When it comes to mea culpas, they don’t come much stronger than Jim Chalmers’ recent admission

Four months ago, Anthony Albanese reminded his caucus of something Paul Keating had said – that Labor was like a bicycle. Keating said it more than once. On one occasion he attributed the sentiment (though not the phrase) to Gough Whitlam. “Gough understood that the ALP was like a bicycle. It only stands up when you pedal. If you stop pedalling it falls over. If you run out of ideas and you run out of push and you run out of drive, it just sort of lays to one side.”

It’s mostly forgotten now, but Whitlam could be a sharp critic of the Hawke government. So that occasion was significant in part because, as the late Michael Gordon recounted in his biography of Keating, the speech in which Keating said this – matched by Whitlam praising Keating – marked a “rapprochement” between the two men.

There was a historical resonance – perhaps unintentional – to Albanese’s use of the quote. Keating has at times been a sharp critic of this government. After this year’s budget, though, he swooped in to defend Labor’s taxation agenda against its critics. There was a nice symmetry, then, in Albanese quoting Keating’s olive branch to Whitlam – perhaps while offering an olive branch of his own.

And this made sense, because the budget marked this government’s strongest declaration of purpose – stepping into the Labor tradition to which both Whitlam and Keating were attached. With their housing tax changes, Albanese and Jim Chalmers chose to do something significant about our increasingly unequal society. And there was a second part, which would likely have appealed to Keating: Chalmers argued, too, that Labor’s changes to housing taxes would improve productivity by making sure people were investing in the areas most likely to drive economic growth, rather than areas most likely to benefit from tax incentives.

So where are we now, five months after what Chalmers described as the most significant tax reform in a generation?

The question is difficult to answer, in part because poor polling can cloud judgment. Polling doldrums are too easily read as proof that a government is not just unpopular but bad at governing.

We should be particularly cautious about such judgments at a time when the poor polling is almost certainly driven greatly by inflation, a large part of which is outside the government’s control. (Yes, the government plays some part, which I’ll get to.)

Is the government adrift? There are two answers to that. In one sense, no. Albanese has, at least at the level of obvious activity, kept pedalling since the budget, with action on migration, AI, the NDIS, the digital duty of care and gambling (whether those policies work is another question). And remember: it has only been five months.

But there is another answer. The government seems to be falling into a malaise in which at least some of its MPs, too, begin to believe polling offers an authoritative answer to the question of whether it is doing a good job. The newspapers are suddenly full of Labor ministers and MPs offering views about each other.

There is nothing wrong with disagreement – in fact, this government hasn’t had enough of it. But disagreement is most useful when it is serious argument over policy and ideology. So far, much of this backgrounding seems to be at the level of political whingeing. Still, senior figures are obviously taking it seriously. On the subject of olive branches, you will not get many stronger mea culpas from senior ministers than Chalmers’ recent admission to this masthead: “I should make more time for my colleagues.”

A type of urgency is building in the media: the sense that Labor must define itself clearly and perhaps even stake out some new direction. That pressure will ramp up after the next rate rise, predicted this week. Is that urgency justified? Again, there are two answers.

The first is that Labor must be wary of jumping at shadows. A sudden swerve would look like panic. And a pivot in the dying weeks of the year is unlikely to succeed, as voters begin to switch off.

The second answer is that Labor must not assume the ship (or bicycle) will right itself, in part because of one significant difference between this term and its first term. It is easy to see this term’s housing tax changes as equivalent to last term’s tax cuts changes: both are about equity, both involved breaking promises, both brought concerns about Labor’s future to the fore.

But the changes to the stage 3 tax cuts were announced just over a year before the election. Afterwards, the government went fairly quiet, until a policy burst at the beginning of election year.

The housing tax changes, though, were announced two years before the likely date of the next election. That leaves significantly more time to fill. What is Labor’s agenda? Or, more fundamentally, what is the character of this government?

This is the question that senior figures must surely now be thinking about. Does Labor continue down the path it set in the budget, of a boldly reforming equity-focused government? Or is that the one big risk it allows itself before reverting to the more cautious approach of most of its first term? On inflation, there must be serious savings announced in the December budget update, but this won’t answer the larger economic questions. Does Labor cut spending aggressively in the new year, despite risks of recession? Does the “growth agenda” that Albanese has begun to speak about mark some new stage – or is it only a new phrase for old policies?

Beneath this is a bigger question: Whether the government goes decisively in one direction or – somewhat understandably, in the face of enormous uncertainty and risk – proceeds by trial and error, pedalling as slowly and carefully as it can.

These are devilishly difficult questions. They will be defining. The government will likely not rush to answer them in the next two months. But over the next year, either through action or inaction, they will be answered.

Sean Kelly is author of The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison, a regular columnist and a former adviser to Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.

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