Albo’s a good sport but he’s going to struggle to stay on message

While Anthony Albanese wants us to believe he’s all-in on the issues punters care about, he’s going to struggle to stay on message, writes James Campbell.

Back from his holidays last week, the Prime Minister was keen to stress to everyone that after taking his eye off the ball, he’s going be bringing a laser-like focus to the cost-of-living issues that are hurting middle Australia.

Well, I think that was the plan as he stepped out in front of the cameras on Wednesday but, Albo being Albo, he couldn’t help wandering off topic into areas that must have his minders pulling their hair out.

Conscious perhaps that his constant presence at A-list sporting fixtures is threatening to become fixed in the mind of the public in a similar way his overseas travel has, the PM was keen to stress that later that morning he would “be attending briefly” the beginning of David Warner’s last Test match.

After rushing through a laundry list of measures we can already thank him for, including an additional 300,000 fee-free TAFE places, the 58 urgent care clinics and 26,000 people who have benefited from the expanded home guarantee scheme, he reiterated the Government’s priority will be to provide cost of living relief and he had “asked Treasury and Finance to come up with further propositions that we’ll consider in the lead-up to the May budget this year”.

That’s the stuff boss, his staff must have been thinking, keep it up!

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will have to be careful how often he is seen enjoying himself at major sporting events. Picture: James D. Morgan/Getty Images

But, before taking questions, for some reason he veered off into a diatribe about the fate of cabinet records from 20 years ago.

Apparently some 78 cabinet papers dealing with the Howard government’s 2003 deliberations about whether we should join George W Bush’s Coalition of the Willing, which should have been handed over to the National Archive in 2020, weren’t.

Anthony Albanese rushed through a laundry list of measures before veering off into a diatribe about the fate of cabinet records from 20 years ago. Picture: NCA Newswire/Gaye Gerard

Luckily the failure was discovered and the papers have since been handed over and will be released at a later date.

Was there anything sinister about the failure? Luckily we’ll know soon enough because the Government has commissioned former bureaucrat Dennis Richardson to look into it.

Was this really necessary? We’ll find out in due course.

But that didn’t stop Albo getting into full high-dudgeon mode.

“Australians do have a right to know what the decision-making process was, and my Government believes that this mistake must be corrected,” he harrumphed, going to say: “There is no reason why these documentations should be, with the exception of putting people in danger, should be not released in a transparent way. So we will, we have asked that this occur, and if this doesn’t occur we’ll look at whether the Government needs to take further action to ensure that there’s transparency here because Australians do deserve to know the basis upon which the decision was made to send Australia to war.”

Anthony Albanese back at the cricket – briefly – to support the Jane McGrath Foundation. Picture: NCA Newswire/Gaye Gerard

Well of course we do, indeed as far as I am aware no one is suggesting anything else.

(Incidentally we wouldn’t have had to wait until 2024 to get to the bottom of this important matter if Kevin Rudd had kept his word and held an independent inquiry into the pre-war intelligence upon which that decision was based.)

Watching this performance, it was hard not to feel that though he wants us to believe he’s all-in on the issues punters care about, he’s going to struggle to stay on message.

You can see why Albo might have thought that planting the idea in people’s minds that the previous government had deliberately sought to keep secret cabinet document from the public would work well for him just as the “scandal” of the “secret Morrison ministries” played well back in those happy months when he strode the Australian political stage like a colossus.

But that was several interest rate rises ago and before he set fire to his political capital in a quixotic attempt to enshrine an Indigenous voice to parliament in the constitution.

Trying to get people worked up about the fate of 20-year-old cabinet papers is not only a sad attempt to revisit salad days that are gone forever but shows Albo doesn’t really yet grasp the discipline his present circumstances are going to require.

And this wasn’t the only example on Wednesday.

Asked if we would be going to the polls this year, he didn’t say yes, he didn’t say no, he didn’t say unlikely – all answers that would have been ignored.

Instead, he gave us his opinion that the three-year terms of federal parliament are too short and we’d be better off moving to four years as has happened at state level.

Is the Government interested in doing anything about this? Of course not. So why bring it up?

Incidentally, Albo was back at the cricket a couple of days later – briefly no doubt – and held a press conference there to acknowledge the work of the McGrath Foundation.

It will be interesting to see how long he spends at the tennis this year.