The trouble with Albanese – what was it all for, Anthony?

We all know the story – you know it, Speersy knows it, everyone warm and vertical in Australia knows it. Anthony Norman Albanese was born into a single parent family and raised in public housing by a mother battling on a disability pension. Some of us could probably recite the story line-for-line by now. As far as log cabin stories go, it doesn’t get any loggier.

But let’s not get our aim mixed up here. Albanese’s mother was clearly a phenomenal woman, single-handedly raising, not only a university graduate and a formidable backroom operator as cunning as a public servant escaping Robodebt accountability, but also, the Prime Minister of Australia. The actual Prime Minister of Australia, is however, a whole other target. Because, what was it all for Anthony?

Oscar Wilde once wrote in The Picture Of Dorian Gray, “The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought and sold, and bartered away. It can be poisoned, or made perfect.” So has Anthony Albanese – the log cabin kid, the son who owes so much to government support, and public welfare and the charity of his socialist mentors – bought and sold his soul, or bartered it away?

Only Albanese knows the answer to that, and nobody knows if he consults his soul anymore given what the job of Prime Minister does to you. It turned Tony Abbott from a brawling, victorious Opposition Leader into a man who coughed on Peta Credlin’s command. It shifted John Howard from a preternaturally disturbed suburban solicitor to a, aaah, well, a preternaturally disturbed suburban solicitor. But still, the Prime Ministership changes everyone. It has to. With great power comes great responsibility. So what was it all for Anthony?

The same Anthony Albanese who worked toward the Prime Ministership for almost 40 years, that started out in the office of Labor’s Tom Uren as a university graduate back in 1984, that enjoyed free university education, that protested against Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians as recently as 2000, has morphed into a man who ignores his own Labor party members calling a fellow Labor Muslim woman a “filthy rat”, and pays obsequious, cap-doffing visits to the Murdochs, and appoints special anti-Semitism envoys that Australians didn’t realise were that special.

It would be churlish of course to ignore his government’s achievements. Albanese and Chalmers eventually massaged in the stage 3 tax cuts all the polling told them they should. They negotiated Julian Assange’s release, legislated cheaper childcare, and backed in a $22 billion surplus for 2022-23, against the $78 billion deficit forecast by the Morrison government. And while we’re on that, they rid Australia of the terminally appalling Morrison government.

The problem the Albanese government has, however, is that it’s not very good at communicating its achievements. A recent poll by Red Bridge Consulting surveyed over 2,000 participants. When asked about the Albanese government’s achievements, a staggering 57 percent said they could not name one achievement that had made their lives better since the 2022 election. 

Part of this of course comes from an intellectually limited, right-wing favouring media in Australia that leans heavily into the bogan narrative of politics, simplifying everything into the cost of a meat pie or fuel, (just watch the breakfast tv programs and you’ll get the gist, Karl). But a great deal of the problem also comes from the leader himself.

Albanese has always presented to the Australian public as an underwhelming man of minimal oration skills. He’s grown in the job, but not nearly enough. He still looks flustered, occasionally giving the impression of somebody who’s waiting for the real Prime Minister to turn up, (and perhaps he is). That deficit can sometimes be balanced out with a deputy PM who picks up the communication slack, but in Albanese’s case he’s saddled with the monumentally awful Richard Marles, a man with all the political skills and charisma of last weekend’s lawn clippings.

The federal government’s most effective communicators by far are Jim Chalmers and Tanya Plibersek, both of whom are kept in a box, their considerable talents underutilised because Albanese is nothing but a political animal and he’d rather keep his political competition close, but not close enough that they get a chance to shine too brightly. His government’s poor results in communicating their achievements are partly self-inflicted.

But there is also a general pall that hangs over the Albanese government, and it’s a much harder essence to quantify. Whenever we see a Katy Gallagher or a Mark Dreyfus or indeed many members of the Albanese government communicating to Australians, they always appear to be ill-at-ease, rigid, frightened to step off the white lines in the middle of the road they occupy. As if something is holding them back.

Perhaps all those years in opposition have left them tired. The current Labor government was in the trenches for so long, hanging on for dear life to get their moment in the sun, that by the time they got there, they were already spent. Perhaps that’s the trouble with Anthony.

Perhaps the more brutal reality is that Anthony Albanese leads a government mired in mediocrity. If you zoomed forward in time and looked back at this government’s legacy, you could say that they lacked chutzpah, they lacked ambition, they lacked any sense of who they were and what they were there for. They lacked audacity.

You could say, the Albanese government was an unenthusiastic government.

You can see it in the faces of the Cabinet. You can see it in the mealy-mouthed, miserly, please-sir-can-I-have-some-more way they seek to appease the federal opposition on almost every score, and their failure to understand that Dutton’s opposition, if they ever made it back into power, would never return the favour and would instead, treat them with the contemptuous scorn Albanese only reserves for the Greens.

Albanese’s eternal brawling with the Greens turns voters off. Even worse, It turns progressive voters off. It’s old, old school Labor brawling that belongs under the shearer’s tree back in Barcaldine. It is inherently male and fouled by testosterone and ultimately, not a vote winner. The largest demographic of voters turning away from federal Labor are progressive women, especially those under 35. Progressives would far sooner see Albanese take the fight up to the heinous leftovers of the Morrison government than attack the party that aims to strengthen our humanitarianism and tackle climate change. 
That’s the trouble with Anthony. As a Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese has developed the spectacular ability to create enemies from his friends and even bigger enemies of his enemies.

They say that animals can sense weakness in a leader and so too can the voters. Australians can see a man who has no position in the sand. He can not pick a position because he doesn’t have a position. The principled, fire-brand Albanese of old has long gone, along with his log cabin. Instead of inheriting the unholy mess that is AUKUS and flinging the entire US-centric debacle out the window, Albanese chose to embrace the $368 billion burden and run with it because his polling told him the voters didn’t care about AUKUS – so why not just keep it then Anthony? He won’t raise the welfare rate, regardless of all of the women just like his mother out there struggling to survive on it, because there are no extra votes for the government in increasing welfare. Did I tell you I was raised in poverty? Thank god it doesn’t affect me anymore.

This is what Albanese is. A man with few principles, only a plan for power for power’s sake. Never a leader, more a nervous opportunist. A person who steps up and does what is right in the circumstances, regardless of the popular opinion, is a leader. Albanese is a person who steps nowhere. He’s a man who will be remembered for squandering power to appease the shadows he is always jumping at. A man who spent 40 years clambering, dealing, conniving his way to the top, forgetting everything he stood for, only to get there and ask himself: What was the point Anthony? What was it all for?