Don’t expect an earlier-than-expected drive to Yarralumla after that Albanese Press Club speech
Anthony Albanese says the next election will present one of the starkest choices for Australians in decades.
It will be a “night and day” difference between the political offerings, he says. A fundamental choice between different agendas and vastly different visions for the country.
Not only are there two different roads being driven but vastly different destinations in mind for Australia.
Albanese’s framing of the election contest won’t be disputed by Peter Dutton. If anything, the Liberal leader will seek to establish an even blunter division.
In an interview with The Australian at the end of 2024, both leaders agreed on only one thing. And it was this very point.
The ideological battle between Labor and the Coalition, culturally and economically, is one of the most profound since the 1970s.
Albanese on Friday in his address to the National Press Club sought to establish the battleground on which Labor will seek to fight the election.
It confirmed, if nothing else, that Labor’s campaign strategy will be firmly rooted in a traditional Labor model that defaults to core Labor cues.
It will seek to leverage its traditional strengths on health and education, wages, Medicare and skills.
And it will be aggressively negative in its attempt to profile Dutton and the Coalition as risks
Albanese’s message is a “stick with us and we will protect you’’ pitch.
But if the expectation was for a detailed vision statement, the Prime Minister’s speech was not only hollow but also in part, delusional.
The Prime Minister was unapologetic in defaulting to his infrastructure bias, having spent most of his frontbench career in this portfolio.
But it fell short in delivering clearer definition as to what the Building Australia’s Future will do for national prosperity.
He speaks of the future and Labor vision, but the vision so far is built around a contrast to an unknown alternative.
While he sought to broaden concept beyond the building of things, Albanese’s attempt to thread education, health, wages and skills into this building Australia theme may have appeal but lacks a destination.
The delusion in his address was an apparent absence of urgency in addressing the present rather than the future.
Household despair and cost of living pressure remain critical to the broader contest. The Prime Minister boasts of a record of economic management. But this is not the lived reality of households.
Asserting that the country had turned the corner and the worst was now behind households is like George W. Bush declaring Mission Accomplished on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003. There has been no victory over inflation yet in the minds of millions of Australians.
Albanese delivered his speech efficiently and with confidence.
And if he is concerned about the polls and the outcome they point to, he showed no sign of it.
The clearest take-out from his speech was that there won’t be an earlier than expected drive to Yarralumla.
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