‘Eye on the future’: Anthony Albanese outlines vision for second term as PM
Cyclone Alf has scuppered any plans Anthony Albanese had for calling an April election this weekend. The current stormfront’s the only issue he’s invested in at the moment.
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Supporting “aspirational” Australians with opportunities to get ahead and leave the world in a better state than they found it may be far from revolutionary, but it’s the legacy Anthony Albanese is looking to forge if given a second term.
But as the Prime Minister lays out his pitch for why he hopes voters will make him the first Australian leader to win back-to-back elections in almost three decades, there is another “a” word looming large: Alfred.
Tropical Cyclone Alfred is the only storm Anthony Albanese is interested in right now, but there remains another brewing over what the looming natural disaster means for his election plans.
The PM will not be calling an April election this weekend as Tropical Cyclone Alfred scuppers any plans for an early poll and all-but guarantees Labor will hand down a federal budget.
As millions of people in south east Queensland and northern NSW brace for the cyclone to cross the coast, sources said the Prime Minister has ruled out calling the election this Sunday or Monday for April 12.
As Australians filled sandbags, taped windows and braced for impact, the political debate in Canberra has raged on fuelled by his attempts to avoid the issue altogether.
Perhaps the cyclonic winds were always predestined to collide with Australia’s 31st prime minister in some way, given Alfred was originally due to be called Anthony.
It was coincidentally next on the Bureau of Meteorology’s list of approved alphabetical names for cyclones, before being hastily swapped last month to another ‘A’ to avoid any confusion with the man currently in charge of the nation.
As Australia does not have fixed terms, being pestered by journalists about when they plan to call the election is practically a rite of passage for any prime minister of the day.
Despite this, the constant questions at times bemuse and at others clearly irritate Albanese, even more so the latter once a cyclone is barrelling toward the east coast.
Yet he has long played into the uncertainty by leaving wriggle room in answers even as he insists he thinks three-year terms are too short.
The election must be held by May 17, but if the PM did not want to deliver a budget in March this weekend was seen as the last real opportunity for him to go early.
Flying back to Sydney after a trip to Brisbane for briefings on Alfred preparations days before the cyclone was due to hit, it’s already clear at least some of his plans for the week will be abandoned.
A slated trip to Perth is shelved in favour of Albanese basing himself at Canberra to respond to the cyclone – this is a Prime Minister who does not want to shirk any hose holding responsibilities.
But he remained as resolutely evasive as ever on the question of election timing, leaving the door open right up until the moment he shuts it late on Friday.
No matter, the real purpose of this interview was to draw out the “why” of his re-election bid rather than the “when”.
I remind Albanese of his response to comments Scott Morrison made shortly before the 2022 election, when the former prime minister revealed the idea of having a legacy was “just not how I think about things”.
Morrison argued that when politicians started thinking about legacies they “stop thinking about today and what they have to do now,” framing the whole notion as “vain”.
This clearly struck Albanese at the time, because a few days later he used a speech at the National Press Club in Canberra to label it “remarkable” that the absence of a legacy was a “conscious choice” for his then-opponent.
“If given the opportunity, I want to make a real difference for the people of our nation – and to strengthen the nation itself,” he went on to say.
Three years on, I ask Albanese what he therefore thinks the legacy of his first term will be.
“Dealing with immediate issues which we confronted, while keeping our eye on the future,” he says.
This, Albanese elaborates, is his “philosophical legacy”.
“Always in government you can be confronted by curveballs, as the Morrison government was with Covid, but do you respond in a way that doesn’t take you off track from where you want to take the country?”
In practical terms, he says this meant responding to soaring living costs, inflation and economic challenges in a way that “helped to deliver what we want to do in the future”.
“Before the election, I said we had two themes in ‘no one held back’ and ‘no one left behind’.
“No one left behind: the measures that we’ve put in place to deal with cost of living pressures, no one held back: the opportunities that we’re creating in seizing the … energy transition, the future made in Australia agenda, the shift towards affordable childcare, the strengthening of Medicare, dealing with skills and jobs, keeping people in employment.”
With a legacy like that, Albanese certainly couldn’t be accused of not “thinking about today” as Morrison characterised it.
What he hasn’t mentioned is that at the start of his term, Albanese was undoubtedly hoping the creation of an Indigenous voice to parliament would be a hallmark of his tenure in the top job.
The referendum was resoundingly voted down in October 2023, but only months earlier Albanese had sat in the red dirt of north East Arnhem Land at the Garma festival reassuring nervous Indigenous advocates who were clinging onto hope that their request for a constitutionally enshrined advisory body would prevail.
Looking back at that time, what does he feel went wrong?
“People made their decision,” Albanese says.
“It’s hard to win referendums in Australia. But we did that out of conviction, not out of convenience.”
He says Labor always knew there was “no certainty” of the result.
“We had a crack. No government has had the guts to have a referendum this century.”
It’s about as much of a post-mortem as he’s prepared to offer before shifting to argue Labor’s commitment to the referendum did not come at the expense of its broader agenda.
“We didn’t allow it though, to be a distraction from what else we were doing,” Albanese insists.
“We were saying ‘yes’ to the referendum, but we’re also saying yes to energy price relief, yes to cheaper childcare, yes to cheaper medicines, yes to all the other things we were doing to address the cost of living.”
Albanese may wish to move on, but there’s no denying the failed vote was like a fault line that split wide open under pressure and cleaved his term of government in two.
Before its defeat, Labor was fairing okay despite increasingly poor economic conditions — an energy crisis fuelled by war in Ukraine, back-to-back interest rate hikes, and soaring prices.
In early 2023 the party won a historic by-election in the outer Melbourne seat of Aston, trade tensions with China had begun to ease and election promises were passing through parliament at a steady rate.
After the referendum, the government had exhausted whatever little political capital and goodwill remained across the community, and has since struggled to cut through on any issue.
Throughout the last three years Albanese has placed a high premium on “stability,” often citing the longevity of his cabinet ministers and general absence of internal rancour among the Labor caucus.
But with plenty of Australians eager to see ambitious reform, has the focus on solidarity and considered process come at the expense of Albanese “swinging for the fences” on bold new ideas like many of his Labor forebears?
“I never promised a revolutionary government,” the PM retorts.
“I said we would be orderly, I said we would be focused.”
He rails against the “dysfunction” of the nine years of Coalition government that preceded him, revisiting well-trodden lines about the shocking assault on democratic process that was Morrison’s decision to be secretly sworn in to multiple cabinet ministries during the pandemic.
“That is not the way that the Westminster system should operate,” Albanese says.
“They had no accountability.”
The multiple portfolios saga was indeed an egregious failure in transparency during the pandemic, but the average Australian is hardly clamouring to hear about the processes behind Albanese’s “cabinet-lead” and public service fuelled government.
“I think how governments function does matter,” he insists.
Albanese highlights the “revolving door” of ministers in important portfolios, like defence, under the Coalition, in contrast to his own comparably steadfast frontbench.
Given the last prime minister to win two elections in a row was John Howard in 1998, perhaps Albanese is not wrong to hold stability in such high esteem.
Supposing this strategy does secure the Labor leader that seemingly elusive second term, he insists his government has big plans for what to do with it.
“We’ll have a full suite of policies to build on the foundations that we’ve laid in our first term,” he says.
“The first of that is a stronger economy. We go to an election being able to say that in difficult global economic times, we have lower inflation, higher wages, interest rates falling, we have delivered tax cuts for every taxpayer (and) we’ve got 1.5 million additional jobs created.”
Albanese says his ambition is to build on this with stronger wages and employment, making fee-free TAFE permanent, a 20 per cent reduction on student debt and a range of health initiatives, not in the least spending $8.5 billion to lift GP bulk billing rates.
“Across the board we’ve got good stories to tell,” he says.
Childcare reform is also firmly on the agenda, with the Prime Minister having made no secret of his dream to achieve “universal” affordable access to early education.
In this he sees two benefits: firstly as an important productivity measure to boost women’s participation in the workforce, but more ambitiously as a critical key to unlocking aspirational Australia.
“Labor is the party of aspiration,” he declares enthusiastically.
It’s an idea he first espoused upon becoming Labor leader six years ago, with the comments then interpreted as a direct repudiation of Bill Shorten’s disastrous campaign rhetoric targeting the “top end of town”.
Supporting individual aspiration has conventionally been the dominion of the Liberal Party, but whether through a cynical political play for Middle Australia or a genuine attempt to course correct after the shock of Labor’s 2019 election loss, Albanese has persisted with contesting the space.
On this occasion, his return the subject was sparked by our discussion about his formative years.
Albanese’s humble beginning — growing up in public housing in the inner west Sydney suburb of Camperdown raised by his single mum — is by now, a fairly well known story.
The contrast to his current life is something he says strikes him each time he is driven up the hill in through the gates of the prime minister’s courtyard to his office in Canberra’s Parliament House.
“I am conscious of the privileges I have, in having that opportunity of living in The Lodge, of representing Australia as well is something I’m very conscious of,” he says.
“There are of course moments that you think to yourself, this is beyond what I could have anticipated growing up where I did.
“My mum had, like so many parents do, great aspirations for me.
“That’s a part of ‘no one held back’ — aspiration is a good thing.
“We want every Australian to have the opportunity to be the best they can.”
For Albanese, this is where education comes in.
Fresh in his mind is the funding deal secured with NSW last week that will fully fund public schools by 2034.
Over the past year the Albanese Government has been locking in similar agreements with almost every state and territory, with Queensland the only jurisdiction still to come on-board.
But with 90 per cent of a child’s brain developed by the time they’re age five, the Prime Minister says providing universal access to early education is where Labor’s support for aspiration really begins.
“That creates opportunity,” he says.
This claim is backed up by a growing body of research showing children who participate in quality early education are more likely to achieve higher levels of school and employment success.
A Labor government focused on education is hardly revolutionary, but the merging of a policy strength for the party with its perceived weakness – economic management – has potential to resonate with voters.
Labor’s overall plan to fight Peter Dutton on the economy seems to directly draw on that hackneyed political saying, don’t compare me to perfect, compare me to the alternative.
This is nowhere more evident than in how Albanese responds when the Coalition’s most potent attack line is put to him — that Australians are worse off than they were three years ago when Labor took office.
“Two points,” he says in response.
“If the Coalition was in government, you’d have been worse off now.
“And who will make you better off in three years time?”
On the first charge, Albanese cites Labor modelling that Australians would be on average $7,200 worse off if measures the Coalition voted against had not been implemented.
“At a time when Australia was saying ‘yes’ to cost of living measures put in place by my government and dealing with inflation by also delivering two budget surpluses, they (the Coalition) were just saying ‘no’ to everything,” he says.
In terms of which major party can provide a better future, Albanese points to improving economic conditions like lower inflation, an interest-rate cut and real wage increases.
He credits these achievements to the “hard work of Australians,” but the implication is it’s all happened on Labor’s watch.
“I’m really proud of what we have been able to achieve,” he says.
“Australians have done it tough, it’s been difficult times, in part because of the long tail of Covid, in part because of Vladimir Putin and Russia’s invasion and the impact that had on energy prices globally.
“But we haven’t sat back as observers, or talked Australia down, we’ve rolled up our sleeves, like Australians have, and turned the corner.”
But what of the mistakes and missteps of the past three years, does Albanese have any regrets?
“No one is perfect,” he offers.
“I’m human like everyone else. But the question is, do you learn every day?
“My mentor Tom Uren would say, ‘you’ve got to learn something new every day, and you’ve got to grow as a person every day.”
Albanese says there are a “range of things that we could do better” without offering up any examples, while insisting there’s no “arrogance” about his government.
“It’s an incredible honour (to govern),” he says.
“I love this country and I want to do what’s best for this country, and I want to do my best for this country.
“It’s one of the reasons I get up early and go to bed late, every single day.”
As if to emphasise the point, the plane we’re travelling in from Brisbane to Sydney jolts in mid-air, prompting Albanese to buckle his seatbelt without breaking the conversation.
A few seconds later the warning light above us pings on and I hastily reach for my own belt struggling for a moment against the turbulence as the PM pauses mid-sentence to wryly note, “well there is a cyclone coming you know”.
It’s clearly meant as a sombre observation rather than a flippant remark — Albanese is all too aware of the devastation about to be visited on the nation’s third biggest city.
After meeting with NSW Premier Chris Minns the previous day, Albanese had flown north to extend the Commonwealth’s unconditional support to Queensland’s leader David Crisafulli and get an appraisal of the looming threat in person.
His morning began with two local radio interviews followed by more than two hours of briefings at the Emergency Services Complex in Brisbane with Crisafulli and other officials, and then a press conference.
Attempts were made to coordinate a stop in northern NSW, rendered futile by an inability to arrange for the plane to land in either Lismore or Ballina, so it was back to Sydney for more briefings and then on to Canberra to monitor the national disaster response.
It’s been 50 years since a cyclone has made landfall over such a populated part of Australia, an event so rare that even the best preparation can do little to mitigate the unbridled carnage inflicted by raging 90km/h winds, ocean surges of up to a metre and torrential rain that for some regions will include 24 hour totals of 400mm.
Still Albanese has preemptively authorised the release of recovery funds, pre-positioned Australian Defence Force assets and is ready to receive further requests once the damaging winds subside.
The cyclone is only the latest in a long line of events that have buffeted Albanese’s term, with the leisurely circumnavigation of Australia’s coastline by a flotilla of Chinese warships in recent weeks another example.
The PM often says he considers this to be the most uncertain time globally since World War II.
To deal with this, he says Australia “clearly” needs “more resilience in our defence”.
“That’s why we’ve increased our defence budget to 2.4 per cent over a decade, why we did the Defence Strategic Review and have prioritised assets that are best to defend Australia – naval assets, an increase in missiles.”
Investing in relationships has also been Albanese’s focus – engaging with Pacific Island nations, southeast Asia, improving ties with traditional partners in Europe and restoring economic relations with China.
“We have worked hard on diplomacy,” he says.
Albanese recalls fondly the sermon at the church service held at the start of the parliament titled: “hope in an uncertain world”.
“There’s nowhere you’d rather be positioned than Australia,” he says.
“We’re in the fastest growing region in the world in human history, we have resources that the world needs and wants, we have diaspora, which means we have people-to-people relations throughout the entire world, including in our region, and that puts us in a strong position where we’re valued in the world.”
Though Albanese has seemingly thrived on the global stage, the reception to his travels abroad in some quarters back in Australia really became the first chink in his shiny new government armour.
“Airbus Albo” took off in 2022, a moniker most international experts say unfairly maligned the PM for doing what has long been a normal part of the job.
By the end of his term, Albanese was just as likely to be criticised by his opponents for not hopping on a plane abroad to attend a summit, highlighting just how fraught managing public expectations is when you’re leader of the country.
Albanese has spent almost half of his life in public office, having been first elected to his inner west Sydney electorate of Grayndler in 1996.
But none of his previous roles — from backbench MP to the outer ministry, cabinet and for a brief period deputy prime minister — compare to the intensity of interest in his life as prime minister.
“It’s something that is reality to deal with,” he says when asked how he has found the attention he and fiance Jodie Haydon have received over the past three years.
An unavoidable part of the job, but one that only heightens the importance of not sharing absolutely everything.
“You do need to make sure as well, that you have an element in your life that’s private,” he says.
“The best example is when I proposed to Jodie.
“No one knew about it in advance — well a couple of people knew, like the person who helped design the ring — but that’s about it.”
It wasn’t until the pair shared a smiling photo of their happy news the morning after Albanese’s Valentines Day proposal at an Italian restaurant in Canberra until most people learned of the engagement.
“You understand that (public attention) is part of the job, but it’s really important as well that you continue to exist as a human being,” the PM says.
A few days later there’s a relaxed air as Haydon stands with Albanese for pictures in a little known corner of the gardens at The Lodge, she’s here to support him in between her own busy work schedule.
The PM’s cavoodle Toto is lolloping around at their feet, but as soon as Haydon turns to go back inside for a meeting the little white dog takes off after her leaving Albanese in the dust.
He insists there’s no favouritism there, staying for a moment in quiet corner of native bushland watching a pair of cockatoos enjoying the nearby pond.
When on the plane, Albanese had nominated interests “outside of politics” as the key to remaining rooted in the real world.
“I have a group of friends, including people I grew up with, and people I went to school with,” he says.
“I enjoy footy and sport, I enjoy music, I enjoy a range of friends outside of politics as well, which I think is important to keep you connected and grounded.”
During his years as opposition leader, Albanese became fond of using sports metaphors to articulate Labor’s election strategy.
The parliament term was divided into footy quarters, and great emphasis was put on “kicking with the wind” at the final siren.
Albanese withstood criticism of Labor’s carefully constrained “small target” agenda and went on to claim victory.
But three years on and conditions on the field are not ideal for Labor.
Despite the team’s best efforts, they’ve struggled to score points and the head coach can surely see the wind is blowing straight into everyone’s faces.
Still, Albanese bristles at the suggestion Labor is losing ground in its outer suburban heartland.
It’s not a premise he accepts, no matter that almost every poll in the country is saying as much.
What then does a Labor voter look like in 2025?
“A Labor voter looks like an Australian,” Albanese answers.
“Someone who is concerned about jobs and a strong economy. Someone who cares about health and education, someone who cares about climate change, someone who regards all Australians as being worthy of support.
“Someone who wants to lift people up, not push people down who are already vulnerable.
“Someone who accepts that we have a responsibility to look after each other, that wants a stronger economy and a stronger Australia.”
We’re skidding along the tarmac at the Sydney Airport as Albanese returns to Morrison’s “quite extraordinary” legacy quote.
“I think not just politicians, but that people want to leave the world a better place than what they’ve found it, and that it’s part of a moral code,” he says.
“The values that I was raised on is that we should all try to do that, in our own way.
“That might be the volunteers who are out there helping people in this natural disaster.
“It can be so many things that make a difference to people’s lives.
“But if you’re in my position, you’re in a position to make a difference to the environment that people inherit, to international relations, to security for Australians, to all of those things across the board.”
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