The May 2025 election delivered something quietly historic. For the first time since the 1970s, the Labor Left faction holds a majority in caucus.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, a life member of the Left, now leads a government where his faction controls the numbers. Yet despite this apparent triumph, there is little sense of rupture, and even less of radicalism.

What should be a generational opening instead feels like the management of a new constraint: how to hold power without the capacity, imagination or courage to use it.

Labor’s internal culture, like its parliamentary logic, remains deeply conservative – even when led by the Left. Caution, compromise, and consensus are hard-wired.

It is the latest chapter in a much longer story: the erosion of Labor’s radical tradition, the shrinking of its narrative ambition, and the tightening grip of the consent ecology – the set of social, media, economic, and institutional expectations that discipline what any government dares to do.

From authentic radicalism to risk-averse centrism

Australia’s........

© Pearls and Irritations