Piers Akerman: Anthony Albanese can’t handle heat of political kitchen

Like an overwhelmed short-order cook, Albanese has demonstrated not only is he clueless around the political kitchen, he can’t even read the recipes placed in his hands by his minders.

Beloved celebrity chef Maggie Beer endorsed Anthony Albanese’s plan to provide better food in aged-care homes but she should have warned him that one of her signature dishes is rhubarb crumble.

For crumble is what Albanese has done in record time.

Like an overwhelmed short-order cook, Albanese has demonstrated that not only is he clueless around the political kitchen, he can’t even read the recipes placed in his hands by his minders. Forget the culinary legend’s delicious crumble, in Albanese’s hands it has turned into second-rate custard.

On his very first outing, the Opposition Leader demonstrated that he doesn’t have a clue about the mainsprings driving the nation’s global success story.

His boosters — the ABC, Crikey, GetUp, the Guardian, The Project, The Conversation and the team of so-called independents being bankrolled by Simon Holmes a Court — have all been so focused on ousting the Coalition that they failed to lift the bonnet and look inside Labor’s campaign strategy to present Albanese as a credible alternate prime minister.

Labor leader Anthony Albanese delivers a speech at the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation on the third day of the election campaign. Picture: Toby Zerna

Had they done so months ago they would have seen that their man was a greater dud than Rudd or Gillard.

On his very first outing, he demonstrated that he didn’t know the basics — the level of unemployment and the cash rate.

This wasn’t a failure of memory which, charitably, John Howard — the elder statesman par excellence of recent leadership — tried to excuse.

It was a failure solidly grounded in ignorance.

It was doubly inexcusable because Albanese had padded his CV to claim, falsely, that he was an economics adviser to the successful team of prime minister Bob Hawke and treasurer Paul Keating.

The record, and his own autobiography, clearly demonstrate that he was anything but.

At best, he was an adviser to the left-wing Labor figure Tom Uren and he used his position as an adviser to rally fellow leftists to attack the Hawke-Keating partnership’s plans to open up the Australian economy.

It was an undeniable shameless distortion of the record.

He then set out a policy to deploy local GPs to relieve the pressure on hospital emergency departments, forgetting that the country has a shortage of GPs and hoping perhaps that no one would notice that his recipe was little more than a repeat of Kevin Rudd’s failed promise to build 35 GP “super clinics” across the nation.

Even the doctors’ union, the Australian Medical Association, which is firmly behind Labor, admits that there aren’t enough GPs to meet Albanese’s recycled Rudd flop.

Albanese, who had claimed that his plan for urgent-care clinics had been costed by the Parliamentary Budget Office, was subsequently contradicted by Katy Gallagher (one of the so-called “mean girls” along with senators Penny Wong and Kristina Keneally who have denied claims they bullied the late Senator Kimberley Kitching).

Gallagher tweeted that the $135 million policy had not in fact been costed, leaving Albanese to splutter ineffectually that full costings would be released before the election.

Labor then attempted to shift the debate with an attack on the Liberal Party’s candidate for Warringah, Katherine Deves, who is running against Zali Steggall.

Deves is a women’s advocate who co-founded the organisation Save Women’s Sport, which aims to prevent biological men participating in female categories in sporting competitions.

Biologically, there are two sexes defined by their chromosomes and it is indisputable that most males naturally possess physical advantages to women, which is why men and women do not compete against each other in sports requiring strength or athleticism.

The feminist movement is so deluded that it believes this innate difference reflects what it calls toxic masculinity.

As a longtime admirer of Beer and her husband, Colin, I laud her work lifting the profile of tourism in South Australia’s Barossa Valley with her Pheasant Farm restaurant, a line of delicacies and television shows.

Her story stands in stark contrast to the false narrative which surrounds Albanese with his ridiculous claims to economic expertise and government experience, let alone border security.

Beer’s creations show the benefit of experiment and thorough testing.

Albanese’s not so much.

As a political chef he couldn’t cut it in a kitchen. His dishes don’t pass the sniff test let alone the taste test but given his backflips on policy he would make it in a circus.