Albo’s Starmer Warning

Keir Starmer has gone.

The great British Labour technocrat, sold to voters as sober, serious and safe, has found out what happens when a government mistakes good intentions for results. On 22 June, he announced his resignation as UK Prime Minister.

Anthony Albanese, naturally, was wounded by it all.

“I consider Keir Starmer a friend,” he said, before adding that politics “can also be a harsh business.”

Yes, it can.

But there is a word for what happened to Starmer: Accountability.

That is the bit Australian Labor seems determined to avoid.

Only days earlier, Albanese had warned against Britain changing leaders. He said the history of changing leaders was “not a positive one” and went back to the usual line about stability.

Stability. The word every struggling leader reaches for when achievement has gone missing. A bad government that stays put is not stable. It is just stubborn.

Starmer’s sudden collapse should worry Albanese because their similarities are hard to miss. Both men campaigned as safe, moderate, practical leaders. Both governed like managerial progressives who thought the state could tax, regulate and subsidise its way out of every problem it had helped create.

You can see the pattern clearly enough. Higher burdens on business. Climate policy sold with promises of cheaper power, then followed by bills that did not play along. Migration settings that ran ahead of housing. Workplace laws tilted towards unions. A growing itch to regulate speech online whenever the public conversation became untidy.

This is not some strange coincidence. It is the modern Labor/Labour operating system.

Start with tax. Both men campaigned as reasonable centrists. No wild ideology here, voters were told. No great shock coming. Just sensible government by sensible people in sensible suits. Then they got into office.

In Britain, Starmer’s Government found ways to lift the tax burden while insisting working people would not pay more “in their payslips”. It was a cute trick. Send the bill through employers, investors, prices, lower wages or fewer jobs, and still claim the promise has technically survived. A politician’s promise, in other words.

In Australia, Albanese and Jim Chalmers have been playing from the same book. More spending, more intervention, more tax dressed up as fairness. Every time Canberra wants more of someone else’s money, the language becomes softer. It is for workers. It is for families. It is for the future. It is for fairness. Funny how “fairness” so often requires government taking more control over people who worked, saved, invested or took a risk.

The same thing happened on energy. Starmer had his clean-power crusade. Albanese had the famous $275 power bill promise, which now sits in the political cupboard with all the other things Labor would prefer you not mention at dinner.

Both were attached to the same fantasy, that a modern energy system can be remade with slogans, subsidies and a bit of moral bullying. The promise was cheaper power. The experience for many households has been higher bills, shaky confidence, expensive transmission and a lot of official explanations that sound impressive until you open the envelope from your energy retailer.

When the bills failed to fall as promised, the excuses arrived right on schedule. Global shocks. Transmission delays. Market failures. Previous governments. Putin. The weather. The modelling. Probably the moon if someone in a ministerial office thought it would help. Anything except their policies.

Albanese still says renewables are the cheapest form of new energy. That might work in a speech or at a conference with people nodding over lanyards and weak coffee. It is less persuasive to a pensioner deciding whether to turn the heater on, or a small manufacturer wondering whether the next power bill makes the business viable.

Voters do not need to understand every line of the energy market to know when they have been sold a pup.

Then there is migration, where the governing class always looks most exposed.

In Britain, Starmer eventually started talking tough about control after years of public anger over illegal boat arrivals, out-of-control migration and pressure on local communities. By then, people had heard enough speeches. They wanted borders that worked and a government that looked like it knew who was coming into the country.

Australia has had its own version of the same mess. Albanese’s Government presided over huge migration numbers during a housing crisis, then seemed shocked when Australians connected the dots. Rents were rising, roads were clogged, schools and hospitals were under strain, and young people were being told home ownership was still possible if they just worked hard, saved diligently and perhaps inherited a house from a dead relative.

Apparently importing more demand while supply is broken has consequences. Who knew?

Even Labor’s own Migration Strategy admitted the system was broken and that migration levels needed to return “back to normal”. Net overseas migration reached 446,000 in 2023–24 before falling to 306,000 in 2024–25. The reduction was then sold as proof of control, as if arriving late with a mop is the same as not flooding the house in the first place.

Migration is not the only cause of the housing crisis. No serious person says it is. Planning laws, construction costs, interest rates, taxes and state governments all play their part. But only a fool would pretend migration has nothing to do with it.

When population growth runs ahead of houses, roads, schools, hospitals and services, ordinary people pay. Not the political advisors. Not the Treasury officials. Not the politicians. The family trying to rent a three-bedroom place near work pays. The young couple stuck in a unit with a toddler pays. The tradie sitting in traffic for an hour because the road network cannot cope pays. And then the government acts surprised when people start looking for someone else to vote for.

Starmer's union story is just as familiar to Albanese. Starmer’s Labour pushed workplace laws that business groups saw as handing more power to unions and tribunals. Albanese’s Labor has done much the same. Again, the sales pitch is fairness. It always is.

The result is usually more complexity, more legal risk, higher costs and less flexibility for the businesses that actually employ people. Labor governments talk endlessly about productivity while making it harder for employers to hire, roster, adapt and take a chance on someone. Then they wonder why growth is weak.

While the government claimed it was restoring the balance, what employers heard was something else: more central control, more union leverage and more reasons to think twice before putting on another worker. Both sides can bury the issue in policy language, but only one side has to make payroll.

The most revealing similarity, though, is their aversion to free speech. Both Starmer's government and Albo's government showed the same instinct: If citizens are saying, reading or sharing things the people in charge dislike, regulate the platform, police the content and call it safety.

In Britain, the Online Safety regime became a lightning rod for fears about speech control. In Australia, Labor’s misinformation bill was so bad it earned the obvious nickname, the Ministry of Truth. The bill eventually died. The instinct did not.

That is the point. These people do not need to win every battle to show us what they want. They want a managed society where bureaucrats referee the conversation, and citizens are treated like supervised children. They dress it up as protection, but it still looks a lot like control.

Albanese should understand Starmer’s downfall better than anyone. He flew to the UK Labour conference and thanked “my mate” Keir Starmer. He told the party faithful that Australian Labor and UK Labour were part of the same broad movement, committed to the same kinds of answers on climate, security, trade and government activism.

With Starmer's fall, those remarks looks less like statesmanship and more like a prophecy.

Starmer was not brought down by one speech, one bill or one bad poll. These things usually happen by accumulation. Broken trust. Higher costs. Weak borders. Economic drift. A government that keeps lecturing people while life gets harder. A party that mistakes winning office for permission to do whatever it already wanted to do. That is now the danger for Albanese.

He may feel safer because the Liberals still look like they are searching for the instruction manual. But governments do not fall only because oppositions are strong. Sometimes they fall because the public decides the incumbent has become intolerable. And, in Australia, they now have One Nation to consider, just as the British public have Reform to consider. And considering they are. Both One Nation and Reform lead the polls in Australia and the United Kingdom respectively.

Starmer seems to have read the room. Albanese has not.

Instead, he offers "stability". But stability without competence is just stagnation. Stability without trust is arrogance. Stability without delivery is a government waiting for the crisis.

The disappointment is not that Britain has changed leaders again. The disappointment is that Australia’s Prime Minister can look at Starmer’s fate and not see his own reflection staring back.

Same mistakes. Same instincts. Same contempt dressed up as concern. But only one resignation so far.

“The price of greatness is responsibility.”
– Winston Churchill