In one awful decision, Anthony Albanese has revealed his do-nothing plan

Other acidic pollution from the gas plant at Karratha has done great damage to the Murujuga rock art, and will do more. And this isn’t just any old bunch of Aboriginal carvings.

It is the most extensive collection of etched rock art in the world. More than a million carvings chart up to 50,000 years of continuous history, showing how the animals, sea level and landscape have changed over a far longer period than since the building of the pyramids.

It has images of what we called the Tasmanian tiger in the Australian mainland’s far north-west. It includes what may be the world’s oldest image of a human face. It even has an image of a tall ship.

How much natural gas would it take to persuade the French to let some company screw around with the 20,000-year-old paintings in the Lascaux Cave? What about the Poms letting miners have a go at Stonehenge?

But that’s not the way we value our ancient carvings. They may be important to First Australians, but the rest of us don’t see them as our heritage, valuable beyond price. The miners want them? Oh, fair enough.

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Speaking of price, how valuable is that gas off the coast of WA? To Woodside’s foreign partners – BP, Shell and Chevron – hugely so. To us, not so much. The foreign companies pay only a fraction of their earnings in royalties to the WA government.

They pay as little as possible in company tax and next to nothing under the federal petroleum resource rent tax. In principle, it’s a beautiful tax on the companies’ super profits; in practice, they pay chicken feed. The Albanese government moved early in its first term to fix up the tax. Now the fossil fuel giants are being hit with two feathers, not one.

Ah yes, but what about all the jobs being generated? About 330 of them. Oil and gas are capital-intensive. We’re destroying our Lascaux Cave to save 330 jobs?

But apart from this decision’s effect on the climate and our pre-settler heritage, what does it say about how we’ll be governed over the next three years? Albo must think he’s laughing. His policy of doing as little as possible has received a ringing endorsement from the voters. So much so that the Liberals have been decimated, while the minors promising to act a lot faster on climate – the Greens and the teals – slipped back a bit.

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But if I were Albanese, I wouldn’t be quite so certain that another three years of doing as little as possible – of never rocking the boat or frightening the horses – will see him easily re-elected in 2028.

In all the Libs’ agonising over what they must do to attract more votes, old hands are advising them not to become Labor Lite. Good advice. Albo has already bagsed that position.

I suspect that if Albanese wants to be the Labor government you have when you’re not having Labor, he’d better expect a fair bit of buyer’s remorse, starting with Labor’s true believers.

Just because Albo looked better than the scary Peter Dutton doesn’t mean voters opted for a do-nothing government.

Labor did well – and the Libs did badly – because it attracted more female and young voters. We know both groups are strong believers in climate action. Next time, they may decide the Greens and teals are the only politicians left to vote for.

If most voters expect their government to do something about their growing problems, Albo may attract a lot more critics than he bargained for. But admittedly, he will be kept busy shaking hands with the victims of droughts and 500-year floods.

Ross Gittins is the economics editor.

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