Mark Kenny: Jobs and skills summit like a mirror to Bob Hawke's political authority in 1983

As remedial tasks go, repairing ties with the Elysee Palace was at the easy end of the scale for new Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, requiring him merely to agree with Macron that our last guy had been a bit shifty.

It's a dynamic to keep in mind when assessing the broader political equation within Australia too. This is the obverse law of political incompetence: the worse the last lot was, the more adept the new management will look by comparison.

Or to put it in Canberra-speak, the more political authority a new government starts with. For Albanese, this is crucial right now because political capital left unused simply evaporates.

Perhaps this headstart is why the last one-term government (federally) was James Scullin 1929-1932 - and even then it took the crash on Wall Street and 32 per cent unemployment during the Great Depression.

But Albanese knows voters dumped Scott Morrison more purposefully than they embraced Labor.

His government has the twin tasks of cementing the poor standing of Morrison's punchy but agenda-less government, while turning that reflected authority into support via problems solved, hardships eased.

Post-election revelations of Morrison's multiple-ministries helped in this regard, reminding voters just as buyer's remorse might have crept in, that they'd made no mistake.

Yet problems far more wicked than smoothing French feathers or huffing over a secret #Scottocracy loom large.

Which is what the jobs and skill summit was about confronting - or at least discussing - which is itself a change.

After all, a problem shared is a problem halved, right? Kind of.

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Prima facie, the summit quickly succeeded by highlighting - again by way of contradistinction - what a pointless operation Team Morrison had been.

Getting the major economic players to talk publicly, and to exhibit concerns beyond their own sectional interests, is the unsung device that makes these events transformative. Yet it escapes many media cynics.

It was a no-brainer for any government, given the complex of problems the COVID-ravaged economy faces - maxed-out budgets, low productivity growth, falling real wages despite company profits, weakening innovation, skilled labour shortages, worsening income disparities, a persistent gender pay gap, a neglected care economy, a galloping housing crisis, and a higher-education sector buckling after years of official mendacity. And let's throw in another - a political class lacking the courage to fund government functions with taxation.

Clearly, Albanese was channelling Bob Hawke from the 1983 economic summit - a gathering which kicked off a period of policy advancement now widely cited as a golden age of structural reform.

Hawke, like Albanese, inherited much political capital. He had replaced a Coalition government notorious for division. The ultra-ambitious Malcolm Fraser had seized the job in 1975 by forcing an unprecedented parliamentary meltdown and his government had always been defined by those convulsive origins.

Hawke's 1983 pitch under the pithy slogan, "Bringing Australia together" offered a kind of redemption - consensus and cooperation and through these things, it hinted at the patriotism implicit in seeking a fairer, functional, more modern Australia.

Like Albanese in 2022, Hawke judged that Australians had "conflict fatigue".

But the political economy looked very different then. Union membership was near 50 per cent in 1983 whereas now it sits below 14 per cent.

The prominent role of women in the 2022 summit has been widely remarked upon.

Just days before the talkfest, the ACT government announced that the former Labor senator for the Territory, Susan Ryan, who died two years ago, is to be honoured with a statue in the capital.

Staggeringly, as Hawke's new education and youth affairs minister, Ryan had been the only woman in attendance in 1983. That kind of under representation is not just unthinkable now, but would be hugely counter-productive.

Especially when it was leading women who made most of the running and most of the sense in Canberra over the two days of the 2022 summit. It was as if suddenly women reached the kind of critical mass in positions of influence needed to reshape things. And not before time.

Names like Sally McManus and Michelle O'Neil on the union side and Jennifer Westacott, Alexi Boyd, and Christine Holgate on the employer side. And from the government, women were also central with the Home Affairs Minister Clare O'Neil impressing with her mastery of her portfolio as she announced an increase in the skilled permanent migration program to 195,000 per year, and flagged radical rethinking in immigration policy.

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The opening salvo of the event came in the keynote address by Grattan Institute CEO, Danielle Wood in which she argued for many things including an official emphasis on full employment. Hers was an inspired choice.

Hardened political and economic observers praised Wood's perspicacity with Crikey's political editor Bernard Keane posting on Twitter: "The speech to open the jobs summit by @daniellewood is one of the best economics speeches - public policy speeches for that matter - I've read in a long time."

Alan Kohler responded: "Yes, agreed" and even Treasurer Jim Chalmers indulged in a rare spot of commentary, tweeting: "Agree - it was absolutely fantastic."

In other forums, Wood has argued that Morrison's 2018 Stage III tax cuts for the wealthy were conceived in a different world and should be reconsidered by Labor.

The government says they are still two years away - but its capital may be gone by then. A problem delayed is a problem doubled?