Who is Zohran Mamdani, what is his agenda, and what would his equivalent in Australian Labor be promising to do?

Zohran Mamdani just broke all the rules for winning office in the USA. At only 34 years of age he is New York City’s first Muslim mayor, its first mayor of South Asian descent and the first born in Africa. There is no sense in which he was a small target. He wasn’t a centrist and he didn’t run a cautious campaign. He called himself a democratic socialist and he proposed taxing the rich and spending more on public housing and transport.

And he romped it in. Indeed, he is the first Mayor to get more than one million votes since 1969. Democrat voters turned out for him in droves.

So what did he run on?

Key to Mamdani’s campaign was the simple claim that “New York is too expensive.”

He didn’t talk about ‘cost of living pressures’ or ‘housing crises’, he talked about the price of houses and bus fares and promised to cut them.

Every Australian politician will tell you they’re worried about ‘the housing crisis’, but there’s few major party MPs who say they want house prices to fall. Emoting about abstract crises is a lot easier than promising specific results.

But Mamdani’s platform is a lot bolder than promising to make housing cheaper, he also promised to freeze rents, crack down on bad landlords, provide city owned grocery stores and make buses fast and fare-free. Oh, and free childcare as well.

How did he propose to pay for the kind of free services that are so common in Europe and so rare in the US? By increasing taxes on the biggest corporations and wealthiest citizens. It’s not complicated.

Zoran Mamdani’s communication’s strategy was as bold as his policy strategy. When advised to lower expectations he replied “I will do no such thing.” He promised to “govern expansively and audaciously,” and asked to be judged not by perfection but by the courage to try. He didn’t retreat from labels designed to scare voters, he owned them with statements like “I was elected as a democratic socialist and I will govern as a democratic socialist. I will not abandon my principles for fear of being called radical.”

While it’s hard to imagine a Labor PM, or even backbencher, spelling out a vision and strategy as bold as Mamdani has, it’s important to remember that he is a Democrat, the party of neoliberals like Bill Clinton and incrementalists like Joe Biden. Genuinely broad churches have room for radicals.

So what would an Australian Mamdani from the ALP need to do?

They could start by saying Australia has become too expensive. They’d say that house prices need to fall, energy prices need to fall, and the cost of essential services needs to fall. To be clear, saying prices need to fall is radically more ambitious than the weasel words of saying things need to be more affordable. We can measure price but there’s no actual definition of affordability. Thats why MPs love to promise to make houses ‘more affordable’ as they can always say they would have been ‘less affordable’ under the other party.

An aspiring Australian Mamdani would do well to pick a few big problems that drive the cost of living up and the fun of living down. If they made dental care free for everybody it would even lower the cost of health insurance for those who prefer private. If they made childcare free for everybody it wouldn’t just boost the budgets of young families but the labour force for all industries. And if they spent up big on public housing, the way Menzies and Whitlam did, they could ensure the houses were where they were needed and rented to the people who needed them most,

As one of the more budget deficit obsessed countries in the world (the last US President to deliver a budget surplus was Bill Clinton back in 2001) any aspiring Australian firebrand would obviously want to know where the money would come from. And on this question they can be a lot bolder than a US mayor could dream of because, in Australia, there are buckets of tax revenue just sitting around waiting for someone brave enough to pick them up.

The first bucket of cash takes the form of the Fuel Tax Credit Scheme (FTCS), the Australian Government’s largest fossil fuel subsidy. Removing the FTCS could raise $10 billion a year in additional revenue.

Then there’s the lamentable fact that we collect more revenue from HECS repayments than from the Petroleum Resources Rent Tax (PRRT). Scraping the PRRT and replacing it with a 25% on natural gas exports could raise up to $17 billion a year.

If we just did those two things and collected an extra $27 billion per year Australia would still be one of the lowest taxed countries in the developed world.

Would such an agenda trigger hysteria in the Australian media and political classes? You bet. Just as it did in the US. But that’s the point. The right-wing hysteria about Mamdani drove voters his way in record numbers.

New York just showed what happens when a leader refuses to lower expectations. The interesting question for Australia is whether Anthony Albanese, who once told us he got into politics to ‘fight Tories’, will be the person leading the charge for change or the guy defending the status quo against the newcomers in his ranks who don’t want to wait decades to fix the problems Australians are facing today.