Shortly after Anthony Albanese was sworn in as prime minister, I watched him arrive at the Bogor Palace in West Java in a motorcade. He radiated impish delight. Albanese was mentally pinching himself – am I here? Is this happening? Have I actually pulled this off? Nearly 12 months later, Albanese sat opposite the British broadcaster Piers Morgan. The interview was a pit-stop on the way to the coronation of King Charles. The impishness of those opening weeks had vanished. Albanese was all business; the mantle of the office had settled on him.
Australia’s 31st prime minister is a lifelong republican. I suspect he’d consider Morgan a preening blowhard. But there he was, in London, indulging Morgan’s pro forma pearl clutch about cancel culture and transgender issues (“What is a woman, prime minister?”) before ducking off to swear an oath of allegiance to a septuagenarian who once aspired to be a tampon. Being prime minister is certainly a mood, a lark, a spree. But Albanese’s adventures are usually calculated. Without a plan, without patience, without a strategy, a scrapper from public housing in inner-city Sydney would never have ascended the goat track to the Lodge. Speaking to Morgan isn’t genuflecting to Morgan – it’s connecting with his tribe, folks who like their bubble.
Albanese is always looking to recruit, persuade or disarm people who get a say in his future. Growing your support base, pushing beyond the allies and acolytes to the agnostics, is a lifelong habit grounded in having to fend for yourself. Attending the coronation was obviously obligatory for any commonwealth leader, but also politically useful; an opportunity to show nostalgics in Australia that social democrats can respect tradition. Pitching yourself as having the manners to not roll your eyes at the establishment feast is a flex when there will be right-leaning Australians who can’t hand out how-to-vote cards if the Liberal leader is Peter Dutton. Although taking Nick Cave along to hereditary privilege’s greatest pageant in Westminster Abbey did feel like a wink to Marrickville, Newtown, Enmore, even if Cave harbours an “inexplicable emotional attachment” to the royals.
People who find Albanese’s flexibility either tiresome or suspect sometimes reduce him to a Boomer cliche: a youthful militant extinguishes his own righteous fire as he tracks inexorably to the bland centrism of prosperous mid-life. And it is true – provable in fact – that Albanese’s politics is less strident now than it was in the 1980s and 1990s. The teeth are straight and the suits are more expensive. Albanese’s public service isn’t styled as a crusade. His pragmatism can frustrate people who feel, entirely reasonably, underwhelmed and unrepresented by the incrementalism and inertia of major party politics. It’s very reasonable to ask: what good is a revolutionary if he’s not kicking doors in?
The Albanese of 2023 is not an absolutist, but he remains an activist. Almost 12 months into his prime ministership, his abiding belief in the power of shared values feels pretty radical. Albanese’s civic utopianism is out of sync with “move fast and break things”, with Elon Musk’s Twitter. He wants to nurture the inclusive commons; hack the algorithms, test the limits, not die wondering.
This prime minister thinks he can entrench Australia’s curious, progressive character as the national default without triggering a societal rupture from people who fear the future.
Politics can feel like the preserve of demagogues, vaudevillians and enclavists intent on prospering politically by vilifying opposing tribes. But Albanese wants to enlarge Australia’s idea of itself. The tempo might be measured, but he wants this enough to put his prime ministership on the line to achieve it.
His desire to establish a First Nations voice to parliament is one proof point of Albanese’s big bet on our better angels. Albanese is somebody we haven’t seen in politics for a while: a prime minister prepared to have a fight for a measure of decency and justice. A fight that he’s not entirely certain he’ll win.
The importance of planning ahead
For the past couple of months, I’ve been out of Canberra, consuming politics like the rest of the country, which means glancingly if at all. Normally I’m an avid miniaturist. Lately, on hiatus from the cloisters, I’m a landscape impressionist. Some impressions of the Albanese government 12 months in. An ensemble, not a one-man band; a group with a policy agenda being implemented with a minimum of cosplay.
This orderly bustle reaches me in television pictures and the disembodied headlines pushed to my smartphone. I’m not chasing the daily news, feeding the beast, maximising the objectively inconsequential increments with my relentless political editor energy. At the moment, developments wash over me. There’s Albanese and Joe Biden in aviators. They must have landed Aukus. Labor won Aston? (Really? OK.) There goes the budget – something about bulk billing and Jim Chalmers riffing on his rap influences. Where is Penny Wong this week? Oh, the Quad is on. No, actually it’s off. Biden can’t play paterfamilias in a contested region, even if his friends need him. He has to deal with homegrown lunatics who want to burn the republic.
When we speak this week about what he’s learned during the transition to being prime minister, Albanese says the step change has reinforced the importance of planning ahead; understanding there are things requiring immediate attention “whilst keeping focus on the medium and long term”. Kevin Rudd was whacked by the global financial crisis in 2007. Albanese has battled his own external shocks: an energy supply crisis and global inflation. The problems were large enough in scale and scope to have derailed Albanese’s pre-election program. But the Labor ensemble pinned its ears back and pushed through their to-do lists. “One of the government’s achievements has been to keep focused on the things we said we would do,” Albanese says.
Albanese has less time in government to strategise than he had in opposition, which increases the risk of miscalculations. But he says the flip side of his diminished bandwidth is access to high-level advice. He’s also drawing on muscle memory, knowledge accumulated by watching opponents across the dispatch box in the years Labor was in the wilderness. “I’ve had nine years to think about what went right and what could be done better, as well as watch the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison governments and think about what I would be doing,” he says.
Albanese looks more comfortable in the job than many people might have expected. From a leader considered small target and municipal pre-election, the prime minister has racked up modest status credits in the global zeitgeist. He’s the progressive empath designate – a vacancy that opened up when Jacinda Ardern’s political star fell to earth.
On Instagram Albanese smiles, laughs and hugs almost as much as the Princess of Wales. Albanese has been anointed the southern hemisphere’s voice of hope and opportunity by the faction’s elder statesman, Justin Trudeau, in Time magazine. Not brandishing a lump of coal in parliament, or working with Saudi Arabia to crash coordinated action to curb global heating, secures an Australian politician a provisional entry card to rooms where it happens, and Albanese sees the transition to the low-emissions economy as the contemporary Labor project, the economic reform of the epoch. “I think this is a critical period,” Albanese says, reaching for the homily. Delivering that transition “is one of the reasons we need a Labor government – there is no sign of a shift from the Coalition on any of these issues”.
The polls for now are good, because Albanese and the ensemble feel like a decisive break from the performative vacuousness of Scott Morrison. Albanese remains the political beneficiary of NBM (not being Morrison) but Labor strategists suspect the NBM cycle is just about maxed out. Voters aren’t yet surly, but they will move shortly to judging the government on its merits. Bored by an orderly change of government rendered daily on page three, the ravenous political news cycle is also, increasingly, craving page one spectacle. That dopamine hit of dysfunction.
The return of fight season
Winter is coming, and the arena is getting more noisy. Paul Keating won’t let up on the strategic idiocy of Aukus. Albanese faces querulous near-daily demands from the national papers to keep his hands off the stage three tax cuts. The Oliver Twists of media and thinktank progressivism (“Please sir, I want some more”) meanwhile flay Albanese’s lack of zeal in the face of Australia’s serious challenges. Adjacent to this intergenerational Labor legacy war, down with redistribution from the Australian and the Financial Review, and escalating progressive ennui, sits garden variety partisanship. Twelve months into his opposition leadership, Peter Dutton looks like a politician who has resolved to be Peter Dutton. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Albanese and Dutton get on reasonably well. The two engage in more regular private conversation than voters might realise. But Albanese doesn’t see a lot of opportunity for joint ventures with his opponent. “I think there are no signs that [Peter] is up for being constructive,” Albanese says. “I think, policy-wise, the big opportunity for him was to show bipartisanship on constitutional recognition. I genuinely tried [but] … I think he is a negative politician … it is what it is.”
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Dutton’s strategy isn’t subtle. He wants to thwart Albanese’s attempt to dial down the drama. He’s on the hunt for the knockout blow. The Liberal leader’s first foray was Labor’s climate policy driving up the cost of everything. That didn’t catch. His latest moral panic is Labor’s alleged surge of migrants will drive up the cost of housing. Given the lived reality of ludicrously expensive houses, not enough supply, rising interest rates and high living costs, this sortie could prove more salient.
But there’s listlessness about Dutton’s pugilism – at least from my current distance. Dutton possesses Tony Abbott’s negativity but seems to lack Abbott’s pulverising zeal, his appetite for hyper-partisan helter-skelter. Dutton punching down loyally, coddling the base on 2GB strictly during office hours, feels not only obvious and rote, it feels strangely low-energy. Given the moderate wing is now decimated, given Dutton’s considerable authority over his party room, refusing to experiment or grow in the job feels like a crisis of confidence. It’s curious. Perhaps he’ll find another gear, but right now the relentless retro opportunism makes Dutton’s Liberal party feel like an Abbott tribute band grinding out covers on the country wedding circuit.
While Dutton says no to everything, and crashes into things in the hope of breaking them, clamour is also building on the left. The Greens leader, Adam Bandt, expended considerable internal authority to ensure his party helped bolster then legislate Labor’s first tranche of climate policies rather than torpedo them. But that early collaboration has lapsed into rancour over housing policy.
The Greens gained lower house territory last May in part by appealing to the grievances of the growing cohort of renters locked out of home ownership. The Greens know Labor wants the renters in their column come election time, but won’t match them for boldness when it comes to policy prescriptions improving affordability, not when Albanese needs to neutralise asset holders and the investors as well as court aspirants in the housing market.
Demographically, generationally, housing affordability feels like the perfect political fight for the Greens to pick, so Albanese enters his second year in the top job battling two oppositions. He posits the Greens party room is divided between people “who want to see the government do things, and people who want to block the government doing things”. If his punditry is right, if the Greens are locked in an internal battle between the activists and materialists, who wins? Albanese opts for truth. “I don’t know,” he says.
First character, then stability
If tranquillity is too much to hope for – and it very likely is – Albanese will fashion his re-election pitch around stability. The required lore for this pivot is being assembled as we approach the first year anniversary; a version of clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, stick with Labor.
Albanese lobs a mind-focusing point. “The last seven elections have elected seven prime ministers,” the prime minister says. “The next election will be an opportunity to re-elect a prime minister. This won’t have happened for more than 20 years.”
I feel this fun fact must be wrong, but he’s right. A prime minister hasn’t been re-elected in Australia since John Howard made the 2004 election about trust in order to pulverise Mark Latham. We’ve battled rolling regicide for two decades. “The last seven elections have produced Howard, Rudd, Gillard, Abbott, Turnbull, Morrison, Albanese,” the prime minister says. He says federal elections here are already too frequent. Other comparable nations have four and five-year terms while we reach for the democracy sausage every three years. “It is not in the country’s interest to have instability.”
Albanese says his foundational task in this opening year was to reveal the character of the government. Labor had to be worthy of the office. Courtship was necessary because a transition was necessary between Morrison losing and Labor winning. “At the last election it was clear there was considerable opposition to the Morrison government and, after nine years, part of that was what was the point of that government? From opposition, [the voters] weren’t certain about us and part of what our task has been and will continue to be as a first-term government is to restore faith and have a very clear narrative of the values Labor has and the policies that reflect those values.”
Albanese says part of demonstrating that Labor has the disposition to deliver stability is him helming an open-access government. “We talk to business, talk to unions, talk to civil society, talk to women’s groups. That doesn’t mean that everyone gets the answer that they want, but it does mean it’s not a narrow government that serves a sectional interest.”
I wonder if he thinks election night last May was the high-water mark of the new politics; whether voter appetite for disruption and disruptors has waned without the foil of Morrison to galvanise progressives on the centre right and centre left? Is the current environment more favourable to majority governments? Albanese considers waning partisan loyalty a long-term trend reflected across western democracies. It’s not a flash in the pan. “You just had an election in Finland where the social democrats got 19% and they were defeated by a party that got 21%.”
But Albanese in his moments of audacious dreaming thinks it is possible to prosper if the Labor project finds its moment. “Do I think it’s possible to lift Labor’s primary vote up? Yes, I certainly do, and it’s my objective to do so.”
