Steve Price: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is self destructing before our eyes
Australia’s tin-eared prime minister just doesn’t get it — he has no feel at all for the people of the country he’s tasked with leading.
Opinion
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Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is selfdestructing before our eyes.
Our worst ever modern leader is a tone-deaf political operator who doesn’t know how to lead.
It started on May 21, 2022, at Sydney’s Canterbury-Hurlstone Park leagues club in his electorate and it might just have ended outside the Adass Israel synagogue in Melbourne’s Ripponlea on Tuesday this week.
Since that May night - where a speech began with a Welcome to Country and a pledge to bring Australia together - it has been painful to watch.
Reading that speech again, like I did this week, the alarm bells should have been screaming loudly then about what was to come.
He told us, in the hubris of an election win, of a passion he has had all his life – “beating Tories” – and that he would lead a government worthy of the people of Australia. Then around 29 words in, Albanese made the first promise of his leadership: to implement the Uluru statement from the Heart “in full”.
This of course led to the divisive Voice referendum that was voted down by 60 per cent of Australians. So much for that pledge to bring Australians together.
In that same speech we got the ‘son of a single mum’ spiel that’s been repeated over and over again, along with the tale of growing up in public housing and how remarkable it was that he was standing there as our new PM.
The newly elected prime minister promised to end the climate wars and make Australia a global renewable super power and thanked the “mighty trade union movement”.
Albanese even made this remarkable admission: “I said (during the campaign) I’ve been underestimated my whole life and I’m not here to occupy space. We have made history tonight.”
Fast forward to last weekend and he’s at the Cottesloe tennis club in the swanky suburb of the same name, where the lawn courts are said to be some of the best in the nation. A two-hour hit with locals was followed by a few post-match drinks.
How could any politician with the slightest hint of a political radar think that was a smart thing to do after the firebombing attack on a Jewish synagogue in Melbourne two days earlier.
This is at the heart of the problem for the son of a single mum from social housing. The PM just doesn’t get it — he has no feel at all for the people of the country he leads.
Anthony Albanese is completely out of his depth and might soon be out of a job altogether.
I’ve been around long enough to have lived under both prime ministerial leaders and duds. Bob Hawke and John Howard were clearly in the first category.
Hawke had an innate feel for the people of Australia with his beer swilling, cigar chomping younger version, to celebrating our historic win in the America’s Cup. Hawke was the sort of PM Australia deserved, even with all his faults.
Ironically — given Albanese’s boneheaded tone deafness around Israel and the Hamas terror attacks — Hawke was a strong champion of Israel his whole career.
John Howard was PM during some of the toughest times for his country, including the Port Arthur massacre and the September 11 attack on New York. He, like Hawke, understood middle Australia and what makes it tick. You only need to think gun law reforms and the Tampa illegal boat saga to know what I mean.
I’ve also lived through my fair share of duds. Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull in recent times would head that list, with both always believing they were the smartest people in the room.
Malcolm was so out of touch with middle Australia that he turned a Tony Abbott swag of Liberal seats into a one-seat majority and refused to leave his harbourside mansion to face the music.
Rudd won in 2007 and assembled a bunch of celebrities, including movie stars and media sycophants, to scribble down on butchers’ paper his vision for a future Australia. We all know how that turned out.
As living proof of Albanese’s tin ear, Rudd was made ambassador to the US even though there was a possibility of a second coming for Donald Trump.
Talk about dumb decisions.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise though, when you remind yourself about who we are dealing with in Anthony Albanese.
He has been a paid politician since 1996, so coming up to 30 years on the public payroll. He has been the local member for the seat of Grayndler for all that time, an inner west part of Sydney that has little to do with the real Australia.
At Sydney University he joined the Labor Party and was elected to the student council, representing the hard left while working as a Labor Party official and research officer. As a student, he had links to the Australian Communist Party and African National Congress. At some point he spent two years working in a bank before becoming the Assistant General Secretary of the NSW Labor Party.
Quite the CV for someone going on to become PM – a hard left career party hack with a taste for the good life. This year he has been slammed for his taste for air travel at the pointy end of planes and the purchase of a $4.3 million beach house at Copacabana on the Central coast of NSW, which is a long way from Grayndler.
None of this would matter if, like Hawke or Howard, he had the common touch. But as shown with the synagogue attack and his delayed response and tennis playing kick in the guts to Jewish Australians, he has a terrible habit of misreading the room. Even when he eventually turned up four days too late, he nervously talked about attending his first bat-mitzvah while in Perth which meant absolutely nothing to anyone.
Outside, after inspecting the burnt-out shell of the latest anti-Semitic attack to hit Melbourne, he was heckled about his lack of support for Jewish Australians and had to be surrounded by a security detail and shoved into his armour-plated BMW and whisked away from the baying crowd.
All this came in a week that started with a disastrous Newspoll showing Albanese, according to voters, was the weakest PM in the poll’s history, with his rating as a strong and decisive leader falling five points to 44 per cent, compared with Peter Dutton’s approval rating of 60.
That same Newspoll has the two parties (Labor and the Coalition) locked together at 50-50 heading into next year’s election.
The very real problem for Australians fed up with the PM’s weak leadership and broken promises on things like power prices and the cost of living, is the possibility of a minority Labor Government led by this bloke.
Can you imagine what an Albanese and Greens-led Adam Bandt government would do to this country.
A Labor-Teal coalition wouldn’t be much better.
All we can hope for if that happens is for the PM to decide life on the clifftop at Copacabana would be better for him and Jodie than another tortured three years at the top.
Love
— Peter Dutton’s pledge to stand before one flag only – the Australian flag
— Classic VB beer ad to feature in our Canberra sound archives
— Living legend Dawn Fraser recovering strongly after a nasty fall
— Boxing Day MCG Test Day 1 a sellout
Loathe
— Latest anti-Semitic attack, this time in Sydney
— Armed gangs stealing cars and assaulting locals in Brighton
— Fruitless attempt to query utilities bill from South-East water with hours spent on hold
— Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s addled comparison of Israel with Russia and China
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