The State We Actually Have

Labor, the Unions, and the Cost of Institutional Loyalty

A FIVE-PART SERIES

Part Two of Five

Part One traced Fabian socialism from George Bernard Shaw’s 1931 newsreel through to its long, publicly acknowledged relationship with the Australian Labor Party. This second part asks what that inheritance looks like in practice.

Why Labor warrants particular scrutiny

Labor governments are generally more comfortable with the proposition that government can be used positively to direct social reform, redistribute resources and reshape institutional outcomes. That makes Fabian history relevant when examining Labor’s instincts towards centralised programs, regulation, public-sector expansion and government-led social transformation, yet the criticism must be applied consistently.

The Voice to Parliament illustrates the pattern at both levels of government. Anthony Albanese did not administer the federal referendum as a neutral question for the electorate to decide; he made himself the public face of the “Yes” campaign, touring the country in support of one outcome rather than presenting the choice impartially. Sixty per cent of Australians voted “No” regardless, in every state.

South Australia illustrates the same instinct in a different form. In March 2023, the state Labor government led by Premier Peter Malinauskas had already legislated Australia’s first Voice to Parliament, without submitting the question to a referendum or plebiscite. When South Australians were later asked directly, in the federal vote, they recorded the second-highest “No” vote of any state, behind only Queensland. The state’s own Voice remained in place regardless.

Whatever view one takes on the merits of the Voice itself, both cases share a pattern this series keeps returning to: administrative and institutional reform advancing ahead of, or instead of, direct public consent.

The same pattern shows up in less visible infrastructure. The Digital ID Act 2024, passed under the current Labor government with a $288.1 million budget commitment, an elevenfold increase on the previous year’s funding, significantly expanded a digital identity program that has run for over a decade under governments of both parties. Its own architecture is explicit about the trajectory: government services first, state and territory governments next, private sector participation targeted from December 2026. No Australian voted on whether to have a national digital identity system. It is voluntary today. Fabian gradualism never needed a law to be compulsory on day one; it only needed the infrastructure built, so that participation could become the practical default a few budget cycles later.

A different kind of expansion is under way in speech regulation. I examined this in detail elsewhere, in the proposed Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill 2026: expanded ministerial power to designate prohibited groups by regulation rather than judicial process, and new speech offences whose defences apply only after an investigation has already begun. The pattern I described there applies to this whole article: “Security laws and hate-prevention regimes almost always begin narrowly and expand quietly, not because leaders are villains, but because institutions, by their nature, seek control, predictability, and reduced liability over time.”

That selectivity is visible in what Labor has chosen not to do as well as what it has done. In 2022 Labor promised religious discrimination protections alongside removing exemptions that let religious schools discriminate against LGBTIQ+ students and staff. The Attorney-General drafted a bill and provided it to the Opposition in March 2024, following an Australian Law Reform Commission report recommending removal of existing balancing clauses in the Sex Discrimination Act. In August 2024 the Prime Minister confirmed the religious discrimination half of that promise would not proceed, citing a lack of bipartisan support and a wish to avoid “divisive debate”. By mid-2025 he had confirmed it would not be revived this term either.

Digital identity legislation passed. Hate speech law expanded. The one bill specifically meant to protect people of faith from discrimination did not.

The same gap runs in both directions: reforms that never asked for consent, and promises that asked for it and then were not honoured.

Anthony Albanese promised, as Opposition Leader, that a Royal Commission into Australia’s COVID-19 response “will need to happen”, a position his own Senator Katy Gallagher endorsed in a Senate committee report a month before the 2022 election. In government, Labor delivered a twelve-month inquiry instead, one with no power to compel witnesses, no power to compel state and territory leaders, no protection for whistleblowers, and an explicit exclusion of lockdown decisions from its scope. The government then rejected the Senate’s Royal Commission recommendation in a single sentence: “the government does not support this recommendation.” Even a Greens senator on the same committee argued the substitute inquiry lacked the coercive powers needed for the public to trust its findings.

Before the same election, Albanese promised, on his own account up to 97 times, that Labor’s policies would cut household power bills by $275 by 2025. “I don’t think, I know,” he told a journalist who questioned whether the figure was achievable. “I know because we have done the modelling.” That modelling predated Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which triggered a genuine global energy price shock no government could have foreseen, and it would be unfair to treat the shortfall as a simple lie. But official regulator data confirmed household power bills had risen by as much as 37 per cent in some regions by 2024, not fallen, and the promise was never publicly recalibrated once the modelling it rested on had plainly been overtaken by events.

The growth of administrative government is not exclusively a Labor phenomenon. Coalition governments have also expanded spending, regulation, surveillance and executive authority. Conservative parties have frequently accepted programs or powers they once opposed and then administered them rather than dismantling them.

Neither side of Australian politics has consistently resisted the growth of the state.

The liberal tradition can elevate autonomous individual choice and market freedom in ways that conflict with Christian teaching. The conservative tradition can elevate national loyalty, order, economic growth or political pragmatism above truth. Labor’s social-democratic tradition can elevate equality, administration and collective provision above conscience, family and local responsibility.

Each political tradition contains partial truths, but none should be permitted to become a substitute for the Gospel. My reason for focusing on Fabianism is not that every fault belongs to Labor. It is that the Australian Fabians openly seek to influence Labor and offer a particularly clear example of the conviction that lasting social transformation can be achieved through research, public institutions and gradual administrative change.

When solidarity becomes institutional orthodoxy

The broader labour movement offers its own warning about fallen institutions. Trade unions were formed to protect workers from exploitation, unsafe conditions and unequal bargaining power. That remains a legitimate and often necessary purpose. Yet an institution created to restrain power can accumulate power of its own.

In Victoria, a review commissioned by the CFMEU’s own Federal Office, conducted by Geoffrey Watson SC into cost blowouts on government-funded construction projects, recorded findings that violence had become accepted within parts of the union’s culture, that incidents were rarely reported to police, and that organised-crime figures and outlaw motorcycle gangs had infiltrated sections of the union to obtain commercial and industrial influence. Labor subsequently suspended the construction division’s party affiliation and stopped accepting its fees and donations.

That is not proof that Fabianism caused CFMEU corruption. It is evidence that an organisation acting in the name of worker solidarity can become self-protective when political loyalty, institutional power and weak oversight begin to overlap.

A different form of institutional drift can be seen within education unions — one institutional, the other cultural. The NSW Teachers Federation’s own Centre for Professional Learning publishes material such as “Viva La Difference: Exploring LGBTIQ Diversity in the Primary Classroom” and promotes a gender and sexuality diversity micro-credential course that satisfies NSW professional-learning requirements, embedding gender and sexuality diversity as a whole-school and curriculum priority.

The Federation’s own website states that it is “proud to support the Uluru Statement from the Heart,” and provides members with a Welcome to Country/Acknowledgement of Country leaflet. These positions are presented as inclusion, reconciliation and protection from discrimination.

Traditional Christians can affirm the equal dignity of every student, oppose bullying and racism, and recognise the injustices experienced by Aboriginal Australians. The tension begins when one contested account of gender, identity, sovereignty or equality becomes an institutional expectation rather than a matter open to reasoned disagreement.

A Christian teacher may wish to protect a distressed child without affirming that identity overrides biological sex. A Christian parent may support reconciliation while questioning compelled cultural practices or permanent political categories based upon ancestry.

When those distinctions are no longer permitted, institutions may become hostile to traditional Christianity without anyone consciously setting out to persecute Christians. Those responsible may sincerely believe they are advancing compassion and equality.

A third form of drift is different again: institutional power exercised well beyond the industrial purpose it was built for. Since October 2023, the Maritime Union of Australia, part of the CFMEU, has taken an active public role in the Palestinian solidarity movement, entirely apart from any dispute over its own members’ pay or conditions.

MUA officials addressed rallies, and the union’s Melbourne hall was made available as a meeting space for the activist group Trade Unionists for Palestine. In January 2024, a blockade at the Port of Melbourne halted operations against the Israeli-linked ZIM Ganges container ship for close to four days before police intervened.

In March 2024, almost twenty protesters were arrested at a further demonstration against a ZIM vessel at Port Botany, among them the MUA’s own Sydney branch secretary, Paul Keating, who told the shipping line directly: “we don’t want you in our ports.” The union has genuine historical precedent for this kind of action, having organised shipping bans against apartheid South Africa and colonial Indonesia decades earlier.

Whatever view one takes of the underlying conflict, the institutional question is a separate one: whether a union whose legal purpose is bargaining its own members’ wages and conditions should also function as a lever for disrupting national and international trade in pursuit of a foreign-policy position, and whether that position was ever put to the members whose industrial power makes it possible.

The MUA’s actions were not an outlier. The ACTU itself, the peak body representing the entire union movement, issued formal statements on the conflict in October 2023 and February 2024, calling for a ceasefire and, later, for sanctions against Israel and an end to military trade. By August 2025, unions flying flags at national Palestine solidarity rallies included the AMWU, NTEU, TWU, CPSU, ASU, CEPU, HACSU, VAHPA, MEAA and the AEU, alongside the CFMEU and MUA.

In Melbourne, hundreds of Australian Services Union members working in the community sector took what the union itself described as unprotected industrial action, walking off the job in solidarity, separate from any dispute over their own pay or conditions. The NTEU’s Sydney branch went further again, formally resolving to support members engaging in boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns against Israeli universities. Not every union followed this path.

The Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association, the country’s second-largest union, stayed out of it, and the Health Services Union’s president publicly criticised the “absurd” use of his union’s banners at pro-Palestine events by activists acting without its authorisation.

The pattern is therefore neither universal nor coordinated by any single hand, but it is broad: across construction, maritime, education, community services and the public sector, a significant share of the union movement extended its institutional voice, and in some cases its industrial power, into a foreign conflict its founding purpose was never designed to address.

The danger is not that these movements seek justice. It is that justice can become identified with one political and moral framework, leaving historic Christian conviction increasingly treated as an obstacle to the common good.

None of this establishes a direct line from the Fabian Society to any specific union decision, and it does not need to. Trade unions were one of the original channels through which Fabian permeation was designed to work: not a separate revolutionary party, but existing institutions, quietly extended.

A century on, the mechanism outlives the ideology that built it. A corrupted construction division, a curriculum campaign, a port blockade over a foreign war, a peak union body issuing foreign-policy statements: none of these needed a shared plan or a shared ideology. They needed only an institutional channel built for one purpose and left available, once captured, for whatever purpose its current leadership chooses.

That is what permeation actually predicts. Not a conspiracy. A door left open.

Gradualism, applied

Early in this series, gradualism and permeation were defined in the Fabian Society’s own terms: a public utility placed under municipal control, a welfare program established, a regulatory authority created, a government service extended, a professional field brought under public supervision. It is worth testing that definition against what has actually happened in Australia since 2022, one measure at a time.

In 2023 the government legislated Help to Buy, a national shared-equity scheme under which the Commonwealth takes a direct equity stake, up to 40 per cent for new homes and 30 per cent for existing ones, in the private homes of eligible buyers. It does not lend the money; it becomes a part owner, sharing the capital gain or loss until the buyer repays the stake or sells. A public utility placed under municipal control has become, in practice, a private home placed under Commonwealth part-ownership.

The National Broadband Network was placed in permanent Commonwealth ownership by law in 2011, under an earlier Labor government, and neither side of politics, including nine years of Coalition government that followed, has moved to change it since. A government service, once extended, tends to stay extended regardless of who holds office.

A smaller, more revealing case is currently before the Senate. Armaguard, a private company, has run Australia’s cash-in-transit network at a loss for years and wants to stop servicing unprofitable regional routes. Rather than let the company exit, or nationalise it outright, the Cash Distribution Framework Bill does something closer to the Fabian instinct in its purest form: it leaves the company in private hands while empowering the Reserve Bank to fund alternative distribution if it falters, and requires major banks to cross-subsidise regional routes through pricing supervised by the ACCC. One industry analysis described the effect plainly: the company becomes “a highly restricted, state-supervised utility.” Ownership never changed hands. Control did.

The $22.7 billion Future Made in Australia agenda goes further again: production tax credits, grants and equity directed by government toward the specific industries, renewable hydrogen, critical minerals, green metals, it has decided the country’s future should be built around. This is not a safety net. It is industrial policy: the state choosing winners and financing the choice.

Before the 2025 election, Anthony Albanese ruled out changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax. In the first budget of his second term, the government reformed both: negative gearing limited to new-build properties from 2027, and the 50 per cent capital gains discount replaced with inflation indexation and a 30 per cent minimum tax. A tax made progressive is one of the oldest items on the Fabian list. The manner of its arrival, ruled out, then delivered once the political cost of ruling it in before an election had passed, is itself an illustration of gradualism: change timed not to a mandate, but to its absence.

The legislation’s first flaw arrived almost immediately. Properties held before budget night were meant to be grandfathered under the old rules, but the drafting did not clearly preserve that protection once ownership changed hands, exactly what happens when a spouse dies or a couple divorces. Independent Senator David Pocock raised the problem before the bill passed the Senate on 25 June 2026; an estimated 680,000 jointly owned properties were affected, disproportionately touching the 2.2 million Australian women aged over 65.

The government gave a verbal undertaking to fix it in later legislation, and the bill passed regardless. Four days later, Labor and the Greens voted down a Coalition amendment that would have corrected the flaw immediately. A fix eventually followed in draft form. The sequence is the pattern in miniature: a flaw affecting widows and divorcees was known, named, and left unresolved for as long as politically possible, repaired only once the cost of leaving it stand had become impossible to ignore.

A further example followed close behind. Division 296, a new tax on superannuation balances above $3 million, passed into law effective 1 July 2026. The original proposal would have taxed unrealised, on-paper gains and left its thresholds unindexed, guaranteeing that more ordinary Australians would eventually cross them through ordinary wage growth rather than genuine wealth. Industry backlash forced a narrower final version: only realised earnings taxed, both the $3 million and $10 million thresholds now indexed. The retreat is worth noting for what it reveals rather than what it changed. A new tax on a form of wealth previously left to individual stewardship arrived in stages, its harshest edges negotiated down only after the underlying principle, that superannuation above a certain size is the state’s business, had already been established.

A third test came a few months earlier, and required no legislation at all. A private research firm proposed taxing Australians for owning more bedrooms than a household of their size was deemed to need. Asked directly, the Treasurer declined to rule it out. Nothing has been legislated, and nothing may be. But refusing to close a door is its own kind of signal. The idea remains available, tested in public, costing nothing while it waits, should the moment for it arrive.

A further, larger measure follows behind it, though it is not yet law. In the same budget, the government proposed a 30 per cent minimum tax on discretionary trusts from 1 July 2028, ending, for many small businesses, tax treatment that has made trusts a standard structure for family enterprises for decades. Around 350,000 small businesses currently operate through discretionary trusts; Treasury’s own figures suggest roughly 60 per cent would be affected. Large corporations, which typically operate through company structures rather than discretionary trusts, are largely untouched by the change. The pattern recurs: reforms sold as closing loopholes for the wealthy tend to land most heavily on the family business too small to restructure around them, while the largest players, already organised differently, absorb little.

Media funding follows the same arc. In 2018, the Coalition government created a modest, time-limited $60.4 million Regional and Small Publishers Jobs and Innovation Package to help smaller outlets adapt to digital disruption. In 2020, citing the pandemic, it added a further $50 million in emergency support. By December 2024, the Albanese government had turned emergency measures into permanent architecture: the News Media Assistance Program, $153.5 million over four years as part of a $180.5 million package, framed as protecting “democracy, social cohesion and informed citizens.” The mechanism did not obviously serve the small and regional publishers it was named for.

An analysis of the first funding round found the money scaled with how many journalists an outlet employed, and Nine and Seven, Australia’s largest commercial networks, took 37 per cent of the pool between them. Regional publishers themselves had warned of exactly this outcome as early as 2020, that they risked being “sacrificed to the more powerful voices of the commercial television and radio networks.” A time-limited package became a permanent program, and the industry it was built to protect ended up competing, on unequal terms, with the industry it was meant to be protected from.

The same instinct extends into the household. Paid parental leave, now paid with accompanying superannuation contributions, reaches into a domain, the early economics of family life, that has historically belonged to the household rather than the state.

Ownership of a home. A telecommunications network kept in permanent public hands. The company that moves the nation’s cash. The industries the country builds around. What a capital gain is worth. What a large superannuation balance owes. What a spare bedroom might one day cost. How a family trust is taxed. Who gets paid to report the news. Examined one at a time, none of this proves a coordinated plan, and none of it should be mistaken for indifference to genuine need. Housing stress, cost-of-living pressure and precarious work are real, and limited government cannot be invoked as a slogan against them.

But property, this series has already argued, should be understood through stewardship, not absolute possession, a principle that cuts in both directions. A state that gradually becomes co-owner, financier and director of housing, infrastructure, industry, cash, and even the press that reports on it, is not practising stewardship. It is practising something closer to what the Fabian Society always called it: patient, incremental, and largely uncontested, because no single measure, on its own, ever looks like enough to fight.

Read individually, each is a policy. Read together, a reader is entitled to ask whether patience is simply what gradualism looks like from the inside, and whether that is still the right word for what is happening to the space between citizen and state.

Where does this leave us? Institutions created to protect the weak can themselves become self-protective when political loyalty and weak oversight overlap. The biblical pattern is older than any modern party or union. Does institutional orthodoxy, Fabian or otherwise, still leave room for the conscience that answers first to God rather than to the collective?

“Woe to you shepherds of Israel who only take care of yourselves! Should not shepherds take care of the flock? ... You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bound up the injured. You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost.” — Ezekiel 34:2–4 (NIV)

Institutions are not the only place this pattern can be traced. Part Three turns to something that can be measured in the plainest terms available: how large government has become, what it costs, and what Australians receive in return.

If you have not read Part One, which traces Fabian socialism from George Bernard Shaw through to its historical Australian connection, you can begin here. - Part One — Who Must Justify Their Existence?

Thanks for reading

God Bless

Mark