Rita Panahi: Anthony Albanese’s ignorance on cash rate should alarm us all

The determination to reimagine Anthony Albanese as some fiscally conservative moderate is nothing short of laughable.

The only way Anthony Albanese will become the 31st prime minister of this great nation is if the Labor Party successfully conceal the real Albo from the Australian public.

Thus far they have been largely successful in hiding Albanese and now reinventing him as some sensible centrist when he’s been part of Labor’s hard Socialist Left faction since his days in student politics.

That is who he is to his core. He was still mouthing off like a first year arts student 10 years ago when he said: “I like fighting Tories …that’s what I do.”

Labor would like you to believe that he was just a young and naïve 49 year-old at the time and has since moderated his views but throughout a lengthy political career Albanese has consistently been on the wrong side of every key challenge facing this country, from border protection to economic management.

The determination to reimagine Albanese as a fiscally conservative moderate who rejects wokeness is nothing short of laughable. If you believe that then you’ll believe anything. It should terrify every thinking Australian that the hot favourite to be the next PM doesn’t know the Reserve Bank’s cash rate nor the unemployment rate. His ignorance is all the more alarming given Australia’s current unemployment rate is the lowest it’s been in almost 50 years. It is a notable figure. During budget week the treasurer and PM mentioned the rate over and over … and over.

Labor leader Anthony Albanese is still mouthing off like a first year arts student. Picture: Toby Zerna

Albanese was sitting right there, what was he doing that he somehow managed to miss such key data? Was he checking his Twitter feed? Ordering curtains for the Lodge? These weren’t cheap gotcha questions like the price of a litre of milk or a loaf of bread, but basic financial figures every political leader should be across. Voters know their prime minister is unlikely to be cruising the Woolies aisles for his weekly groceries and in any case the price of milk and bread can be enormously variable. A loaf of bread can cost as little as $1.40 to more than $7, and that’s just at Woolies.

But the unemployment and cash rates are critical data that any politician with an ounce of economic acumen would recall instantly. Albanese’s explanation for his mistake didn’t clarify why he didn’t know the figures. “People make mistakes. That happens. I’ve fessed up to it,” he said. One of Albanese’s key promises in his budget reply was to tackle wage stagnation; a year-10 economics student could tell you the crucial links between the employment rate and boosting salaries. If the Labor leader is serious about delivering on his pledge then he’d know the unemployment rate. One would think Albanese, who reminds people he grew up in public housing approximately once every five minutes, would be ecstatic that so few Australians are out of work.

In recent weeks each-way Albo vowed to govern like Labor luminary Bob Hawke and Liberal great John Howard. We’ll never know what Hawke thought of the comparison but Mr Howard was none too pleased. “I think it’s much more ­important that you tell people what you intend to do rather than cite other leaders,” Howard said last month.

The truth is Albanese is not Hawke, he’s not Howard, he’s not even Bill Shorten. His biggest problem is that he’s Albanese, the career politician from Labor’s hard Left who shares more ideologically with the Greens than the Hawke-Keating governments. Perhaps that’s why he plagiarises speeches from other leaders of the Left, real and fictional, because if he were to tell the electorate what his real agenda is, they’d run a country mile. When he’s not borrowing lines from former disgraced UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn he is ripping off Andrew Shepherd, the free-world fictional leader played by Michael Douglas in the motion picture The American President.

Michael Douglas in The American President.

Just compare the pair:

Fictional US president played by Michael Douglas: “We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious men to solve them. And whatever your particular problem is, I promise you, Bob Rumson is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things and two things only: making you afraid of it and telling you who’s to blame for it.”

Real Albanese when a minister in the Gillard government: “In Australia we have serious challenges to solve and we need serious people to solve them, unfortunately, Tony Abbott is not the least bit interested in fixing anything. He is only interested in two things: making Australians afraid of it and telling them who’s to blame for it.’’

If he becomes PM it’ll be because he has successfully hoodwinked the Australian population just like Kevin Rudd before him. But the public always figure you out in the end.