assessments of his economic record. He and Hawke implemented the new orthodoxy of neoliberalism in Australia and, for a time, it appeared to have delivered increased national prosperity. The accords (agreements with the union movement to forgo wage rises in return for lower taxes and benefits such as Medicare) seemed to realise Keating’s vision of "efficiency with equity.

But under his leadership, inequality grew, union power declined, and national assets such as Qantas were partly privatised, alienating many traditional Labor voters.

However, compulsory superannuation, introduced in 1992, transformed retirement incomes and boosted national savings. It is widely hailed as one of Keating’s most significant achievements.

In preparing for an ageing population via superannuation, looking to Asia for Australia’s economic prosperity, and confronting the reality of Australia’s dispossession of Indigenous Australians, few prime ministers can claim to be as forward-looking as Keating.

When his government was defeated in 1996, Keating was unrepentant, declaring "it’s the big picture which changes nations". Yet Keating was also a culture warrior ahead of his time, and his willingness to press the buttons of his political opponents opened the way for today’s more ideologically charged, divisive and punitive politics.

John Howard has had good press from some genuine enthusiasts, and now sits alongside Robert Menzies as a Liberal Party hero. But Howard might have the better claim to have changed the country. Australia changed under Menzies – but how much did he have to do with that? Did he merely preside? Some, like Donald Horne, thought he did.

Howard did not merely preside. While criticised for failing to do enough to liberalise the economy as treasurer, his ambitions as a transformative leader were made clear enough during his first, unsuccessful time as leader in the 1980s.

In the 1988 manifesto "Future Directions: It’s time for plain thinking", he set out much of the vision he would later pursue as prime minister. Clever journalists ridiculed the white picket fence and white family on the cover. They underestimated the attractiveness of his reworking of Australian conservatism.

When the time came to govern, Howard fought the culture wars and the history wars with vigour, successfully opposed a republic, and pushed back on Indigenous claims to self-determination, native title and calls for an Apology to the Stolen Generations.

There is a familiar claim that he remade the country as a more conservative place. Yet conservatives who worried there was too much Asian immigration in the 1980s – and Howard revealed himself in 1988 as one of them – should have been dismayed by the size and composition of Australia’s immigration intake as it developed under Howard.

The Tampa crisis of 2001, and the border protection policies to which it gave rise, will be condemned or celebrated according to one’s perspective. But there are aspects of the policy that are undeniable. It was popular. It became bipartisan. The essentials of the approach remain in place today.

More contentiously perhaps, it gave legitimacy to a large immigration program, temporary and permanent, because it provided assurance that the government was in control of the country’s borders. But Howard-style border protection also inflicted a great deal of cruelty and suffering, a project the Labor Party would subsequently join.

The combination of border security, the September 11 attacks on the United States (which occurred while Howard was in the US) and the "War on Terror" elevated both "national security" and Howard himself. In the eyes of many, he became something more than a merely partisan politician – if not quite a statesman, at least a national leader.

Howard was a great political beneficiary of the China boom. This story, and the government’s encouragement of this burgeoning economic relationship, probably mattered more for the country’s future than the intimate relations he established with the US as a minor member of the coalition of the willing that invaded Iraq.

There is another irony in Howard having become so attached to the US in these years. The Coalition’s clampdown on gun ownership in the wake of the Port Arthur massacre would in time craft one of the most telling differences that Australians see between themselves and Americans.

Besides asylum-seeker policy, there are some other dark Howard legacies that are still with us. The privatisation of child-care, age-care and employment services has lacked merit. The scale of tax concessions offered to wealthy retirees and property investors undermines our social compact. Funding to private schools was delivered on a scale that fuelled growing educational inequality and declining performance. The level of subsidy to private health funds, another Howard-era project, undermined Medicare.

Few of us saw things quite this way at the time, but it might have been better for all of us if Howard had been more like his hero, Menzies – and not only in his mastery of the art of politics and his marvellous capacity to win elections.

During the 2007 election, Labor leader Kevin Rudd depicted himself as more suited to the 21st century than Prime Minister John Howard, but still a safe pair of hands.

Rudd was the Mandarin-speaking candidate who would manage the "Asian century" and the rise of China. At 50, he was a much younger man with a highly successful working wife and progressive gender politics.

Rudd reassured social conservatives by emphasising his Christianity, albeit a social justice version that critiqued inequitable neoliberal economic policies and advocated more humanitarian attitudes towards refugees and the LGBTQI community.

At the same time, Rudd pledged to be a responsible economic manager, balancing the budget on average across economic cycles.

However, that suddenly became more challenging as the global financial crisis hit. Rudd and Treasurer Wayne Swan implemented a full-scale Keynesian stimulus package that helped prevent a recession, but significantly increased government debt.

While China’s growth also helped avoid a recession, neither Rudd government benefited from the massive Asian mineral boom revenues that had facilitated the Howard government’s favourable budget outcomes.

Indeed, the rise of China contributed to a high dollar, a “patchwork economy” and the decline of Australian manufacturing, which the government tried to address.

Meanwhile, attempts to increase mining tax revenues resulted in well-funded campaigns against the government. Similarly, government attempts to tackle climate change through a carbon trading scheme succumbed to major conservative opposition from the Coalition and the Murdoch press. It was also hammered from the other end by the Greens for not being radical enough.

However, the Rudd government’s many policy reform successes included recognising same-sex relationships (although opposing same-sex marriage) and improving gender equality. Rudd made a heartfelt apology to the Stolen Generations of Indigenous children.

Julia Gillard’s reforms as Rudd’s employment and workplace relations minister removed some of the worst excesses of Howard’s WorkChoices legislation, albeit leaving other measures that many unions opposed in place.

The government initially introduced a more humane approach to processing asylum seekers, but faced opposition arguments that it was not protecting Australia’s borders.

Internationally, Rudd played a significant role in facilitating the G20, but Australia did not achieve his desired influence in Asia.

Meanwhile, the government was being detrimentally affected behind the scenes by Rudd’s dysfunctional management style. It came as a shock to many Australian voters when Gillard replaced Rudd as prime minister in a 2010 leadership coup.

Rudd briefly returned to the prime ministership in 2013, tasked with saving as many seats as possible before an almost certain electoral defeat. He tried attracting former Coalition voters by introducing harsh offshore processing measures in Nauru and Manus island that were designed to prevent asylum seekers who arrived by boat from ever settling in Australia. He also tried attracting social progressives by personally supporting same-sex marriage.

Rudd argued Australia was one of the few countries to escape a recession during the global financial crisis and had low government debt internationally. Nonetheless, he lost the election to a Coalition campaign based largely on criticising Labor for being a big-spending government that could not manage the economy – or itself.

Julia Gillard will forever be a significant Australian prime minister, given her pioneering status as the office’s first woman occupant, after 110 years and 26 men.

Since her deposal in June 2013 by the man she originally toppled to get there, Kevin Rudd, normal transmission has resumed. Counting Rudd redux, in the more than a decade since, the country has had five prime ministers, all men.

Gillard has to wear blame for catalysing the cycle of prime-ministerial assassinations that roiled Canberra beginning with her ascension to office in June 2010. Only with Anthony Albanese’s May 2025 re-election has that period of instability passed.

Gillard was sorely provoked. She was consistently required to instil order and soothe sensibilities in the midst of Rudd’s chaotic governing style and dismissive treatment of subordinates. She was a woman cleaning up after a man.

Nevertheless, and with the benefit of hindsight, Gillard ought to have resisted the urgings of disgruntled colleagues and the sirens of ambition to quell rather than join the anti-Rudd revolt. She should have realised that Rudd’s distempers, however vexing, were not so uncharacteristic of the leadership personality. She ought to have anticipated that blood would beget blood, especially given what she knew of Rudd’s character. And she should have heeded Albanese’s counsel: that ripping down Rudd would destroy two prime ministerships, his and hers.

To a large extent, that is how it turned out. Gillard wore the way she obtained office like a crown of thorns. It stained her reputation and robbed her of legitimacy. This was shot through with gender bias – where ruthlessness and ambition are traits accepted in men, they are regarded as anomalous and repellent in women.

Conscious of the shadow of illegitimacy that hung over her prime ministership, Gillard sprinted to an election to win her own mandate from the public. Underdone in the leadership role and up against the search-and-destroy potency of Tony Abbott, she lost Labor’s majority, only retaining office by adroitly negotiating the support of key crossbenchers.

Gillard achieved much while in power, a record all the more remarkable as the country’s first minority prime minister since the second world war. She was a brave, resilient and diligent administrator. Under her leadership, the 43rd parliament outstripped the productivity of most of modern times. Her government laid down bold reforms, most notably the carbon tax, tragically repealed by Abbott in 2014, and the National Disability Insurance Scheme – widely viewed as the most significant landmark in social policy since Medicare.

Yet it was a crisis-ridden period: plagued by missteps and volte-faces on budget management and asylum seeker policy, menaced by Abbott, and undermined by Rudd’s relentless stalking. Nor did Gillard help herself with a wooden communication style and withdrawn persona. She seemed to expect her governing deeds to speak for themselves, declining to unbend in the public eye. Part a function of her distaste for Rudd’s performative excesses, this was also a product of a fundamental shyness and prideful character. But it was also characteristic of her gender: unlike males, women typically get on and do things without having to constantly preen.

Unquestionably, the reception to Gillard’s prime ministership was also negatively coloured by deep-seated veins of misogyny in the media and public. She was a target of lamentable public bullying. Stoic in the face of that adversity, finally, following provocation upon provocation, Gillard hit back with her famed misogyny speech of October 2012.

Internationally renowned, it was another of her legacies as she gave expression to the pent-up rage of women of all ages. "It doesn’t explain everything," was her parting reflection on the gender effects on her prime ministership, "it explains some things. And it is for the nation to think in a sophisticated way about those shades of grey." A conversation we’re arguably still waiting for, perhaps it will only come with Australia’s next woman national leader.

Tony Abbott was not the first party leader to emerge from a journalistic background, but he was the most efficient at turning its base tabloid instincts to the task of dismantling a first-term government’s public standing.

No assessment of Abbott’s influence on the country, nor his rise and fall as prime minister, is possible without understanding his concussive impact as opposition leader. This time became less a preparation for high office than the model for – and delimiter of – his potential as a government leader.

Synonymous with reductive three-word slogans such as “axe the tax” and “stop the boats”, Abbott as opposition leader had eschewed personal likeability in favour of a full-throated assault on virtually every element of Labor’s program, including its fitness to govern.

Wherever he ranks among Australian prime ministers, the 28th holder of that high office is surely the most efficacious opposition leader in Australia’s federal political history.

Hardly praise – this simply recognises that for a time, the member for Warringah healed and enthused his bedraggled conservative coalition by focusing it laser-like around a new aggression directed at the Rudd and Gillard governments’ policies and personnel.

Abbott’s macho shift worked surprisingly well. In rapid succession, he intimidated a dominant Labor Party into retreating from its signature climate change policies and then into dumping its still popular prime minister, Kevin Rudd.

Against Julia Gillard at the subsequent 2010 election, Abbott came close to winning, forcing her into minority government. By 2013, he did the rest, obliterating Labor by 90 seats to 55.

In victory, Abbott had it all before him – a united party and a bitterly divided Labor opposition coursing with acrimony.

Yet his own unpopularity, combined with a 2014–15 federal budget heaving with unheralded austerity measures – most notably big cuts to health and education spending – would set the course for his eventual demise.

By the time he was bundled from the prime ministership in 2015 by his own colleagues, he had embarked on some bizarre policies. Not least of which was a decision to restore knighthoods – including one for Prince Philip – and the stubborn refusal to allow same-sex marriage to be legislated.

There were glimmers of personal growth from Abbott as prime minister, but these turned out to be either fleeting or simply tactical concessions designed to create momentum-sapping delays.

One such occasion was when he told parliament in 2015 that a private members bill to legalise same-sex marriage should be owned by the whole parliament, not merely the Labor side. Read initially as a belated recognition of wide social support for the change, Abbott’s pluralism turned out to be just another ploy for denial.

In foreign affairs, Abbott spoke of pulling Australia’s gaze nearer to the region – more Jakarta than Geneva – but in reality little changed.

In substance, Abbott’s locus of values and authority remained defiantly Anglophone, and his political style unedifying combative.

Perhaps it was always destined to end this way because Abbott viewed the prime ministership as just another battle plane on which to continue his lifelong fight with the left.

He never fully rose to the possibility of government for the whole nation. A feckless Labor Party pitched in, but as both Liberal leader and prime minister, Abbott left Australia in a less civil and less united state than he found it.

On September 15 2015, Malcolm Turnbull defeated Tony Abbott in a party-room ballot to become Australia’s 29th prime minister. Turnbull’s prime ministership began with good prospects of following John Howard in establishing a long-term Coalition government.

This did not happen. An inability to read the electorate and manage the coalition parties and a hostile right-wing media led to the premature end of his premiership on August 24 2018, once again in a party-room ballot.

His own mistakes contributed to the outcome. He did not to go to an election in 2015 at the height of his popularity, then campaigned poorly in a double-dissolution election in the winter of 2016. A hostage to right-wing elements in his party, his leadership was never able to recover.

On economic policy, Turnbull sought to cultivate a culture of enterprise and innovation in an "agile" private sector. This theme led to an enterprise tax reform package in the 2016–17 budget. At its core was a cut in company tax from 30% to 25% to be phased in over a decade. However, Turnbull was unable to get the legislation through the Senate and his reformist economic agenda failed.

In managing Australia’s foreign relations, Turnbull was successful in negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership with 12 Pacific Rim nations. He also held his own against US President Donald Trump when the latter tried to overturn an arrangement over refugee settlement that had been negotiated with President Barack Obama.

Before Turnbull, Coalition and Labor governments embraced a policy of engagement with China. Under Turnbull came a worsening of Sino-Australian relations that deteriorated further under his successor, Scott Morrison.

The Australia-China relationship really soured when Turnbull banned Chinese telecommunications company Huawei from supplying equipment for the rollout of Australia’s 5G network. Although ostensibly based on security concerns, Turnbull’s memoirs revealed there was no "smoking gun" to justify the ban.

In some areas of policy, decisive actions produced results. In 2017 he forced suppliers of liquefied natural gas to increase domestic supply in the eastern states by threatening to use Commonwealth powers to cap their exports. In the same year, he yielded to pressure to dump the Clean Energy Target proposed by the Chief Scientist, Alan Finkel. While it was a creative substitute policy, Turnbull’s proposed National Energy Guarantee (NEG) was vetoed by right-wing elements in the coalition parties and contributed to the political turmoil that led to his replacement by Morrison in 2018.

A policy decision that remains doubtful was Turnbull’s decision to commit to the construction of the $2 billion Snowy Hydro 2.0. This involved linking two existing reservoirs with new tunnels and an underground power station. By October 2025, completing the project at even $12 billion is considered unachievable.

To his credit, Turnbull made determined efforts to discourage discrimination against Muslim Australians, ran a successful plebiscite on marriage equality, had effective cabinet processes and enforced ministerial standards, including with future leader of the Liberal Party, Sussan Ley.

Scott Morrison occupies a middling place in the impact rankings of Australia's most recent ten prime ministers. He is the "hinge" figure who marked the end of one long era of Australian politics and inadvertently ushered in a new one.

Morrison changed Australia in two ways. First, he gave Australians their fullest experience yet of the neoliberal approach to government originally seeded by John Howard. Second, through neoliberal overreach, Morrison triggered voters' fundamental rejection of that approach, resulting in the election in 2022 and decisive re-election in 2025 of the Albanese Labor government.

His prime ministership was therefore significant as the culmination of the line of neoliberal Liberal prime ministers, which began with Howard and ended with Morrison leading the party into an electoral and ideological wilderness from which it is struggling to recover.

The roots of Morrison's approach are clear in the neoliberal seeds Howard planted in office. They included privileging the private sector over the public, hollowing out and bringing to heel the Australian Public Service, relaxing ministerial integrity and accountability standards, and favouring men over women in terms of policy and appointments. Howard also promoted fossil fuels, including a massive expansion of Australia's gas industry.

The long-term results of Howard's approach were floridly on display under Morrison, who took them to their logical conclusion.

Under Morrison the public service became effectively semi-privatised at the cost of frank and fearless advice and loss of institutional knowledge. Ministerial accountability standards crashed, as notably symbolised in (but far from restricted to) the Robodebt scandal. The Liberal "man cave" emerged fully into view, leading to trauma for some of the party's notably small number of women MPs, and bringing the nature of parliament as a gendered workplace into stark focus.

A trademark Morrison moment occurred while a minister in the Turnbull government, when he brandished a lump of coal in parliament saying, "This is coal. Don't be afraid. It won't hurt you."

During his prime ministership the influence of the resource sector on Coalition governments peaked, with damaging consequences at the 2022 election. The Liberals lost a swathe of metropolitan blue-riband seats to centrist, climate-focused, female independent candidates who, earlier in the Liberal Party's history, might comfortably have been moderate Liberal MPs instead of crossbenchers.

A crucial but little-recognised aspect of Howard's prime ministership was his use of tough fiscal rhetoric combined with a permissive approach to government spending when it suited the Coalition's political purposes. This was a frustration to Howard's treasurer Peter Costello, whose commitment to fiscal rectitude was less compromised.

Howard's pragmatism on government spending saw its ultimate expression in Morrison's loose fiscal policy – his government never achieved a budget surplus – and, when the COVID pandemic arrived in 2020, lavish subsidies for big business without enforcing clawback mechanisms for money when it turned out not to be needed.

Morrison will be remembered as the prime minister who took the Liberals too far to the right to be acceptable to mainstream Australia.

Many readers will read this in November 2025 with the view that Anthony Albanese has squandered his opportunity to substantively reshape Australia. He was unable to win bipartisan support for the Voice to Parliament referendum in 2023, leading to its public defeat in October that year, although criticism needs to fall with the then Liberal leader Peter Dutton for that, too. The result continues to have an outsized bearing on how we appraise Albanese. Had the referendum passed, his legacy on reconciliation and Indigenous rights would have been obvious.

Instead, Albanese’s achievements have been piecemeal. In his first term as prime minister, he oversaw a fairly comprehensive suite of workplace relations reforms, aged care and NDIS reforms, cut HECS debt for existing students, and introduced the social media ban for Australians under 16.

Albanese has tended to downplay these legislative achievements. Historian Frank Bongiorno has described him as both campaigning and governing in prose: not “a radical visionary, but the kind of bloke you’d trust with your tax return”. Less charitably, it may be that Albanese genuinely lacks a stomach for reforms that threaten his popularity among voters (or donors, as seems more likely with the watered-down superannuation tax reforms).

Elsewhere, he has not addressed issues that have both public and expert support: increasing NewStart, reducing intergenerational inequality, or banning gambling advertising. Universal childcare – apparently how Albanese hopes to be remembered – is on the agenda for this term, but details are scarce.

Some of this might be attributable to constraints inside the parliament. Between 2022 and 2025, Labor needed the support of either the Coalition or the Greens plus at least one crossbench Senator to pass legislation. It’s difficult to deliver a cohesive set of reforms when you are bouncing between two very different negotiating partners.

But since July 2025, Albanese needs only the Greens (or the Coalition) to support bills in the Senate, opening the path to progressive legislation on issues where the left-wing parties could plausibly agree: workplace relations, climate change or welfare reform, for example.

Albanese’s real legacy might instead be how he has managed the Labor Party through a series of potential crises. Albanese has navigated internal tensions over its position on Israel and Gaza, opposing the US to admonish Israel, and losing only one caucus member along the way.

He has balanced calls to be tougher with US President Donald Trump and the need to support Australian export industries. The party withstood consistent interest rate increases between May 2022 and November 2023, and no decrease until February 2025.

Regardless of when and how he leaves office, Albanese will leave the Labor Party in much better shape than he found it. Maybe in the post-2007 era of Australian politics, that’s good enough.