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Both major parties have run election campaigns focused on the leaders to the exclusion of rising stars and talented rivals, even as shifting demographics highlight the need for generational change. By Karen Barlow.
Can the major parties regenerate?
After surveying the losses and gains from this election, the first jobs of the leaders of the two major parties will be to reassemble and rearm the respective front benches.
In a tightly controlled campaign, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has already flagged a significant cabinet reshuffle should he win the election. Labor insiders say it was deliberate internal caucus and cabinet messaging to “keep everyone in their place”.
Jostling has intensified after several years of relative political stability in Australia. Adjacent to the main election campaign, there have been calls for support and coded messaging in public appearances, along with strategic offers of help with backbench campaigns.
“They try to fundraise for others in order to basically curry favour for the votes when it comes to the ministry,” a senior Labor insider tells The Saturday Paper.
Albanese has confirmed only that the members of the leaders group – Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles, Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong, Treasurer Jim Chalmers, Finance Minister Katy Gallagher and Trade Minister Don Farrell – would stay in their portfolios.
The Labor source says there’s personal strategy in the plan for a broader reshuffle, “not because he doesn’t think these ministers are doing a good job in their portfolios – it will be to keep them busy bedding themselves down early on in a new term”.
“He’ll do it in order to be able to give himself some breathing room.”
Peter Dutton may well be wanting some himself, though former Morrison media chief Andrew Carswell says the Liberal leadership is only likely to be in question if the Coalition were to secure fewer than 65 seats.
Liberal insiders say shadow treasurer Angus Taylor wants the top job, and Dutton knows it.
Pointedly asked last week whether he will run for leader if the Coalition loses the election, Taylor sidestepped, while brandishing his credentials.
“You know, there is one job I want ... and that’s Jim Chalmers’ job because he’s not up to it,” Taylor told Sky News. “He’s out of his depth. He’s out of touch. We can do better.”
“We need someone with a private sector background who understands business, who understands investment, who understands what it is to grow a growing economy.”
Carswell insists there’s no lack of talent within the Coalition’s current ranks, highlighting campaign spokesman James Paterson and Jane Hume – although they are in the Senate, never the home of a major party leader. He also describes Andrew Hastie, one of the Liberal figures who has spent more time in their local fight rather than the national stage, as a “bright prospect for the future”.
“He handled himself quite well on the campaign quite recently, when he came under attack for previous comments,” he tells The Saturday Paper, referring to the former SAS captain’s views on women in combat roles.
“He didn’t buckle under pressure. He didn’t give in to the media’s desire for blood. He stood firm on his values and I think that he endeared himself from that moment to a lot within the party.”
The Coalition leader is widely viewed as exceeding expectations after Scott Morrison’s 2022 loss, but the bright lights of the official campaign have left him, and his team, exposed.
“The party room is not happy with the economic agenda. We should have robust policies, but we just don’t have them,” the Liberal source says.
“The work-from-home policy came from Jane Hume and Angus Taylor. So disappointing.”
There are continuing calls for the return of former Liberal treasurer Josh Frydenberg, who lost his seat of Kooyong to Monique Ryan in 2022.
Now the Australian chair of investment bank Goldman Sachs, Frydenberg told a forum in Perth this week “never say never” about a possible return to politics, and “I don’t think ambition is a crime” when asked if he wanted to be a future prime minister.
Asked on Wednesday if Frydenberg would be a welcome addition to his team, Dutton said he hoped he “comes back one day”.
“I’ve encouraged him to do so. That’s a debate for three years down the track, obviously, he’s not running in this election,” he told reporters in Melbourne.
Australian National University professor and former political journalist Mark Kenny describes Dutton’s leadership as having run “this unified, sort of, fairly sleek peloton toward the goal of winning the very next election.
“He’s done that really, by strategically – perhaps pragmatically might be a better way of putting it – avoiding fights on both policy and personnel.
“As the election became less of a theory and more of a reality, and we’ve found that he’s got a frontbench team that really bats down to about number two, or two or three, and then it’s, you’re into the tail end … for the most part. Just to use a cricket term. And of course, on policy, a really very thin offering.”
“It’s a problem for both leaders,” a Liberal source tells The Saturday Paper. “They pick people based on loyalty and compliance instead of capability and talent.”
“They are not talking to the back bench.”
For his part, Albanese has turned to his advantage what he’s portrayed as a deeper bench of talent.
“I think the capacity of the team is one of the big differences in this campaign,” he told the National Press Club on Wednesday.
“The other mob have shadow cabinet ministers who haven’t been sighted. They’ve got people who aren’t allowed to leave their electorate, let alone talk to anyone. I’m really proud of my leadership style. I think my leadership style is one that has brought us unity.”
There has been conspicuous absence on the Labor side, too, however. While Albanese kept his Labor Left factional ally Mark Butler close throughout the campaign – unsurprisingly, given the central role of his health portfolio – Albanese’s closer rival on the Left, Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek, has been spending more time in her electorate of Sydney and assisting marginal campaigns.
The awkward baggage of Albanese’s history with Plibersek led to several days of questions during the campaign about her future, until he finally conceded she would remain “a senior cabinet minister”.
A majority result for Labor would cement Albanese’s position in a second term, but short of that, he has a clock ticking over his head, according to ANU political marketing researcher Andrew Hughes.
“I think most people accept that he’s on the way out, not the way in, even though he might win [this] election,” he says. “In my head, he gets married and he leaves a job and he retires to the Central Coast, which is not a bad outcome, to be honest.”
Richard Marles, who prefers deputy prime minister over his defence title, and Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke are the two who would be expected to fight it out with Treasurer Jim Chalmers as the Labor Right candidates for leadership.
What is arguably in the electoral interests of both parties is some generational renewal. Political analysts say it is the younger vote that drifts the most. And with the Gen Z and the Millennial generations of voters now outnumbering the Baby Boomers for the first time, this younger bloc will expect to see themselves represented on the political stage.
Generational reform is not easy for rigid and tribal political parties.
“The next cabs off the rank, and they’re five-deep in terms of the old guard of Labor that have been around for a very long period of time, so you’re not going to see that immediate switch to the next generation,” Carswell says.
“There are others that are going to fill that gap in the meantime. But really the next stage is promoting those young stars, the Andrew Charltons of this world, and giving them more prominence that they currently don’t have, and they haven’t had during this term whatsoever.”
Charlton is part of Labor’s New South Wales Right faction, which is well represented in the Albanese ministry by heavyweights Burke, Chris Bowen, Ed Husic, Michelle Rowland and Jason Clare. A Rhodes scholar like Angus Taylor and a former economic adviser to prime minister Kevin Rudd, Charlton was elevated by Albanese to special envoy for the digital economy at the end of his first term.
The backbencher is seen across the aisle as leadership material, though not without his early stumbles. An ABC 7.30 interview in the lead-up to the campaign, in which he highlighted Dutton’s share trading during the global financial crisis, ended up discussing the prime minister’s office and how Labor had held the information for a week.
One Labor insider notes that for any rising stars to secure a role, “someone else has got to drop out” of the front bench. In government for Labor, there have been 30 ministers, 12 assistant ministers and four special envoys.
As for vacant spots for him or anyone else, “There are none available … What Charlton would have to do is actually break that nexus. And I can’t see him breaking that nexus.”
There are expectations, however, for a possible raft of resignations mid-term, with some experienced hands defying expectations and trying to hold on to seats to get their respective parties over the line in a tight race.
In the meantime, Albanese has committed to serving a full term and is eyeing a third, which is a way of saying he is offering stability.
Says Mark Kenny: “For Labor, winning too big could become a stricture of its own into the future. On the other hand, there’s a very reasonable argument for saying Albanese gets them through this election and some decent period into the term, probably around the midway mark, he voluntarily goes and then we see, probably, the ascension of Jim Chalmers.”
It’s unclear whether Albanese had that in mind when he made the point, when asked last month about a third, or even a fourth or fifth term: “We’ve had a revolving door. I don’t think, objectively, that’s in the interests of Australia.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 3, 2025 as "Fresh faces".
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