Can Labor rise above the chaotic carnival of our politics? We’re about to find out

I’m sorry – is this real? Australia, according to the latest international results, ranks poorly for classroom discipline. On Saturday, the Coalition announced a solution: it would hire military veterans. The shadow education minister said: “When I think about the need for better classroom behaviour and more discipline in our classrooms, and the need for more support for Australian values, it seems to make sense.”

“Let every school have a flag,“ the Coalition spokesman also said, in keeping with Angus Taylor’s call two weeks ago to protect the Australian flag more stringently from being burned. These are unserious ideas, but will they work politically? I have no idea because the truth is they match the carnival-esque atmosphere of the past few weeks.

An ex-soldier crying blasphemy because of a cartoon. Revelations that Pauline Hanson had criticised Anthony Albanese’s mother. Suggestions – denied – that One Nation was stealing policies from the Coalition. Golf club renovations, drug use and “sexual deviance”, melons, “feminisation” of our curriculum, the prime minister touring the home of the iPhone. These are not minor stories, but events that have dominated recent weeks.

There are various substantive things that can and should be said about the treasurer’s release of the Intergenerational Report today and the immigration minister’s speech at the National Press Club last week. But they are most accurately viewed as attempts to ground the overarching political narrative in a sense of seriousness again: to wrest back control of the dominant political story.

Whether this government is capable of reasserting control at this particular moment remains an open question.

In his speech releasing the last Intergenerational Report (IGR) in 2023, Jim Chalmers said “the 2020s must mark the end of complacency”. Australia had a chance to “turn these turbulent ’20s into the right kind of defining decade”.

Three years on, the decade is still more turbulent. The government has begun acting on some significant challenges, including the energy transition, housing and broader inequality around assets. These also mean it has begun to address questions raised in that last report on the taxation mix, with predictions then that, if nothing was changed, income tax would play an increasing role in the nation’s finances.

How important the IGR was in paving the way for those recent changes is doubtful. Recall that most observers were surprised by Labor’s decision in the recent budget to change the capital gains tax beyond housing – not a lot of paving had been done.

Still, the last IGR was released only a year or so after Labor won government – the government was still determining its priorities. Halfway through Labor’s second term, it’s reasonable to expect it has a clearer sense of where it wants to go. So the really significant question out of today will be how much Jim Chalmers succeeds in sharpening a story about problems he wants to solve.

He will speak of the danger of people feeling “unmoored economically” at a time of great change, when the “intergenerational promise, of better times” is “fraying” – and say that the “division in politics now is … between those who prey on [the pressure caused by change] and pick on it and politicise it and catastrophise it – and those who seek to alleviate it.”

Obviously, one of the ways some political figures, like Pauline Hanson, are trying to “prey on it” is by targeting immigration. Last week, Hanson announced her plan to slash migration in a policy that would have more people leaving the country than coming in. On the weekend, Angus Taylor promised he would “deliver one of the biggest cuts to immigration in Australian history”. It is into this overwrought context that Chalmers will launch the IGR, with its statistics about lengthening life expectancy, falling fertility and an older population. Whether Chalmers says it or not, there is one inescapable conclusion: we will need migration to continue at reasonable levels.

So it is significant that Tony Burke announced last week that immigration numbers would stay within existing forecasts – in fact, at the level at which they have been for most of the past two decades. There were some changes here and there – on backpackers and international students, most notably. Still, three of the most striking elements were more about shifts in the way migration is talked about.

The first was Burke’s attempt to shift focus away from the question of bringing immigration down to the issue of whether the system “unfolds in the way that we say it will”. Meeting migration targets, Burke said, was one of two elements in maintaining public confidence. (This is not only rhetorical: being able to do so depends on actual changes.)

The second was economic. Interestingly, he took this out of the abstract and towards the concrete, speaking about “the economy of our regions” and “the economy of our cities”, making it local. Then he talked about the economy in terms of hospitals, doctors, aged care and construction: whether those specific areas had enough workers. On Sunday, Anthony Albanese echoed this, saying One Nation’s approach would be “diabolical for our economy and have real consequences for issues such as aged care, healthcare, the hospitality sector, the agricultural sector”. This is a significant pivot for Labor: towards a willingness to make a strong economic case for migration.

Third, Burke said the recent decrease in numbers would make “space for housing supply to catch up”. In doing so, as Paul Sakkal wrote in this masthead, he conceded a connection between the two policy areas.

Importantly, like Chalmers’ discussion of intergenerational equality, this is an economic debate on Labor’s terms. In both cases, we are getting a clear sense of the government’s priorities: it will not be cutting migration drastically, housing supply is at the centre of its aims and so is intergenerational equality.

Labor wants to create a sense of contrast between its own seriousness and the chaos of its opponents. In recent weeks, it has been swept up into the chaos, unable to hold itself apart or drive the agenda. We will see if its latest efforts make a difference.

Sean Kelly is a regular columnist and a former adviser to Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.