Joe Hildebrand on how Anthony Albanese gave him faith in Labor

Anthony Albanese is trying to end years of hurt for Labor with victory tonight. Joe Hildebrand reveals just how bad things got.

Twelve years ago I broke faith with the Australian Labor Party. It was as painful and crushing as a sudden divorce except your wife doesn’t even know you’ve left the house.

My first memory of politics was the 1983 election, during whose count I was cruelly forced to bed. Reluctantly leaving my Lego truck behind, I insisted on being woken when the result came through.

At some point during the night my mother placed the truck my father had finished on the bedside table.

“Who won?” I mumbled, semiconscious.

“We did, darling,” my mother whispered. “We did.”

Such moments never leave you. They are carved in your bones.

I was six years old then and in all the years since I have been a Labor supporter. Often reluctantly, often angrily but always ultimately.

There has not been a single Australian election in which my vote didn’t go to the party I both hated and loved beyond all measure.

There are some one-eyed ideological types who will never understand this.

They think Labor is like a football team for whom you must simply scream loudest, and that by calling the umpire a maggot and glassing your opponent at the pub you might somehow win the match.

Anthony Albanese when he offered his resignation in 2012.

True Labor isn’t like that. It’s a hot mess of fiefdoms and factions and sub-factions and blood feuds all constantly overrun by an eternal rolling stone of arguments and ideas — some achingly idiotic and others breathlessly brilliant.

It is not powered by protest marches or hashtags or dumb election stunts — these only make it look stupid. Its true forge is far deeper.

Working-class people who want a better deal. Migrant communities who want a leg up into the promise of Australia. Middle-class battlers who are watching the election like a tennis match in the background and wondering whether the ball’s in their court.

And people like me, a poor boy from the suburbs who was able to make good because of Labor helping a single mum raise a family on a pension.

But my faith got broken nonetheless. After backing Labor my whole life, including all the way into government in 2007 — the first time my vote had ever contributed to a Labor victory — the party blew itself up.

On the night of my birthday in 2010 — just to make it personal — the federal Labor caucus knifed a first term prime minister for the first time in modern Australian history.

A multitude of political operatives and analysts mounted various justifications for this at the time while I loudly lost my s**t at the sheer insanity of it.

History now proves the latter was the rational response.

But in the middle of that maelstrom one man proved more sane than most. Only one senior figure in the ALP conducted himself with honour.

And that was Anthony Albanese.

Mr Albanese was a Rudd supporter and offered his resignation to Julia Gillard when she assumed the prime ministership.

To her great credit she refused to accept it and reinstated him in the senior role of Transport and Infrastructure Minister.

Ms Gillard knew Albo was a Rudd man, and Albo knew she knew he was a Rudd man. But Albo never formally moved against her even while others closer to her did. This was an almost unheard of act of chivalry in the darkest and ugliest days of Labor politics.

This is not to say that Mr Albanese is perfect — no human being meets that criterion, let alone a politician — but he is sound.

Critics say he is no soaring orator or economic mastermind, and they are right. But so what? Jason Clare can deliver the zingers and Jim Chalmers can crunch the numbers.

Critics also say he doesn’t have a big enough vision or ambitious enough policies. That he is no Gough Whitlam or Kevin 07.

Will Albo be the next PM?

Well thank God for that. Perhaps they should take a refresher course on what happened to Whitlam and Rudd. Both men promised too much and had their wings incinerated by the sun.

Instead Albo’s policies have the only two qualities that matter in politics: They are electable and they are achievable.

But more important than any of this is that he is a good bloke with good instincts.

The worst that conservatives have been able to throw at him is either very old or fairly minor.

And I say all this as someone who has a vast number of beloved conservative friends and is instinctively aligned with the Labor Right.

Whatever his historic left-wing pedigree, the Albo of today is a pragmatic centrist who is pro-business, pro-aspiration and pro-commonsense. And most critically he supports workers over wokeness. He is a bread and butter man.

This is an election day I never thought would come. After the darkest of decades Labor has somehow managed to heal itself and offer to the Australian people a leader who is the rarest commodity in politics: A decent bloke.

I never stopped voting Labor after 2010, I just did it with gritted teeth and a sorry soul.

But after 12 long years I will today be voting Labor with a once-forgotten feeling called hope. Hope that the party I love has finally forsaken the inner-city indulgences of identity politics and online outrage and once more found its place in the great sprawling heart of suburban Australia.

It is time for Labor to come home. And I will be there waiting.