James Campbell: Game, set and match to anyone but Anthony Albanese
A lifetime inside the cocoon of the Labor Party will not help Anthony Albanese connect with ordinary Australian voters, writes James Campbell.
James Campbell
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Politicians are like tennis players: You have to see them against a high quality opponent before judging how good they are.
Malcolm Turnbull is a clever man with a brilliant CV: Oxford, journalism, the bar, banking. Succeeded at all of them.
Made it to The Lodge too.
The problem was his previous triumphs weren’t much use to him once he got there.
Whether it was because he came to politics too late in life or he just lacked the natural instinct for the game, his Prime Ministership just didn’t work out.
The flip side of this was that while he was there, Turnbull made Bill Shorten’s political judgment look a lot better than subsequent events revealed it to be.
Soon after the Liberal Party replaced their gentleman amateur with a proper-dyed in the wool career political hack in the form of Scott Morrison, it was clear that while Shorten might have possessed basic political footwork, he was no Bob Hawke.
Unsurprisingly, those of us who were left with egg on our faces after Morrison beat Labor in 2019 have tended to give the PM the benefit of the doubt when trying to assess just how good a politician he is.
Sadly for Labor, with every passing opportunity he misses, it is becoming clearer we are unlikely to find out as long as Anthony Albanese is the leader of the opposition. Back in May the pressure on Morrison was starting to rise over his government’s failure to pull its weight on quarantining returning travellers.
Surprisingly that month’s budget included no money for a purpose-built quarantine facility as the head kickers in the Victorian Government immediately pointed out.
The expectation in Canberra was that this failure would be at the centre of Albo’s budget-in-reply speech to be delivered later that week.
Budget-in-reply speeches are a big deal for most Labor leaders in Canberra, the closest that most will ever come to handing down an actual budget.
Perhaps this confusion was why Albanese used that speech to make a pledge to spend $10 billion on social and affordable housing.
It was fine as far as it went but bizarrely beside the point when the most pressing – indeed the only – issue of the moment is the pandemic.
It was even weirder considering one of the centre-pieces of the actual budget was a scheme to help single mothers to buy their own home.
He was at again this week at the National Press Club.
After a budget-in-reply speech addressing the press club is right up there as a big occasion for the leader of the Australian Labor Party.
Scott Morrison was having a shocker last week.
The vaccine rollout was far from where it should be.
Half the country was in lockdown with state borders snapping shut and the premiers demanding he cut the already negligible number of people allowed to arrive here by plane.
So naturally Albo chose to use his National Press Club address to make a promise about full employment.
Now as anyone who has been looking out the window this year could tell you while Australia has many problems at the moment, a shortage of jobs isn’t one of them.
With no new migrants arriving and the labour market having to make do without the thousands of international students who have gone home, employers are screaming for more workers.
Hell, they might even have to start paying higher wages in order to hire them.
Yet here was dear old Albo, using one of the few occasions when we are obliged by custom to listen him promising that if elected he would give us full employment.
Except it was worse than that.
He didn’t actually promise a Labor Government would achieve full employment.
He promised “a Labor Government I lead will commission a Full Employment White Paper” which “will draw together experts from across government, industry and the union movement to set out a plan for how we will reduce unemployment and underemployment.”
In other words he didn’t unveil a plan he unveiled a plan to have a plan.
Federal Labor has been out of office more than seven years.
It has the benefit of a massive ecosystem of Leftoid think tanks and academics.
If it wanted to I’m pretty sure it could get the Victorian bureaucracy to help write its policies as Kevin Rudd was able to do.
Given all that it really takes some effort to come up with something this empty headed.
What the hell is a White Paper anyway? Who outside the Canberra bubble could tell you with any certainty?
Albanese appears to suffer from the opposite problem to Malcolm Turnbull.
Whereas Turnbull didn’t really know enough about politics to be Prime Minister, after 25 years on the public payroll in Canberra, it would seem that Canberra is all Albanese knows.
It would also seem that his life experience – a hard start in public housing followed by a lifetime inside the cocoon of the Labor Party is no more help in teaching you to speak to ordinary suburban Australia that Turnbull’s lifetime among the world’s elite was to him.
No wonder Government Ministers shout “we love you” to Albanese across the dispatch box.
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Originally published as James Campbell: Game, set and match to anyone but Anthony Albanese
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