Anthony Albanese acknowledged structural problems in the economy at its National Conference, but Labor still treats capitalism as a system to be repaired rather than transformed.

Anthony Albanese came tantalisingly close to saying something profound at Labor’s 50th National Conference. Australians, he said, have every reason to feel that “the economy is simply not working for them”. This was not merely pessimism or political dissatisfaction. “It’s a reality people are up against.”

Quite so. But if the economy is not working for millions of Australians, the obvious question is: why?

Albanese even acknowledged “structural problems in the economy”. Then, having opened the door to a serious examination of Australian capitalism, he promptly closed it. The answer became the familiar Labor catalogue: cost-of-living relief, tax cuts, higher wages, Medicare, housing assistance, Free TAFE, household batteries and better-funded schools.

All worthwhile. All capable of making lives better. But none amounts to an explanation of why an extraordinarily wealthy country increasingly leaves working people struggling to afford housing, accumulate security, raise families and believe their children will enjoy better lives than they did.

The giveaway comes when Albanese says that “faults in the system can be fixed”. There, in six words, is contemporary Australian social democracy. The system is not fundamentally at fault. It merely contains faults. Labor’s role is therefore not to transform the political economy but to repair it.

Capitalism remains the operating system. Labor supplies the updates.

This represents an extraordinary retreat from Labor’s origin story. Its own constitution still speaks of the “excesses, injustices and inequalities of capitalism”. It still calls Labor a democratic socialist party. It still commits the party to redistributing political and economic power, public enterprise, greater equality of wealth and income and democratic participation in........

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