Shaun Carney: Is Albo as leader really Labor’s answer?
SOME pollsters suggest more people would back Labor if someone other than Bill Shorten was leader. But is Anthony Albanese necessarily that someone, asks Shaun Carney.
Opinion
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NO matter who you vote for, you always end up electing a politician, so the old joke goes. But political parties themselves face a similar problem: they can’t avoid appointing a leader, regardless of the deficiencies of the candidates.
There’s no definitive set of qualifications for a political leader, so how you get the job depends on luck, timing, and desire as much as ability. And it pays to be consumed by hunger for the job.
Right now, the two most prominent Labor Party MPs with that latter attribute are Bill Shorten, who has the gig, and Anthony Albanese, who wants it.
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Albanese’s leadership aspirations remain undimmed. Every few months there is an outbreak of speculation about whether he could take on Shorten.
Ever since Albanese won the backing of 60 per cent of Labor’s rank-and-file members but failed to secure the endorsement of the caucus in a contest with Shorten in late 2013, he’s positioned himself as the leader-in-waiting.
In the weeks leading up to the 2016 election, Albanese supporters started to organise for a post-election challenge to Shorten, requesting resources from unions for the vote-gathering effort. The day after the election, Sky News reported the challenge was on. But because the result was so close and drawn-out, it wasn’t possible.
Shortly before last year’s budget, Albanese publicly attacked a Labor advertisement featuring Shorten and a bunch of workers on the grounds it was not sufficiently racially inclusive. His approach has been to apply pressure constantly, just to see if Shorten will slip and create an opening.
The breaks have fallen Albanese’s way in the past fortnight. First, he got publicity for a speech in which he outlined his vision for a Labor government, basically how it would conduct itself if he were prime minister.
Then early last week Shorten stumbled, declaring a decision on company tax by Labor’s expenditure review committee as party policy before it had been run past the caucus or the shadow cabinet. Shorten had to spend the rest of the week mopping up. Cue terrible headlines for Shorten.
The public comparison between him and Albanese was stark. Albanese had advocated for Labor working closely with business and “not to sow discord” in his speech while Shorten was just a divisive lefty business basher who had overreached and triggered his own downfall.
The week culminated in a member of Albanese’s “inner circle” briefing a Fairfax journalist on the caucus numbers. This insider’s assessment was that Shorten had lost the support of the caucus and the numbers had swung to Albanese — all it needed from here was a ballot.
When you look at things from Albanese’s vantage point, you can see why he might be anxious. He’s 55 — four years older than Shorten. He’s been in the parliament for 22 years while Shorten’s clocked up only 10 years.
Albanese has spent his entire working life inside the ALP. From university, he became a political adviser and then spent a number of years as an official with the party’s NSW branch. Shorten was a lawyer with Maurice Blackburn and then an Australian Workers’ Union organiser, rising to become national secretary before entering parliament.
Both men set themselves early in life to become a Labor prime minister but took different paths.
Shorten leapfrogged Albanese and there’s a good chance, should Labor lose the coming election, either Chris Bowen or Tanya Plibersek could vault over Albanese. Fifty-five is quite an advanced age for an Australian politician to assume leadership for the first time.
But just because Albanese wants the job, does that mean he’d do any better than Shorten, giving it an unassailable lead over the Turnbull government?
Under Shorten, Labor clocked up its 35th consecutive positive Newspoll this week. There is no groundswell of popular backing for Albanese to take over as there was with Bob Hawke over Bill Hayden in 1983 or, dare it be said, Kevin Rudd over Kim Beazley in 2006.
True, five years ago, most ALP members backed Albanese over Shorten. But party members are a much narrower group than Labor supporters. A Newspoll in May showed that just 22 per cent of Labor voters plumped for Albo,
25 per cent for the deputy leader Tanya Plibersek and 39 per cent for Shorten. That’s a big margin.
Shorten definitely has his shortcomings. He is not well-liked throughout the electorate and it could well be true, as some pollsters suggest, that this means more people would back Labor if someone other than Shorten was leader. But is Albanese necessarily that someone?
Love him or loathe him, Shorten has been written off time and again. Early in his leadership, he was dismissed as a stand-for-nothing trimmer. Then he started backing policies such as the end of negative gearing, opposing tax cuts for big corporations, taking on the banks and cutting out the dividend imputation rort.
Should people around Albanese engineer a challenge, they should be prepared for their man to have to win ugly because Shorten wouldn’t go easily. And after that, regardless of the result, the likely question on the lips of voters would be: what was the point?
Shaun Carney is a Herald Sun columnist
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