When Anthony Albanese was sworn in as Australia’s 31st prime minister in June 2022, eyes in the British Labour Party lit up. Ending a decade of conservative rule, Albanese led a campaign light on policy and largely focused on the poor behaviour of his opponent. Parallels with Keir Starmer’s position were obvious, and only months after the Australian Labor Party (ALP) took office, briefings about the inspiration Starmer was taking from the party began to appear in the British press. The Australian prime minister even met Morgan McSweeney, then-campaign director and key Starmer ally. McSweeney was reportedly in such regular communication with the national secretary of the ALP he began ‘mimicking [his] turn of phrase.’

After a first term fraught with economic crisis and lagging opinion polls, Albanese was returned to office in May 2025 with a thumping victory for his otherwise unpopular status quo. Starmer’s team is likely still taking notes, but there may be lessons here for socialists, too.

As parties founded by trade unions, the ALP and British Labour have historically had more in common with each other than with the mass social democratic or communist parties of continental Europe. For Stuart Macintyre, the late historian of British and Australian labour movements, ‘labourism’ was the conciliatory ideology that dominated both parties, ‘restricted in scope to the protection of immediate working-class interests’ with no sense of the ‘incompatibility of those interests with the capitalist class.’

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British socialists including Keir Hardie visited Australia to marvel at experiments in white working-class democracy, a romanticised view occasionally challenged on the left. (Radical Labour leader George Lansbury thought Brisbane was a ‘little hell on earth’ and vowed never to return.) But the ALP governments of 1983 to 1996 under Bob Hawke and Paul Keating provided the greatest inspiration for British Labour. Prefiguring New Labour, future figures of the Blair-Brown government flocked to Australia on fact-finding missions. Alastair Campbell even asked Keating to “coach Blair on how to hate Tories.”

These years of deregulation and privatisation are remembered by the left for the Accord between the Australian Council of Trade Unions and the ALP. In theory, this promised a ‘social wage’ in return for wage restraint. In practice, it defanged the union movement. The percentage of Australian workers who are members of trade unions fell from 40 percent in 1992 to 13 percent in 2024. In this sense, Australia’s path to neoliberalism through social peace was arguably far more successful than even Thatcher’s social warfare.

If New Labour learned how to win from Hawke and Keating, Albanese taught Starmer how not to lose. Key to Albanese’s pitch was avoiding the culture war by keeping sights focused on the economy, a ‘small targets’ strategy. This turned out to mean ceding territory to conservatives while doing little about the cost of living.

Among the early public acts of the 2022 ALP government were turning away a boat of asylum seekers and removing the term ‘birthing parent’ from a hospital form. Standing down on cultural battles also led to the government’s first big shock: a resounding defeat in their own referendum on an Indigenous advisory body to parliament. After a lacklustre campaign failed to counter right-wing attacks, the proposal was rejected by 60 percent of voters.

Meanwhile, a historic fall in living standards occurred during Albanese’s first term, with the biggest decline in real per capita household disposable incomes in the OECD, and a severe housing crisis that led one BBC article to declare 2023 ‘the year the Australian Dream died.’ The new government’s response was sluggish. Their first budget was characterised by ‘restraint’ and a refusal to consider subsidies in response to rising costs, while remaining committed to the previous conservative government’s controversial ‘stage-three’ tax cuts. By 2024, the latter were made less regressive and repackaged as ‘cost of living tax cuts’, and a one-off $300 (£143.55, as of May 2025) energy rebate was introduced for all households. While welcome, for many Australians these measures didn’t go far enough. An opinion poll held after the 2024 budget found 66 percent of respondents ‘couldn’t recall’ anything in the budget that would make them financially better off, with only 7 percent saying energy rebates would do so.

On housing, the government’s key policy was the introduction of the Housing Australia Future Fund. This investment fund will be used to grant loans to private developers who partner with community housing providers and aims to result in 40,000 ‘affordable homes’ over five years. As of March 2025, 340 homes have been ‘acquired and converted’.

Elsewhere, the ALP has toughened up immigration rules, doubled-down on nuclear submarines, full-throatedly supported Israel and condemned pro-Palestinian voices, and even taken the extraordinary measure of seizing control of a democratically-run trade union. The mix of flag-waving, authoritarianism, subservience to US imperialism, and feeble economic measures make the similarity between Starmer’s Labour and Albanese’s ALP programmatically uncanny.

If the ALP’s current programme is remarkably similar to Starmerism, its approach to party management also offers a vision of what a thoroughly Starmerised British Labour Party will look like. One legacy of the Hawke/Keating years never fully emulated by Blair was the eradication of socialism as an organised current within the ALP. While the term does appear in the party’s constitution and in the name of formal factions at state and federal levels, the last prominent ALP politician to positively utter it was former senator Doug Cameron in 2019. Tellingly, it was in his retirement speech.

Of course, differences of viewpoint remain within the ALP. The party operates a factional system more formally structured than anything within British Labour, but less ideologically distinct and transparent. Pacts between the left and right are common: Albanese’s leadership is the product of one.

This ideological cohesion is matched by a level of discipline that requires ALP parliamentarians to pledge their support to the party platform or face expulsion. More stringent than anything traditionally found in British Labour, historian Frank Bongiorno traces this demand to an extension of the concept of solidarity to parliamentary politics and the practical need for the early party to ‘overcome divisions among MPs about the issue of free trade versus tariff protection.’ 

As a result, the parliamentary ALP has seen only 30 individuals vote against the party between 1950 and 2025. One of these figures is Fatima Payman, who was elected as an ALP senator for Western Australia in 2022. In June 2024, Payman, a Muslim woman and the first member of parliament to wear the hijab, was indefinitely suspended from the parliamentary party for voting for an Australian Greens resolution on Palestinian statehood.

It would be too speculative to draw a direct line between the treatment of Payman and the seven British Labour MPs who lost the whip for voting for an SNP amendment on scrapping the two-child benefit cap a month later, but it’s difficult not to see a comparison. Even The Guardian noted the unprecedented nature of Starmer’s party discipline in government, which was later justified on the grounds that ‘voting against the party’s position on the King’s Speech is a serious matter.’ The policing of rebellion is compounded by the ability of the parliamentary ALP to take sole responsibility over choosing the party leader, a rule change Starmer’s faction have long spoken about as a priority — and are likely to continue pushing at Conference.

While Starmer’s party seems to have gone further than Blair’s in emulating the ALP institutionally and ideologically, then, the May 2025 Australian federal election may seem like a point of departure. Most accounts of Albanese’s victory have highlighted his ‘anti-Trump’ campaign. This appears out of step with Starmer’s attempts to out-Reform Reform and cosy up to Trump on the world stage.

Yet Albanese has been similarly deferential to the US president at times, refusing to react to Trump’s comments on leveling Gaza. He also took a careful, diplomatic approach to tariffs, with ‘warm’ talks resuming after the election. His domestic anti-Trumpism was exactly the type of lesser-evilism British Labour have already used against the right by, for example, warning that the NHS and workers’ rights are only safe in Labour hands. A repeated gimmick of Albanese’s campaign was to pull out his Medicare card and say that his opponent couldn’t be trusted with it. 

Immediately after the election, stronger animus was reserved for the Australian Greens, who were attacked for taking pro-Palestinian positions, pushing for public housing, and opposing the union takeover. This, some have argued, forced fence-sitters to the dead centre the ALP offered: better the devil you know.

From this perspective, it’s likely Starmer’s team see Albanese’s latest loveless landslide as a vindication of their ongoing strategy. For socialists in both countries, however, it’s never been clearer that the parties’ respective approaches are dead ends, failing in even the basic task of labourism: protecting working-class interests. The only alternative remains the hard work of rebuilding power in our workplaces and communities, and from there, looking forward to a real transformation of everyday lives.