How Albanese threw Plibersek – and the rest of us – under the bus

It’s weird to me that the bloke who undertook to build a national environmental protection agency for all Australians on the eve of the last federal election just blew it all up. Labor was so close – this close! – to securing a deal with the Greens to establish Environment Protection Australia and a new data body called Environment Information Australia. And then, bam, Anthony Albanese kiboshed the whole deal.

In the words of one insider, “He wets the bed so easily and regularly. It seems like we were on the brink of securing it all – we had secured it all. And he’s just gone, ‘Nope’.”

Illustration: Dionne Gain Credit:

Reminds me of another notorious and now former prime minister, Tony Abbott: “Nope, nope, nope.”

Now Anthony Albanese is giving me Christopher Pyne vibes. “I was the negotiator.” I negotiate. At least that’s what he told the ABC’s Sarah Ferguson on Thursday night when he bluntly erased everyone else’s work on getting Labor’s “nature positive” deal done. But it definitely wasn’t Albanese doing the vast bulk of the negotiation. It was his younger, smarter, factional sibling Tanya Plibersek. But PMs will PM. Swoop in for five minutes and then take credit.

We may never know if Albanese killed the deal in his brief conversation with West Australian Premier Roger Cook: “I don’t give all the details of my private discussions with premiers.”

Yes, this is our weak-kneed PM. But perhaps he scored two key wins this week. One, he thinks he’s bought time, space and miners in the west. Two, once again, he has undermined Plibersek, his environment minister, a once and (who knows?) future rival.

It’s pretty clear to observers that Albanese feels threatened by her. As he becomes even less likeable, she looks more like everyone’s capable sibling, the one who just gets things done without having a tanty. His behaviour has only served to generate a huge amount of sympathy for her, weirdly, across the board. That’s very unusual. Who on earth is sympathetic to politicians? It took Albanese’s behaviour for us to find out.

Sure, Plibersek didn’t stand up to offer herself as Labor leader when she could have – for good reason. And sure, she claimed she would have won if she had run. But here we are, five years later, and Albanese’s leadership is soggy.

What other reason could there have been, beyond a perceived threat, not to appoint Plibersek to ministries where she had serious experience – education, women – except to ensure she had to contend with the more risky business of the environment? It’s hard to score brownie points in environment in a country where business makes money from digging, chopping, polluting.

And yet people tell me Plibersek studied hard to catch up, that she negotiated hard-to-clinch deals with unlikely targets and all but delivered the prize that was meant to be Labor’s. She spent hundreds of hours stitching together one particular set of victories for the environment. And department staff spent thousands of hours on that task. Consultations with environment groups, with industry, with miners, with property developers. Advocates, lawyers. Long days and nights.

So, many of Albanese’s Labor colleagues were taken aback by his scuttling of the deal.

“I am surprised,” says Felicity Wade, a co-convenor, with hardened ALP right-winger John Della Bosca, of the Labor Environment Action Network (LEAN). “I don’t know what goes on in his head.”

Wade says the prime minister will bring the bills back in February. Maybe he will, but right now, I’m not feeling solidarity vibes.

Wade says LEAN consulted 500 Labor branches across the country – and the results are surprising. “Members on the ground do not think being redneck is key to success,” she says, meaning that even in WA they understand the need to defend and protect our beautiful natural attributes. “But we expect that the sensible amendments which had been negotiated with the minister [Plibersek] will stand. These were sensible additions which implement existing Labor policy.”

No one knows exactly the detail, but the Greens demanded an end to native logging. As they should. But Albo made an agreement with the CFMEU about that before all these troubles.

Plibersek tried to make good on a promise that Albanese made when she wasn’t even the shadow minister for the environment. She negotiated with the Greens as if they were completely reasonable (because she was dealing with someone, Sarah Hanson-Young, who is usually completely reasonable). Plibersek built an alliance in a parliament where building alliances is a much-needed skill.

Now, all that labour is wasted, tossed into the incinerator of nature-positive hopes and dreams. And how did Plibersek take the PM’s decision? No tears, no hissy fit, no barking, no bullying.

Let’s not imagine an internal spill for Albanese’s position. We are clearly in campaigning mode now, and we all know how the electorate detests it when political parties dump prime ministers midterm. And under Labor’s rules, a PM can be removed only if 75 per cent of MPs agree to force a ballot. But if not for all that, a few slyly raised hands might be raised in contention – because Albanese’s second-term prospects look shaky at best.

Speaking of campaigning, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton keeps calling the PM weak. It must be testing well in the Coalition’s internal polling because Dutton is using it over and over again.

Might caucus panic about the polling? It seems unlikely, but remember Kevin Rudd was ahead when he was knifed in 2010. Could Plibersek then be thrust forward as a candidate? Highly doubtful, but that might depend on how freaked out her colleagues are in the lead-up to the election. There’s certainly some unrest in the party, and that is spilling into the preselection for Barton, being vacated by Linda Burney.

Independent senator David Pocock says it’s clear that Plibersek is in a tough position: “She cares about nature and wants to get outcomes but is also deeply loyal to her party.” What about her as a deal-maker? “I appreciated the honest, good-faith negotiations she entered into with me to reach a deal on the nature-positive bills, and I’m sorry they weren’t voted on yesterday.”

And Felicity Wade is far from alone in wondering what goes on in the prime minister’s head. A chance to make the environment flourish? Why wouldn’t you take that and make it happen? When Albanese threw out the EPA, he didn’t just throw his minister under a bus. He threw the whole damn country under the same bus.

Jenna Price is a regular columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age and a visiting fellow at the Australian National University.

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