Prime Minister Anthony Albanese needs to start worrying about home, not travelling | David Penberthy

The PM is having a great time gallivanting around the world. But Aussies battling the soaring cost of living at home and some serious political failings can’t be ignored, Penbo says.

This might sound like a cynical pot shot. It is not intended as one, rather a blunt reflection of how I suspect many people in Australia are now thinking.

If you can’t keep up with your mortgage, or rising rent, or can’t find a place to rent at all, if you’re struggling to fill up your car or pay your latest power bill … well, you must have been thrilled to see that the Prime Minister (of Australia) found time in his diary to fly to Tuvalu to unveil a rescue package to save its residents from global warming.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese with Tuvalu’s Prime Minister Kausea Natano signing a treaty that will safeguard Tuvalu’s future while respecting sovereignty to be known as the ‘Falepili Union’. Photo: X

Anthony Albanese is trying to perform an unenviable juggling act.

He is trying to balance the need to address the domestic concerns of voters with the need to address the security and trade needs of our nation at a time of massive global uncertainty.

It became apparent this week that he is failing to get the balance right.

I can’t remember a government having as bad a week as this one just did.

I am sure they all have had similar weeks. But this was easily the worst one Anthony Albanese has had since his victory last year.

He and his government appear to have gone missing on issues of major domestic concern.

The problem the PM has got is that there are huge arguments in favour of all the international work he is doing, yet these arguments are failing to cut through amid the high level of anxiety over cost of living concerns.

That anxiety is compounded by a view among many voters that the PM was already not paying enough attention to those concerns, and was distracted or even fixated by the Voice for the past six months.

Let’s look at the Tuvalu deal. It is a clever bit of diplomacy which reassures not just the people of Tuvalu but other South Pacific nations that Australia is their friend.

The promise to offer safe haven to Tuvalu residents in the event their nation is engulfed costs Australia nothing in a financial sense. The return to Australia is significant in a national security sense, as it’s all about making sure that nations such as Tuvalu remain friends with us, and don’t go looking for a bigger and less pleasant friend further north.

Having just alluded to that nation, there was also a wholly valid national interest argument for Albo to head up to China this month, the first visit by an Aussie PM since Turnbull was in charge.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese meets with China's President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, earlier this month. Picture: AAP/Lukas Coch

This trip was more about jobs than anything, and I say that as a resident of the state which suffered more than any other through tariffs on wine, barley and lobster exports.

Getting the relationship back on track is hugely important. Taking the heat out of the relationship also makes sense.

Both the Tuvalu trip and the Beijing trip were also yet another example of the diplomatic and trade catch-up work brought about by Scott Morrison’s ambivalence to the Asia-Pacific and his megaphone dealings with the Chinese.

So there are reasons for all of it.

But the problem is this.

Albanese looks like he’s forgotten he has a day job.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, this time in the Cook Islands, meeting with Prime Minister Natano of Tuvalu, President Maamau of Kiribati, and Prime Minister Brown of Cook Islands. Picture: @Albo MP/X

And that day job is to represent the put-upon people of Australia and find ways to make their life financially easier at a time of genuinely unprecedented pressure, given the ratio of house values to salaries in 2023.

The government has looked like a rudderless ship these past few days, the look exacerbated by the absence of the bloke who is meant to be running it.

It is hard to recall a more shamefully inept policy failure than the Government’s handling of the stateless criminals debacle.

The government has no end of access to internal legal advice.

It should have seen the freight train coming in the very likely event that the High Court ruled the way it did.

Now, less through candid revelation than the eking out of information via the press, we find that 90-odd hardened crims including murderers, rapists and pedophiles are wandering the streets.

Sure, we have had some vague guarantees that they’re under surveillance, that the AFP has briefed state police services, but the fact that all this happened without an immediate plan to counter it has been a policy failure of the highest order.

It’s the kind of thing that can only happen when a government has lost the common touch, and a sense of what’s on the minds of average people.

They should get out of Canberra or the Chairman's Lounge for a few days and come and sit in a talkback radio station reading the text line to see how well this is tracking.

If only for its own craven political self-preservation, how bizarre that the party that was smashed by two slogans – “Stop the Boats” and “We will decide who comes here and the circumstances under which they come” – could waltz so guilelessly into this catastrophe.

The cherry on top for Labor this week was its sloppy and blasé handling of the major road projects it has put to the sword.

Its attempts to blame this on pie-in-the-sky promises by the Morrison Government has not cut through.

Labor is being blamed for it, and that blame is understandable, as it looks like Ros Kelly might have helped them on this one as so many of the projects being scrapped are in non-Labor regional and rural seats.

To end where I began – it’s good to see the people of Tuvalu getting a leg-up. It makes total policy sense.

But my message to the PM would be that the people of Tuvalu aren’t the only ones who feel like they’re drowning.