Years of political attacks on Scott Morrison catch up with Anthony Albanese

Anthony Albanese and Katy Gallagher during the No More! National Rally Against Violence march at Parliament House in Canberra on Sunday. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Anthony Albanese – whose party spent years attacking Scott Morrison over misogyny – has been hit by a political karma bus and reality check.

While some in government feel the Prime Minister is being unfairly maligned following his appearance at a gendered violence rally in Canberra on Sunday, Albanese owns his government’s pledge to “end violence against women and children in one generation”.

Akin to Bob Hawke’s pledge that no Australian child would live in poverty by 1990 and Scott Morrison’s zero suicides ambition, Albanese’s promise is a populist declaration that will not be realised in his lifetime, if ever.

All three pledges, along with measures to Close the Gap for Indigenous Australians, must be prioritised for more targeted resources and funding tied to results, structural reforms and change.

Ahead of the 2022 election, Albanese and his senior ministers led the pile-on targeting Morrison’s handling of women’s policies and scandals that the former prime minister struggled to fully comprehend and address. Labor’s political attacks framing Morrison as misogynistic were a constant theme in the lead-up to the election.

After offering to privately meet with March4Justice organisers in 2021, Morrison – who once described Marise Payne as the “prime minister for women” and deferred to his wife Jenny following the Brittany Higgins rape allegation – clumsily invoked Myanmar in parliament and said “not far from here, such marches, even now are being met with bullets, but not here in this country”.

For all of Morrison’s poor judgment, Albanese sought to put himself and his party on a pedestal when it came to dealing with the complex nature of a domestic and family violence scourge that does not discriminate along social or cultural lines. Labor poured petrol on every political opportunity to malign Morrison and accuse the Coalition of being anti-women.

Just over one-year out from the 2025 election and facing a public blowtorch over gender violence, Albanese is under pressure to deliver on his rhetoric to keep women and children safe.

Issues predominantly led by states and territories have become priorities for the federal government under Albanese.

The Prime Minister – who will convene an urgent national cabinet meeting on Wednesday to discuss the family violence crisis – has taken greater responsibility for reforming and overhauling domestic violence policy settings, a national firearms register, housing, health, NDIS funding, education, public safety and court systems.

Family and gendered violence is horrific and senseless.

The number of Australian women killed by men this year is tracking at an unacceptable rate.

Amid a proliferation of pornography and social media, increasingly fractured family units and growing lack of respect across society, the challenge is generational and in some communities institutionalised.

The government’s national plan to end violence against women and children, backed by more than $2.3bn across Labor’s first two budgets, cannot become another big spending, unwieldy manifesto that leads nowhere.

There is no easy, quick fix. But for the sake of victims and families of murdered women and children, politicians need to get on with the job of combating the evil at its roots.