Anthony Albanese is going nowhere as Labor leader

You’d be forgiven for thinking Anthony Albanese’s time as Labor leader was almost up. But a few beers with Albo reveals the opposite.

Anthony Albanese might not have much in common with Mark Twain and Paul McCartney but he does have this: Reports of his death have been greatly exaggerated.

I caught up with Albo for a few beers the other day and while it was all personal and off the record – a concept some find difficult to grasp these days – I can confirm he is very much alive.

And despite all the chatter his leadership isn’t on life support either.

While I instinctively gravitate towards the NSW Right of the Labor Party – who doesn’t love a colourful Sydney identity? – Albo is a commonsense, practical and pragmatic leader.

Sure, he’s technically a member of the Left, but nobody’s perfect.

The NSW Right, for the most part, like Albo too.

Even the fiery Joel Fitzgibbon – who planted an airport billboard-sized warning about the ALP’s direction and then rocketed off in front of it – considers him a mate.

Indeed, he was probably doing him a favour.

Fitzgibbon is frank and fearless and as someone in the home stretch of a long political career that has weathered the storms of Latham, Rudd, Gillard and Rudd again he can afford to be.

He is a man with nothing to lose and acts accordingly.

His shot across the bows a fortnight ago was a reminder that if Labor was not 100 per cent committed to suburban and regional workers over inner-city ideology it would continue to face electoral oblivion.

But this shot was a warning flare, not an assassin’s bullet. And it worked.

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Even the fiery Joel Fitzgibbon considers Anthony Albanese a “mate”. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Gary Ramage

On Monday a story splashed across the front page of The Australian declared that Labor would redouble its commitment to workers in the coal and gas industries while at the same time pursuing jobs growth in renewable energy. Truly the best of both worlds.

Better yet, this was from a speech delivered by key Albanese ally Murray Watt, a senator from Queensland – whose regional seats, along with those in outer-suburban Sydney, are most critical to Labor’s electoral fortunes.

The message could not have been clearer. Labor is going back to the heartland, the men and women of Australia who work, not whinge.

To be fair this is a course Albo had already started charting. Despite being nominally of the Left he was a far more centrist and pragmatic voice than the supposedly right-wing Bill Shorten when the Victorian hardman started spouting undergraduate class-war rhetoric in the mistaken belief that woke politics was the inevitable way of the future.

Shortly after becoming leader himself Albo reaffirmed his commonsense instincts by delivering to Caucus a line that should be on every ALP member’s coffee mug: “Trade unionists are part of our constituency, vegan terrorists are not.”

And so there is a solid school of thought that Labor under Albanese has always been trying to recapture to the worker and the sensible centre.

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Albanese is far more centrist than the “supposedly right-wing Bill Shorten”. Picture: Sarah Matray

But there is a fear among many that the party is constantly under threat of being hijacked by boutique interests that will alienate it from mainstream Australia and this is the fear that Fitzgibbon rightly raised.

It is not Albo they oppose but the disconnected elitism of some other Labor figures the wild activism of supposed ALP supporters who would be far more at home in the Greens or Socialist Alternative.

In other words, the NSW Right aren’t worried about Albo, they’re worried about the Victorians.

This is the state that was supposed to deliver Shorten the seats that never came. A state that is supposedly so strongly Labor that the MP for Melbourne is the only Green in the House of Representatives.

If Victoria is the ALP’s answer then the question was written by a suicide bomber.

Indeed, the Greens are a far more insidious threat to Labor than the Liberals. At least the Coalition engages the ALP in open combat in marginal seats. The Greens target not the suburban and regional Labor Right electorates but left-wing inner city Labor MPs who espouse many of the same progressive ideals they claim to want enacted.

The truth is the Greens are not the lions of the political jungle, they are parasites looking for a host. Why anyone in Labor would want to feed them instead of purging them is beyond comprehension.

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Federal Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese. Picture: NCA NewsWire/David Geraghty

And none of this is just theoretical talk because political theory is a contradiction in terms. When Labor goes back to basics it wins.

Annastacia Palaszczuk just proved this in Queensland, sacrificing Jackie Trad’s inner Brisbane seat to the Greens and collecting a swag of other seats across the state. No more distractions, no more equivocating on jobs and the economy and no more walking both sides of the street on lightning-rod issues like Adani.

The Greens, meanwhile, merely executed the state’s leading left-wing figure just so they could have a ringside seat at a Labor government with an enhanced majority waving legislation through before their eyes.

Many in the party have been saying ad nauseam that this is what Albo needs to do if he is to have a hope of winning government.

The good news is it looks a lot like he is doing it.