Where does ‘new Albo’ sit in Labor’s pantheon of heroes today?

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Amid Labor’s wild ecstasy of celebrating, the inevitable question circulated. Is Albo the new Hawkie?

Anthony Albanese, of course, is not the new Bob Hawke for a blur of reasons, not the least of which is that Hawke, for all his considerable strengths and dreadful flaws, will forever remain in a class of his own, unrepeatable.

Anthony Albanese doesn’t need to be compared with Bob Hawke - right now, he is the renewed Albo.Credit: Marija Ercegovac

The better acknowledgment is that Albo is the new Albo.

This is not faint praise. Confidence is the most valuable of all commodities in political leadership, and what happened on Saturday night has transformed Albanese from within and without.

Within, he has no more reason to question his own path, as he seemed to do from time to time after his referendum on an Indigenous Voice to parliament failed a year-and-a-half ago.

Without, his position as prime minister is unassailable, as unchallengeable as the vagaries of politics allows.

Yet only a few months ago, serious observers were wondering aloud whether Albanese might be consigned to history as the first one-term Labor prime minister since James Scullin was brought down by the Great Depression in 1931.

Instead, he is now the first Labor prime minister to be elected to a second term this century. He is the first Australian PM of any stripe to win a second term since John Howard.

More particularly, he has dispatched Liberal leader Peter Dutton to the political graveyard and reduced the Liberal Nationals coalition to what, when all the counting is done, may be the most catastrophic election defeat suffered by any party since Federation.

This is more consequential than Paul Keating’s “sweetest victory of all” in 1993, when Keating surprised just about everyone – including, possibly, himself – when he defeated the Liberals’ surging John Hewson. It was a stunning result, but it was Keating’s only election win as prime minister.

Saturday’s triumph for Albanese and his team cannot be dismissed as freakish.

It comes three years after Albanese vaulted to the prime ministership after delivering to the government of Scott Morrison what the Liberal Party’s own review judged to be the party’s “most serious” loss in history.

Two crushing defeats of the Liberal Party in a row, then. That record alone lifts Albanese high on the pantheon of all-time Labor heroes.

We might reasonably note, of course, that Morrison and Dutton didn’t help themselves or their party.

Morrison was not much more than a showman propped up by arrogance. Dutton was a servant of a range of perceived grievances from those who thought the “anti-woke” populism of Donald Trump would be his map to power.

It should not be forgotten that in 2018, Dutton’s colleagues had doubts about his leadership qualities: they chose Morrison over him when he challenged for the leadership.

Now Australia’s voters, in the space of three years, have passed their own harsh judgments on both of them. They were duds, the tally board shows.

Meanwhile, Albanese was clearly judged the more secure leader in insecure times despite a political environment poisoned by a cost-of-living and housing crisis and a trade outlook promising only Trump-induced volatility.

Albanese’s two election victories have killed stone dead the Liberals’ old boast that the voters accept that only they, the Liberals, know how to run an economy. Dutton’s choice not to match Albanese’s slim tax cuts has also put to bed the other boast that the Liberals are the champions of lower taxes.

Those cost-of-living and housing crises remain serious problems for the Albanese government, but the opposition has dealt itself out of the solutions for now – way out into the political wilderness.

Bob Hawke won four elections on the trot, partly because his winning ways caused the Liberal Party to squirm through leadership turmoil, chopping and changing between Andrew Peacock and John Howard.

Given the scarcity of potential leadership talent on the Liberal Party’s depleted and dispirited benches today, the Liberals may well face just such a bleak period ahead.

Who might they choose to lead them out of this mess, and how restive will the MPs become when they realise just what dismal years might lie ahead?

Albo doesn’t need to be compared with Hawke, even if that were possible for a warrior of the socialist left.

Right now, he is the renewed Albo, the unlikely hero, looking towards what Winston Churchill once called the sunlit uplands.

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