View from The Hill: an over-committed Albanese is scrambling to keep his eyes on the main game

It’s just a tiny thing, but then, sometimes small things can carry bigger messages.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is delaying by a day his departure to the international climate conference (COP31) in Turkey to chair ministerial meetings on work for the budget update, which will be released in December.

The government would deny it, of course, but this can be seen as symbolising how the country’s economic problems are overwhelming everything else on the government’s agenda. And certainly, this includes the COP summit that Australia fought so hard to host (but ended up only co-hosting).

Albanese, who only returned to Australia from the Caribbean on Friday, must feel trapped by the multiple overseas commitments the current “summit season” is imposing on him.

The optics of this week’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in the Caribbean were unfortunate at best, what with clips of the PM’s small talk with King Charles and nothing much of substance out of the conference.

Albanese will now leave for COP on Tuesday, giving him Monday to devote to cabinet’s expenditure review committee discussions.

This week’s interest rate rise has elevated the importance of the budget update. Albanese said in its wake, “it makes our decision that we were looking for savings, it confirms it”.

The flip side of that, however, is this very public search for savings also raises the political hype around the update.

Senior ministers will struggle to find large enough savings, because they are constrained by the need to avoid hurting already angry and agitated voters during a cost-of-living crisis. And large savings would involve significant policy changes.

The government is also trying to ride two horses at once, saying it is really serious about the budget update but also that it shouldn’t be seen as anything out of the ordinary – that it’s just what you do every December.

Meanwhile, two strong official voices are putting ministerial feet to the economic fire, especially those of Treasurer Jim Chalmers.

The Albanese government has prided itself in the number of women it has appointed to senior jobs, but it may be squirming at the willingness of two of its high-profile choices, Reserve Bank Governor Michele Bullock and Productivity Commission Chair Danielle Wood, to speak their minds so freely.

Initially, Bullock was extremely careful, reluctant to be interpreted as telling the government what it should be doing. But her messaging about inflation has become increasingly sharp.

On Tuesday, the emphases in her comments and those of the treasurer on the rate rise were quite different. She stressed the local factors in Australia’s inflation problem; he stressed the Iran war.

“The Middle East is a big factor in the uptick in inflation. It’s the primary driver of that uptick,” Chalmers told his news conference before adding, “it’s not the only driver.”

But Bullock said: “Monetary policy cannot impact global oil prices. Rather, the tightening in monetary policy is to address domestic capacity pressures.”

For her part, Wood is obviously deeply frustrated that more progress is not being made on productivity and that the commission’s hands have been tied to an extent in probing for solutions.

The commision’s report, titled “Unlocking business dynamism: removing barriers to entry, growth and exit”, released this week, said bluntly: “Our terms of reference state that tax, workplace relations and mergers frameworks are not intended to be an inquiry focus”.

Wood indicated that while these exclusions weren’t necessarily a problem for the inquiry, which encompassed a broad range of issues from regulatory burdens to access to finance, workplace relations should be considered in the broader productivity debate.

She told Nine Media, “It doesn’t make sense to leave a big area like workplace relations off the table”.

Of course it doesn’t. But put industrial relations on the table and that runs up against the constraint imposed by the union movement. The government’s history has been to give to the unions; it doesn’t take away from them.

So whether it is finding savings or boosting productivity, the goverrnment’s room to move is limited. And, at the moment, so is the flexibility in the prime minister’s calendar.