Peta Credlin: $4.3m mansion blows up Albo’s battler image and suggests thoughts of retirement

The PM’s show of indifference to the plight of renters by purchasing a $4.3 million clifftop mansion couldn’t have come at a worse time, writes Peta Credlin.

The Prime Minister’s $4.3 million clifftop mansion purchase has been likened to Scott Morrison’s Hawaii moment but it’s actually much worse. Sure, it’s a colossal error of judgment that goes to character and is completely tone-deaf.

It suggests that Anthony Albanese is already thinking about his retirement despite the fact he’ll be trying to convince the electorate otherwise in a few months’ time.

But worst of all, it looks like he’s trying to do a housing deal before his government changes the rules on negative gearing and capital gains tax discounts.

When Morrison failed to cancel an overseas trip during terrible bushfires because he didn’t want to disappoint his family, that poor decision dogged him until his defeat almost two years ago. And that criticism was valid.

In Albanese’s case, he ignored colleagues’ advice not to buy now, it’s blown up his carefully crafted image as a Westie battler, broadcast his own political mortality, and quite possibly taken advantage of inside information to escape policy changes that would financially disadvantage him with a later investment.

Anthony Albanese and his fiance Jodi Haydon have bought this $4.3m luxury beach home.

It stinks and his colleagues know it. While frontbenchers who couldn’t avoid the media have half-heartedly defended their leader; off-the-record, MPs have been dumping on him in the first display of mass ill-discipline in the life of the Albanese government.

Here’s just a few samples of their vitriol: “It looks like he’s got one foot out the door”; “it’s a shocker”; “it wasn’t just a f--k-up at a press conference”; “it looks like he’s checked out and already thinking about what’s next”; “it displays his lack of political and social understanding of what people are experiencing, particularly in Western Sydney”; and “Albo’s tin ear”.

It beggars belief that a left-wing Labor PM could ever think that a multimillion-dollar retirement home purchase in the midst of a housing crisis would ever pass the pub test.

Senior politicians can readily survive stuff-ups with multibillion-dollar programs, and defeats on highly contentious issues. What’s much harder to survive are incidents that are thought to reveal bad character, hypocrisy or being seriously out-of-touch. It beggars belief that a left-wing Labor PM could ever think that a multimillion-dollar retirement home purchase in the midst of a housing crisis would ever pass the pub test. Especially given his endless repetition of life growing up in a housing commission flat with a single mum on a pension. And claiming, after the news seeped out, that he knew “what it’s like to struggle” just made a bad situation worse to the vast majority of Australians who would need to win Lotto to spend $4.3 million on a fourth home.

I am squarely on the side of aspiration. If anyone, the PM included, works hard and gets ahead in life, then that’s to be celebrated, not condemned. But it is the timing of this purchase that’s staggering and that’s where his colleagues are right to be angry because Albanese is urging voters to re-elect him and, if that happens, he will keep enjoying his two taxpayer funded residences – so why buy this house now?

It smacks of arrogance in thinking voters won’t notice, and it damages Labor’s attack lines in the key election battleground of housing.

With Labor now behind in the polls and in a fight with the Greens in some of its safest seats, the PM’s show of indifference to the plight of renters couldn’t have come at a worse time. And it’s reignited demands internally that Albanese should break his commitment not to change the tax rules on investment properties.

Already, Treasurer Jim Chalmers is costing changes to both negative gearing on rental properties and cutting the capital gains tax discount. When Bill Shorten was upfront about these policies in 2019, the voter rejection of these changes helped deliver the Coalition’s “miracle” win.

When Paul Keating briefly abolished negative gearing in the 1980s, it was quickly reversed because it destroyed the rental market. Even though most of the one million-plus negatively geared rental properties are owned by low-to-middle income people looking for an investment they can understand and manage themselves; and even though it’s standard tax practice to write off expenses against income, the Greens and Labor’s left that loath aspiration, don’t like private property, and would like everyone to live in social housing, have always pretended that negative gearing is a gift for greedy landlords.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Picture: Nikki Davis-Jones

Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers. Picture: NewsWire/Martin Ollman

Hence Chalmers’ move to cost-up these tax changes in the event that Labor has to do a post-election deal with the Greens to stay in office.

But that’s where the PM’s move starts to look positively dodgy as well as simply tone deaf. If, as reported, the coming changes to negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount are “grandfathered”, in buying now, rather than later, the PM escapes the likely financial hit from his own government.

What a massive own goal from a PM who, let’s not forget, is on the old parliamentary super scheme that will eventually give him some $300,000 a year for life.

It’s hardly fair, is it?

DAN ANDREWS WRECKED YOUTH MENTAL HEALTH, SO NOW HE CAN FIX IT?

Late on Friday, news seeped out that former Victorian premier Daniel Andrews has been controversially appointed as chair of leading youth mental health service, Orygen.

The backlash was harsh and immediate. And, for me, I had a personal insight into the trauma this announcement has inflicted on families impacted by decisions he made in government.

Ange Shearman is one of my oldest and dearest friends. She lives outside Geelong with her husband, Brent, and beautiful daughter Matilda.

This is her story that I want to share with you after she decided to go public on Friday and start a petition to get Orygen to rethink their choice of Andrews.

“I lost my 16-year-old son to suicide in April 2020, during the first of Dan Andrew’s record six lockdowns. Louie might have been ground zero in the suicide statistics that were a consequence of the inhumane lockdowns that impacted our young people but, sadly, he is now one of many.

Former Victorian premier Daniel Andrews. Picture: NewsWire/Andrew Henshaw

“Last weekend, my son would have turned 21.

“Instead, our family and his many friends had a fundraiser to support youth mental health charities. We raised over $25,000 for local regional mental health services that have been left decimated by recent cuts by the Victorian government.

“I don’t want any more young people to be a statistic like Louie. I don’t want any more families to suffer the existential shattering that occurs when you lose a child to suicide. His Dad, his little sister and me – we will never be the same. We have been to hell and back and I have chosen to share our story in the hope that Louie’s death is not in vain.

“But today we are in shock.

“How can a divisive ex-premier in Andrews, who has wreaked havoc on Victoria, presided over the longest, harshest lockdowns in the world, with the highest suicide rates, be appointed to chair Orygen, a prominent and respected youth mental health body.

“The optics alone are horrendous. It’s like Orygen and the ex-premier are gaslighting the most vulnerable people in our state.

“It’s unbelievable and I’m asking for your support to reverse this. Orygen must think again.”

Please support her petition by visiting www.change.org

Watch Peta on Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm

Originally published as Peta Credlin: $4.3m mansion blows up Albo’s battler image and suggests thoughts of retirement