‘I want a legacy’: Anthony Albanese eyes political prize

Perhaps 80-year-old Robyn, a resident of Nowra’s Symons House Retirement Village, had some inkling of what was to come.

Labor leader Anthony Albanese is traversing the communal dining room in her direction, chatting to residents, and sharing the odd joke.

“Wherever I go I’m accompanied by 100 of my closest friends” he quips, as cameras click and boom microphones jostle to catch a few words for the evening’s TV news.

It’s Thursday, April 21, and the man who wants to be prime minister is in the NSW South Coast town of Nowra, hoping to strengthen Labor’s grip on the must-hold seat of Gilmore, under siege from former state transport minister Andrew Constance.

Chatting amid the media scrum: Anthony Albanese during a visit to Symons House retirement village in Nowra.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

When Albanese reaches Robyn’s table, trailed by a media scrum, the sprightly octogenarian is waiting with a question. COVID-19 restrictions are relaxing. “Is it safe enough right now?” she asks. Heed the health experts, not the politicians, he reassures her. “I have had my boosters and all of that ... I’ve been lucky.”

Forty minutes later I’m interviewing him in the executive cabin of the air force jet assigned to him for the campaign. He’s sounding a touch hoarse but I don’t give it much thought at the time.

He’s in a chipper mood. The previous evening’s live TV debate against Scott Morrison, in the “Legends Room” of Brisbane’s Gabba, has gone well.

Questions from the audience of undecided voters were mostly on the party’s preferred turf and he’s voted the winner by 40 per cent of those who attended, against 35 per cent for Morrison.

Albanese had fumbled, yet again, on boat turn-backs. But there was no slip-up on the scale of the previous week’s disastrous brain freeze on the unemployment rate. Relief was etched on the faces of his senior advisers as he’d come off the stage.

He’d been looking forward to the contest, he says. “I have tried to get Scott Morrison to debate for three years, but he has consistently shut down debate in parliament.“

He’d prepped hard but had also played tennis beforehand to clear his head. “The great thing about tennis is that when you’re playing you can’t think about anything else.” He gestures towards the cupboard at the back of the cabin. “I’ve got a tennis kit in there”.

As the plane comes into Sydney he still thinks he’s going to grab a night in his own bed before jetting off to Perth early next morning.

At 5.53pm, he’s at home on the phone when a text comes in. His PCR test is positive. Whatever momentum his campaign has regained has just come to a jarring halt.

The Labor leader’s first thought is to ask his 21-year-old son, Nathan, who’s just arrived, to safely decamp.

His second is to urgently activate the COVID-19 contingency plan his team had hoped they wouldn’t need.

Despite the initial shock “there was a sense of calm,” he tells me several days later. “We had war-gamed this and it all kicked in.”

Cheers and jeers: some queried the wisdom of Albanese, pictured with partner Jodie Haydon, visiting Bluesfest at Byron Bay. He was later diagnosed with COVID-19.Credit: Photo: Alex Ellinghausen

He’s not the only one to go down. Two more journalists from his travelling party have succumbed, joining several others who tested positive in the preceding days.

No one can be sure where this chain of infection started but some query the wisdom of the visit to Byron Bay’s Bluesfest, where Albanese, an unabashed rock and indie music fan, had cut a swathe, unmasked, through rowdy crowds five days earlier.

He dismisses the suggestion that was an unnecessary gamble.

“How do you engage with people with a mask on?” he says. “It was pretty spontaneous. Peter Noble [the event director] was showing us around, then people started chanting and stuff. There’s a lot of mingling in a campaign - that’s what happens.”

Albanese, 59, still recovering and only out of isolation on Friday, will need every ounce of physical strength for the next big event of the campaign – the party’s official launch in Perth on Sunday. By his side will be Nathan, and his new partner Jodie Haydon. (Albanese split from ex-wife and former NSW deputy premier Carmel Tebbutt in early 2019).

The party is ahead on two-party preferences, but the polls put Albanese behind Morrison as preferred prime minister and the primary vote for both sides is low, hovering in the mid-30s. Close to a third of voters remain undecided.

Three women I speak to after the Sky debate, Deborah, a small-businesswoman, Narelle, a nurse and their friend Mariella, tell me they don’t see enough to clearly differentiate between the two leaders. It’s half-time in the race to polling day; having declared on day one that he had a mountain to climb, Albanese is still not within guaranteed reach of the summit.

Albanese says he’s drawn lessons from Bill Shorten’s shock loss to Morrison in 2019, the victory the prime minister called his miracle.

“We had a whole lot of policies but we didn’t have enough of a narrative, enough of a story to tell,” Albanese says. This time, he insists, there is a coherent “story”.

Give it to me simply, I say.

“It’s about the economy, about national security, more secure work, about social justice, about not leaving people behind or not holding people back,” he says. “We have significant reforms [in child care and aged care] that will make a positive difference to people’s lives.”

“I’ve had a book written about me, I’ve had a beer named after me. I don’t think I’m boring.”

Anthony Albanese

It’s a plan for the “big economic transformation that’s happening globally, the shift to clean energy”.

“We have a fully costed plan supported by the Business Council, AIG [Australian Industry Group] the National Farmers Federation … It ties together the threads of cleaner energy leading to lower power prices; that then allows you to have advanced manufacturing and a value-add to the resources that we have and then to skill up Australians for those jobs,” he says.

“That’s an agenda for growth, it’s an agenda for the future, taking advantage of the fact we are in the fastest-growing region of the world in human history.”

It’s a message that will be easy to sell to believers. But it risks coming across as overly abstract and bland to the disengaged.

Only three Labor leaders since the Second World War have managed to take the party to majority government from opposition: Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke and Kevin Rudd, each of whom traded on their own particular brand of charisma.

Each were also forceful communicators and natural front-of-house performers. Albanese has slimmed down, sharpened up his attire and got himself new glasses. This week his new look got a big workout in an interview he did with former Australian of the Year Grace Tame, for InStyle magazine.

Albanese with Tony Burke, Terri Butler and Jim Chalmers at Tritium, a EV battery manufacturer in Murarrie, Queensland.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

But how does he stack up against those three earlier Labor heroes? Does he have the “X” Factor?

“I am who I am,” he replies. “You know, people make their own judgments. How many other MPs have - [he catches himself, briefly] - I shouldn’t say this but, you know I’ve had a book written about me, I’ve had a beer named after me. I don’t think I’m boring. It’s part of the spin that’s out there from people who don’t want our political interests to be served.”

The pandemic didn’t help, he adds. “There wasn’t the same capacity to lift profile had that not occurred. The only way [to do that] was by engaging in negative oppositionist politics and I chose very consciously to put the national interest first rather than short-term political interest. I chose, as well, during my three years as leader, not to respond all the time with new announcements in order to create attention.” he says.

“So for example on climate policy, I was asked hundreds of times, ‘what’s your 2030 target?’ I told people that we would make the decision, and when we would do it [it was announced just before Christmas], and we stuck to that.”

Albanese’s trusted ally and shadow minister for health Mark Butler says 2022 isn’t the year for a “razzmatazz” election.

“I don’t subscribe to the view that the only way to win an election is having a Hawke-style incredibly popular person, or someone like Gough who is promising to come in and change the country wholesale,” Butler says.

“Back in 2007 [when Rudd swept Labor to power], people were ready for a whole bunch of changes … Things are different now. It’s not 1972 [when Whitlam came in], it’s not 2007. People have come out of a really tough couple of years… if people are up for change, they want a safe change, they don’t want someone to tip the table over and say it’s time to remake the social fabric of the country.”

Albanese’s enforced home detention has put a sharper focus on some of his more telegenic and polished frontbench performers, like campaign spokesman Jason Clare and shadow treasurer Jim Chalmers. Clare was asked at one press conference a week ago if he wasn’t the Labor leader many would be looking for.

Did that faze Albanese?

“Not at all,” he says.

“I’m the leader of a great team and that’s one of our strengths. It’s also one of the government’s weaknesses. Scott Morrison has centralised all authority in his office and the classic example of that is the debacle that is the NSW Liberal preselections.

“I’m leader of a team, I’m confident to enable people on that team to show their wares. We are going to be a good government … The problem for Morrison is he’s got Barnaby Joyce as deputy, people like [minister] Stuart Robert, it’s diabolical. There is no depth to their team, and there is real depth to ours.”

He says of Clare, and of Senator Katy Gallagher, who shares the campaign spokesperson’s role, “they are both fantastic, and totally bloody loyal and like a whole lot of our people, including myself, underestimated”.

A question mark hangs over the lower than expected campaign role of popular former deputy Tanya Plibersek - who’s not close to Albanese. That led to speculation she’s been “benched”, forcing a denial from him on the John Laws radio show on Thursday.

Although he can hardly do otherwise, he acknowledges the problems that dogged the start of his campaign. “The Liberals won week one,” he concedes. “I think we won week two.”

In those first days after Morrison fired the starter’s gun, Albanese appeared caught off-guard by the instant step-up in pace and media scrutiny, in a way that summoned memories of Shorten’s ragged first week of campaigning in 2019. There was shock inside the leader’s camp at the faltering start, and a hasty call-out to veterans of campaigns past.

Albanese speaks to the press during a visit to the Toll NQX national office in Berrinba. Credit: Photo: Alex Ellinghausen

“I think Albanese was too overconfident and thought he could do it without doing the basics,” one party elder tells me gloomily.

Journalists, comparing notes with their colleagues travelling with Morrison on the other side of the country, were struck by the relatively lackadaisical pace of Albanese’s schedule in the first 10 days, compared with the prime minister’s.

Morrison had around him the same tight-knit, battle-hardened group he had taken with him on the road in 2019. By contrast, some of those around the Labor leader, for all their enthusiasm, lacked the collective federal campaign experience of their coalition counterparts. (An exception is Albanese’s chief of staff, Tim Gartrell, a former ALP national secretary who ran the Kevin07 campaign).

Morrison knows how to make a beeline for the best photo op at any event. Albanese hasn’t yet developed that same instinct. “Scott Morrison’s pictures are still leading the news,” complains one campaign veteran. “They [Albanese’s team] are still missing opportunities.”

At the start, there was no party elder at Albanese’s side in the role of campaign whisperer, and coach – the kind of role that former senator John Faulkner, for instance had played with Kim Beazley, Mark Latham, Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard on their campaigns, or that one time Labor treasurer Wayne Swan played with Bill Shorten in 2019.

So media antennae started quivering when former ALP defence minister, Stephen Smith, arrived at Albanese’s Brisbane hotel at the start of the second week. Whether in part owing to Smith or not, the improvement in the Labor leader’s game was almost immediate.

He denies this was part of any emergency rescue effort.

“No,” he says. “Stephen was always coming on. He has been a friend of mine for a long period of time; we have a roster, some of that roster has had difficulties because of COVID, simple as that … We’ve had the national secretary, Kristina Keneally, Mark Butler, Chris Bowen, Tony Burke have all gone down during the campaign ... we will have some other people coming on who have been through a lot of campaigns as well. That was worked out months in advance.”

He is also taking counsel from “some elder states-people”, though he won’t name names.

Labor’s campaign has been helped by some issues breaking its way. The Solomons-China security deal has left the government vulnerable on national security, while the latest inflation figures will re-ignite the wages debate.

What will stand Albanese in good stead for the three weeks ahead, according to those who know him well, is his fighting spirit. “Everything that he has got in life he has had to fight for,” says a colleague who has known him since his days as a young firebrand in the party’s youth wing. “There is nothing that he was ever handed on a bloody platter.”

Marked as a rising star of the Labor left: Anthony Albanese as a Young Labor delegate in Hobart in 1986.Credit: David James Bartho

Albanese talks about the “inner strength” his mother Maryanne’s “absolute unconditional love” planted in him.

He and Maryanne, a single parent afflicted with debilitating rheumatoid arthritis, were a tight team as he grew up in council housing in the inner-city suburb of Camperdown in the 1960s and 70s.

He has called her his “soulmate”. They got by largely on her sole parent and invalid pension, and a raft of part-time jobs he took during his teenage years.

He became the first person in his family to finish high school (at St Mary’s Catholic Cathedral College in inner Sydney) and went on to Sydney University to study economics. But his studies often took second place to a passionate involvement in student politics, which saw him marked out early as a rising star of the Labor left.

Not all his acolytes from those years remember them fondly. One told me he later came to see the feting of Albanese in his Young Labor heyday as “like something out of a North Korean personality cult … it was all about Anthony and differences of opinion were stamped on”.

Albanese’s fighting instincts were further honed by the blood sport that was politics inside the Labor Party’s NSW branch in the 1980s and early ’90s.

At the precocious age of 26, Albanese outfoxed opponents to get himself elected to one of two assistant party secretary’s posts, a position which embroiled him in constant conflict with the party’s then all-powerful right-wing machine. He was also at times battling a rival faction within the party’s left.

“It was a hostile environment, day in and day out,” recalls one Labor veteran.

Another says it bequeathed Albanese a “fixer’s” approach to politics and to policy, which he needs to continue outgrowing. “The challenge will be staying clear in his own head about the big picture.”

In 1996, on his 33rd birthday, Albanese was elected to the federal parliament, having by then managed to turn his local electorate of Grayndler from a bastion of the party’s right into a stronghold for the left.

Anthony Albanese is greeted by his predecessor Bill Shorten at a campaign stop in Melbourne.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

His first taste of the frontbench came six years later, in 2001, and by 2007 he was a cabinet minister under Rudd. By 2008, he’d been entrusted with the critical job of leader of the house, responsible for day-to-day management of government business in the parliament and he played a vital role in wrangling independents to maintain support for Julia Gillard’s minority Labor government, and ensuring the passage of legislation.

He backed Rudd to retake the prime ministership in 2013, and served briefly as deputy prime minister before Tony Abbott reclaimed government for the coalition later that year.

He insists he never got into parliament with the aim of becoming leader. “I’m not someone who you will find a school yearbook, saying I’m going to be PM one day,” he tells me.

But in 2013, after Labor’s crushing defeat, he put his hand up as the party conducted its first-ever ballot for a new leader among both grassroots members and the parliamentary caucus.

He won 60 per cent of the membership vote but narrowly lost to the right’s Shorten who edged him out with the majority of caucus votes, including some who’d defected to Shorten from the left. Butler, who managed Albanese’s campaign, would later tell Albanese’s biographer Karen Middleton, “an act of treachery did him in”.

The next six years would see periodic flaring of tensions between the Shorten and Albanese camps

“I believe I’m a better leader now than I would have been if elected in 2013,” Albanese says. “I have made sure we have proper shadow ministry processes. I have tried to lead in opposition like I would lead in government. There is more unity and solidarity in Labor’s team across the board than I’ve seen in my time in politics.”

This glosses over the recent internal turmoil which broke out after the untimely death of Shorten friend and ally, Senator Kimberley Kitching, said to have felt ostracised by Labor’s senate leadership team of Penny Wong and [then senator] Kenneally, who are close to Albanese.

But when I put it to him that the furore surrounding the death of Kitching revealed a flash of tribal tensions still simmering beneath the surface, he flatly disagrees.

“No it didn’t, no it didn’t,” he says, putting the trouble down to “some differences within the Victorian right-wing faction of the Labor party.”

Of himself and Shorten, he says “we are fine. I spoke to him before the debate and got his advice about what happened last time, and I spoke to him after as well. He’s an important part of the team”.

A source who knows both men well believes “they are both professional enough to make it work”.

I quiz Albanese about his recent declaration that Labor’s “historic mission” was to lift more people into the middle class. Wouldn’t his younger self have scoffed at such a tame expression of aspiration?

“I didn’t say that was our only mission,” he replies.

“When I became Labor leader, I said that we’ve got to be interested in wealth creation as well as its distribution. [In 2019] it appeared as though we were anti-aspirational, and one of the things that’s happened is that there are more middle-class people because of what Labor has achieved, more people going to uni because of Whitlam, more people set themselves up as small business people, because of Hawke and Keating. That’s a positive thing, lifting people up, that aspiration.”

How does he feel about having to tell Australians surviving on JobSeeker that Labor can’t commit to reviewing their level of benefits if it wins office?

“What I have said is that each and every budget, Labor governments should look to see what they can do for people who need more assistance … You are best to examine [some] things like payment systems when you are in government and you have the resources of the federal government.”

Craig Emerson, a former adviser to Bob Hawke, one-time cabinet minister, and co-author of the party’s review of its 2019 election failure, says Albanese’s firm grip on mainstream values is “very important”.

“He has legitimised aspiration. He understands and strongly supports the desire of people to improve their own standing and the standing of their families. But at the same time he is not going to stand idly by and see the disadvantaged being ignored; so his fundamental value is everyone should have the same opportunity in life. To me that’s far more important than some sort of mercurial charisma.”

Unlike Morrison, who told me several months ago that he didn’t think about legacies because they were “vain”, Albanese says, “I want a legacy. I’m in politics to do legacies.”

Out of isolation: Albanese enjoying the sun in Marrickville on Friday.Credit: Steven Siewert

So, what would his look like?

“The big legacy,” he answers, “is the transformation of the economy to a clean energy economy that has things made here, that takes up the opportunity that’s there of Australia becoming a renewable energy superpower that is fit for purpose for the 21st century.”

It’s a noble aim, which won’t completely satisfy those who fear the planet is on a path to climate catastrophe, nor, on the other side, fend off the relentless sabotage by the fossil fuel lobby. But at least this time around, Albanese can take comfort from the fact that his opponent is also internally wedged on climate policy.

He would be less than human if he wasn’t feeling the weight of the party’s hopes and expectations on his shoulders. Should he win, his first task could be plunging into the choppy waters of international diplomacy with a meeting of the Quad partners (Japan, US, India and Australia) pencilled in for May 24. Also top of his to-do list is preparing legislation for Labor’s proposed National Reconstruction Fund and the new body, Jobs and Skills Australia. He plans a short parliamentary sittings in June, and an early meeting with state and territory leaders to “move forward in a more co-operative way across a range of issues”.

He won’t discuss the existential crisis that will surely descend on Labor if he loses.

It will have swung wildly from Shorten’s grand redistributive offering in 2019 to the small target strategy of 2022. If both have failed, it is hard to see what rises next from the ashes. He is not even considering that, he says. “My focus is on us winning the election, and being a good government.”

I have a final question for him. What’s the one thing that no one knows about Anthony Albanese? “I am frustratingly neat,” he shoots back. That’s it? “I’m very domesticated.” (I also winkle out of him that he likes the occasional opera and a sprinkling of classical music as well as his love of rock).

If obsessive neatness equates to organisational skills, that’s a handy trait if he gets his hands on the keys to the Lodge on May 21.

His old friend former NSW Labor leader Luke Foley has a longer list of what he would expect Albanese to bring to the prime ministership.

“An authenticity - somebody who has had experience of tough economic circumstances and has never forgotten where he comes from. Somebody who has evolved, and matured over the decades. And I think somebody who has it in him to be a prime minister for the Australian people as a whole.”

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