Just past midpoint in Australia’s six-week election campaign, things look grim for the center-right coalition of the prime minister Scott Morrison. For 18 months, opinion polling has shown the coalition trailing the Australian Labor Party. Nothing Mr. Morrison has done during the campaign has altered that harsh arithmetic of electoral politics.

The latest survey shows Labor winning 55.5 percent of the two-party-preferred vote, as opposed to the coalition’s 44.5 percent. When psephologists translate this into the 151 individual electorates that constitute the Australian House of Representatives, it indicates a 10-seat loss for Mr. Morrison that would send the coalition into opposition.

Some of Mr. Morrison’s woes can be attributed to sheer longevity. There are no term limits in the Westminster parliamentary system where the government is run by sitting MPs drawn from the party that enjoys a majority in the lower house.

Governments in the Westminster system almost invariably proceed through a life cycle of sorts. Prime ministers assume office full of vim, with the parliamentary majorities required to implement their agendas. Once those initial legislative goals are met, their governments often lose focus and drift into mediocrity.

At this stage of the political cycle, governing becomes more about keeping the opposition at bay than achieving tangible public policy results. The effectiveness of government is also degraded over time by ministerial churn — with experienced first-string politicos retiring, only to be replaced by junior MPs who are not always up to the task.

All of the above is true of the current Coalition government that has gone through three prime ministers since first winning election in September 2013. Add to this the pedestrian leadership of Mr. Morrison, who ducked off to Hawaii for a family vacation just as savage bushfires swept across Australia, burning 70 million acres, inflicting $100 billion in property damage and almost 500 deaths.

By the time negative media coverage forced Mr. Morrison’s return to Australia toward the end of December, damage to his public image was already set in political concrete. His tone-deafness became fodder for that most favorite leftist trope portraying conservatives as heartless elitists concerned only about the big end of town.

Mr. Morrison displayed a similar fecklessness and flippancy in the face of the Covid pandemic. While Israel, Britain, and America mobilized vast vaccination programs, Australia’s vaccine response was hiccup-ridden. Yet well into 2021 Mr. Morrison displayed no sense of urgency, dismissing criticism of his government’s vaccine initiative with the scornful quip, “it’s not a race.”

We must also consider the political distemper of an electorate quite cranky after two-plus years of draconian Covid lockdowns that made Australia a global laughingstock. Many Aussie voters are eager to take out their wrath at the ballot box, and Mr. Morrison is perched at the top of the government totem pole.

So what does it portend if on May 22 a new Labor government under Prime Minister Anthony Albanese were to accede to  power in Canberra? The Australian Labor Party was established to serve as the political arm of the trade union movement. Most of its MPs are union alumni and are sponsored by particular unions.

So if past is prologue, we can expect higher taxes on the private sector to fund an aggressive expansion of the Australian welfare state. And we can expect to see the construction industry and ports in particular hammered by punitive pro-union legislation that hobbles productivity.

We can also expect to see Australia’s national defense relegated to the government funding back teat. Not a single Royal Australian Navy combat vessel was commissioned into service over the seven-year life of the last Labor government, which was in power between 2007 and 2013.

Then there’s the affinity for China’s communist dictatorship shown by Labor’s deputy opposition leader and presumptive deputy prime minister, Richard Marles. During a speech in Beijing just a few years ago, Mr. Marles lauded China’s “considerable humanitarian achievements,” describing the regime of Xi Jinping as a “force for good.”

So those concerned about maintaining a robust American-Australian alliance against rising global chaos and irredentist tyranny, the prospect of a Labor government taking office in Canberra should be cause for concern.