Albo’s bad timing is becoming its own punchline

Anthony Albanese likes to tell us that he’s been underestimated his whole life. But I’m now coming to terms with the fact that I’ve overestimated him for most of mine.

Despite the seriousness of the times, Albanese’s prime ministership can only be described as slapstick. Whenever he seems to be getting on track, he steps on another rake. First it was the Voice referendum, which he announced and then seemed to forget about for half a year, during which doubts set in. Boom – his signature failure.

A young Anthony Albanese (left), emotional in 2012 after voting to back Kevin Rudd to oust Julia Gillard as leader, and as prime minister confronting defeat in the Voice referendum in 2023.

Then, mischaracterisation – every time he said a policy was modest, it turned out to be major – like the industrial relations changes that are causing businesses anxiety. And every time he’s promised something major it has without fail been modest, such as the Future Made in Australia policy, a jumped-up slush fund for uneconomic ideological projects.

And then, of course, there have been his personal missteps and mistiming, like accepting Qantas chairman’s lounge access for his son, buying a clifftop retirement villa and – can we be perfectly frank? – his mawkish decision to propose to his girlfriend on a Hallmark festival.

Last week he managed to have his wedding plans plastered all over the media. The lovely puff piece with fiancee Jodie would have been a great move to humanise him, if being seen as insufficiently human were his issue. Unfortunately for Albanese, that’s not his problem at all. In fact, he’s decidedly too human – waffling and sobbing through his time at the helm in a way that might be endearing in good times but is irritating in a prime minister tasked with making the hard decisions to improve our economic wellbeing and ensure Australia’s security in the face of national and international unrest.

The Women’s Weekly piece cemented Albanese’s bougie Boomer vibes at just the wrong time. Young people – you know, those people who tend to lean left and hence to vote Labor – are increasingly choosing to skip the wedding party to save for a house they might never be able to afford. Meanwhile, their man in the big house is planning his grey nuptials with a guest list of 70 cousins.

To make it worse, the glossy spread gobbled up media space on a rare good news day for the party he leads. Treasurer Jim Chalmers was looking pretty chuffed after the RBA cut the official interest rate and, on Tuesday afternoon, cracked the kind of Jim-grin (from ear to shining ear) we haven’t seen in a good few months. But the sweet glow of vindication bled out into the soft focus of the happy couple’s photoshoot. “Cut & Run” The Daily Telegraph’s headline proclaimed, placed ambigiously enough to apply to the RBA or the prime minister.

Worth a chuckle, but for Labor this is no laughing matter. For a while now, polls have been showing Opposition Leader Peter Dutton closing in on Albanese in the popularity stakes. A sophisticated YouGov poll with a sample size of 40,689 Australians published a week ago found that the Coalition would be in the best position to form government if the election were held now.

So the yearned-for rate cut, which the RBA has indicated is likely to be the only one for a while, is Labor’s best hope of getting re-elected. And Albanese himself robbed it of oxygen.

I’ve been thinking about how and why I got Albanese so wrong. The error crept in early, I believe, due to an infamous absence in a glorious documentary called Rats in the Ranks. That film was released in 1996 and told the story of the wheelings and dealings behind the Leichhardt Council elections in 1994. Almost everyone who allowed themselves to be filmed as part of the documentary came off as venal, hubristic, scheming or stupid. As ALP assistant general secretary at the time, Albanese was sent in to manage a dispute between warring Labor councillors, deep in the grubby political fray.

Even I very nearly became an extra in that doco, with scenes shot at the Balmain pub where I pulled beers while at university. But you know who was never even caught on camera? Albanese. He refused to be filmed. A lot of political careers were truncated when that classic piece was watched by the public, but not our current PM’s. His decision was, as the Herald subsequently characterised it, cunning.

Then the chaos of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd leadership spill years conspired to make Albanese look like a competent manager with a genuine passion for policy. When he wept over “Labor’s legacy in government devalued” he garnered sympathy. Whatever you thought of Labor’s legacy, one thing most Australians agreed on back then was that the navel-gazing and savage infighting was a crying shame. It was then that Albanese also uttered his famous phrase, “fighting Tories … that’s what I do”. In retrospect, that statement was a clue.

I missed it. Despite being warned by Labor friends that Albanese wasn’t the man I’d built him up to be in my head, I wrote a column shortly after the 2022 election which compared Albanese to Machiavelli for the wily way in which he set about neutering the teals. I admit, at the time I thought his backroom guile would translate into front-of-house skill.

It hasn’t and here is why the “fighting Tories” line should have been all the information we needed: fighting Tories is what left-wing university politics tragics do, not how grown-ups responsible for policy should think. Are the people who Albanese has spent his life being underestimated by a bunch of fellow university hacks?

As we wait impatiently for this election to finally be over, this is the question I’m pondering. It seems to me that voters aren’t so much underestimating Albanese. The truth is, most are just underwhelmed.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens.

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