Vikki Campion: Anthony Albanese has not right to complain about criticism — unwarranted or not

Anthony Albanese has made a career of skewering political opponents, so the PM has no right to whinge when he cops a bucket for buying a $4.3m property, writes Vikki Campion.

Nobody should care that the PM and his partner are buying a clifftop ocean-view mansion for $4.3m — but they would if they followed the recipe book of invective that Anthony Albanese wrote himself.

Mr Albanese has spent his entire political career skewering the slightest misdemeanour, including age and mental health, beyond his opponent’s control, such as John Howard’s age at 60, who Albo, now 61, referred to as “one fossil I want to get rid of”.

Howard’s suburban house, a red brick three-bedder, functional over fancy, helped make him a target. Albo belittled Howard as failing to escape the “age of laminex”. An apparent social faux pas.

Despite Howard’s simple home in his electorate, lacking Albo’s new ocean view to preach from, it could not save him from being dressed down in the Albanese cookbook as being “government by the elite for the elite” and “governing for the elite few”, with “elitism in their blood”.

History for Albo has transgressed into irony.

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA – NewsWire Photos FEBRUARY 3, 2022: An angry leader of the Australian Labor Party Anthony Albanese pictured at a press conference in Sydney. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Damian Shaw

There was no clifftop mansion for Howard to escape to from his electorate of Bennelong.

When he went on holidays it was to Tea Gardens, known for its caravan parks and retirees.

Albo frolicked in his personal evisceration as the Tory-killing warrior that he thought he was.

“He (Howard) is like the sheriff sitting in his castle counting the coins squeezed out of the peasants living on his estate,” Albo told the Parliament in 2001.

Never mind Howard lived in a suburban brick house and still does.

Living in a comparatively cheap $351,000 house at Forestville didn’t spare Tony Abbott any punches from Albo – who made it much more personal with the taunt in and out of the chamber: “In your guts, you know he is nuts.”

This is the same Albo for whom they now ask for clemency.

The Albo who described a husband and a father as attempting “to remake himself into ‘human’ Tony.”

Intoxicated by the tribal pile-on he was leading, he relished in further caricatures of “angry Tony” and “brutal Tony”.

This is not hearsay but on Hansard.

The PM’s new cliff-top property looks out over the ocean at Copacabana on the Central Coast. Picture: Realestate.com.au

As his cabinet pleaded this week to leave the Prime Minister alone, one can imagine the vitriol that Albo would have issued forth had he been the opposition leader in similar circumstances on a Howard PM or an Abbott PM.

You didn’t even have to buy a clifftop mansion.

You could have been a cleric from the wrong tribe, such as the Howard-appointed Governor-General, who Albo smashed as what “happens when you place ideology and favouritism above suitability for appointment”, who he criticised for leaving Australia without “any head of state”.

Albanese did this in explicit disobedience of the standing orders that he should have held in higher respect from his tenure and position.

For our Albo, if you could not find a house then a hose would do.

Both Hansard and his own transcripts are full of Albo skewering Scott Morrison for his Hawaiian holiday, which he returned from without purchasing a house.

No one expects Albanese to return to a housing commission home post-politics, but he has spent decades finessing the recipe for bringing down political opponents.

This week, he appealed to a particular type of graciousness for others to leave him alone, though he had never offered such reprieve.

Former prime minister John Howard and wife Jannette still live in their suburban home. Picture: Brianne Makin

He perfected the class warfare recipe and built his career on us versus them.

He posed the idea that to authentically represent people, you had to have had the arse hanging out of your pants – when the reality now apparent for him is a far less bare-arse log cabin, and much more designer suits, private planes, chauffeurs and ocean-view estates.

Paradoxically, the arse-out-of-your-pants politician will only bring us foul results.

The biggest threat to Australia’s future is morons who do not know how to manage money running the country.

Competent people would rather take their eyes out with a fork than go into politics today and have the national media focus on their recent house purchase.

Where this leads, this tall poppy rubbish, is that no successful business person will ever consider becoming Prime Minister or Treasurer while we stare down a $932bn-and-growing debt. We need self-made people to replicate their success for Australia through their service in public office.

If your resume is of failure and incompetence, please don’t apply for the job to run the nation.

Albo is no economic genius, but he has managed his finances prudently enough to be able to buy a nice house with his partner. It would be more of a concern if he had lost his house.

Who do you want running the country, a person who can manage their own money or one who serves as PM and moves back into a housing commission, taking Australia with them?

Had this house resulted from corruption, decisions that resulted in an ulterior pecuniary benefit to them in parliament or immediately on departing parliament, it would be different.

The problem is not with Albanese’s success in real estate. It is with his now evident hypocrisy in politics, for which he has never offered any apology to any of his former or current targets.

But as for Albo’s reaction?

You wrote the recipe. You savaged fathers in politics for going on holidays with their kids. You attacked your opponents’ age and mental health.

You cooked it up. Enjoy your meal and expect to be served a second helping.

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