Albanese has shrunk in office, paralysed by responsibility. It’s sad to watch
Labor politicians and strategists are dumbfounded by Anthony Albanese’s decline and confused about his agenda. They know he has one last chance to reset – but what will he advocate?
Anthony Albanese has become an empty vessel, doing and saying what he hopes others want him to do and say, searching for love and purpose. It is quite sad to watch, and debilitating for the government and country.
Beneath the Prime Minister is an ALP apparatus and membership, and vast labour movement of union officials and members, waiting for something. Can the Prime Minister emerge from a Christmas and New Year hiatus to unleash a new approach and reset in the short few weeks or months to an election, or will the slide continue into a first-term defeat they thought inconceivable three months ago?
Where is his judgment? Just last Friday, and through Saturday, Sunday and Monday, Albanese seemed to think the firebomb attack on a Melbourne synagogue was something that did not demand his personal attention but could be managed from his campaigning caravan in Perth during an itinerary that included donor drinks and an afternoon of tennis.
He even headed back to Canberra for a day before visiting the site and the community.
No idea.
Many of us have been deeply concerned about emergent anti-Semitism since October 8, 2023, when we saw Sheik Ibrahim Dadoun shout to a cheering crowd at Sydney’s Lakemba how it was a “day of courage, it’s a day of pride, it’s a day of victory, this is the day we’ve been waiting for”. The mob replied with “Allahu Akbar” (God is great) as Dadoun said: “I’m smiling and I’m happy.”
Albanese’s response then was tepid, declaring there was “nothing to celebrate” in the murder of innocent civilians. You don’t say. Perhaps the most disgusting and abhorrent public meeting this nation had seen, members of one religion celebrating the barbaric slaughter of men, women and children of another faith, even as the horrors were still unfolding in Israel, terrorising Jewish Australians and threatening social cohesion, and those were the words the Prime Minister summonsed.
And there was no action.
The next night we saw Jew haters take their threatening chants to the Sydney Opera House forecourt and police warned Jewish Australians away. Albanese’s role was more akin to a spectator than Prime Minister, without outrage or firm action, without leadership.
Some of us implored him publicly and privately to take a stand, but here we are 14 months later with a synagogue firebombed, repeated acts of sickening graffiti, cars torched, death threats, doxxing and the demonisation of Israel and Jews. We all play our part in standing up to this madness, but the person with the most social power and political authority to stem the tide is the Prime Minister – and he has been wafting around, sniffing the zeitgeist, knowing he needs a sensible mainstream position but confused by the morally vacuous, radical activist viewpoints of his youth.
His diplomatic retreat on Israel has won praise from Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. So Australia has broken faith with the US and Israel but is winning favour with terrorist groups and militants who are obsessed with grievances and war rather than peace and prosperity.
The perpetual tragedy of the Middle East political machinations is one thing; the diminution of Australia’s national values in global affairs is another. We deserve better.
Around the world the superficiality of the digital media age has deformed public discourse. Consider how social media has been preoccupied all week with a handsome assassin rather than the innocent husband and father he murdered in New York City.
The same inane forces derail domestic politics. When substance, character and values are jettisoned in favour of memes and retweets, you can end up with someone as inconsequential as Kamala Harris running for president, and someone as hollow as Albo running our country. The signs were bad coming into office – Albanese had never had a real job – but we were entitled to expect more, even from a man whose best week in the election campaign was when he was out of action thanks to Covid.
Albanese had been a minister, managed government business in the House of Representatives, told us he liked to “fight Tories” and we hoped he might be competent. But Albo has shrunk in office, paralysed by the responsibility. He put up a referendum for a voice proposal he refused to detail and for which he failed to provide any proper rationale (presumably because he did not understand its history or logic) so he condemned a precious Indigenous consensus to failure, undermining reconciliation, while telling us it was not even his government’s proposal but one that belonged to Indigenous Australians.
It was a reckless way to deal with Indigenous aspirations and has done enormous damage. The only winners have been the conservatives (the people Albo refers to as Tories), some of whom now use the disastrous referendum to shoot down any nod to Indigenous culture or advancement.
Labor politicians and strategists are dumbfounded by the Albanese decline and confused about his agenda. They know he has one last chance to reset in the New Year. But what will he advocate? Albanese cannot promise lower electricity prices again, when they have only gone up; he cannot promise lower mortgages again when they have only risen; and he cannot promise to ease the cost of living again either, given it has only worsened.
Some in Labor make the case for a focus on housing, others on immigration; some have clever ideas to combine the two (but the Coalition, too, will have strong policies in these areas).
ALP hardheads must fear that their penchant for debt-fuelled giveaways will not cut it in an inflation constrained economic environment.
The thing with Albanese – to be frank, the problem with Labor’s Socialist Left – is that his perspective does not align with the mainstream. This means his decisions are not made from a firm footing of ideological beliefs and core values but from the transparently opportunistic place of political motivations and psephological judgments.
Almost invariably this leads to the wrong decisions being made for the wrong reasons, and voters eventually see through it. They may be fooled once, given the choices before them, but they won’t be fooled twice – ask Kevin Rudd.
After the disaster of the voice, a trainwreck that began with election night triumphalism, this year has been a continual slide for Albanese. This column offered him praise early in his term for standing up to China and embracing AUKUS, and readers well know I had long been a supporter of the voice, if not the way Albo handled it.
This year’s columns have chronicled Albo’s decline, noting in early May that the more uncertain he was, the more verbose he became.
Under the heading “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate, PM”, I wrote: “Forget about an absence of malice; to watch the Prime Minister’s media conferences these days is to endure a pitiful search for words and an avoidance of meaning.” Later that month my frustrations, and those of voters, were starting to build and I asked, “What is the point of this Prime Minister?” because he was consistently avoiding opinions or ducking responsibility. I had a flashback to my school days, noting Albo was “shrinking before our eyes, like an empty Twisties packet on a heater”.
Around this time I recalled a video made for a South Australian Liberal Party launch in 1993 showing lowlights of the Bannon-Arnold Labor government cut to Helen Shapiro’s 1960s hit, Not Responsible. It seemed apt once more, so I played the song on Sky News and it struck a chord. Before long 2GB’s Ray Hadley and his musical mates the Robertson Brothers had cut a fresh version about Albanese – listeners and viewers loved it because it resonated.
In June Albanese averted his eyes from the bullying and intimidation of former Chinese prisoner and now Sky News presenter Cheng Lei by Chinese officials at a formal Canberra media event. I wrote that we were seeing the “authority of office shed from his bearing like fur from a sick cat”.
By September even Albanese’s green-left soulmates at The Sydney Morning Herald, disappointed by his positions on Gaza, immigration and climate change, “could no longer remember what he was for or against”. This column described him as the “incredible shrinking Prime Minister”.
Still, this past week, with his ham-fisted and morally ambiguous reaction to the Melbourne synagogue bombing, then desperate attempts to catch up by visiting the Sydney Jewish Museum after another anti-Israel attack in Woollahra, Albanese’s ambivalence has confounded even his most ardent supporters.
In January 2022, on the cusp of becoming prime minister, Albanese spoke at the National Press Club and focused on Scott Morrison. “Never before has Australia had a prime minister with such a pathological determination to avoid responsibility,” he said. “Every action, every decision has to be dragged out of him – and so often, after all the build-up, he gets it wrong anyway. And it’s always too little too late.”
This was Albanese on Morrison – but it reads now like a prescient piece of self-appraisal. It defies logic that someone could be so preoccupied with politics all their life, wanting to “fight Tories”, and then get to the highest office in the land and have so little idea about what to do.
John Howard once had a rapier insight into Julia Gillard’s failure as prime minister. “She lacks authority,” Howard said, surmising that “she didn’t win the last election outright and, having taken the job of a popularly elected prime minister, she really needed to win outright to have authority”.
Albanese is a similar study; he overestimated the weight of his win and assumed authority had been bestowed upon him. But winning government from a record low primary vote of less than 33 per cent, way below the Coalition primary vote, was hardly a popular endorsement.
Instead of thinking of himself as a Sun King anointed to shape the universe, Albanese should have realised he had fallen narrowly into government thanks to the Greens and teal breakaways, and that he needed to work every day to win over the mainstream.
Now he is hoping for a cool February lest a heatwave expose his energy self-harm while the Coalition proposes a nuclear alternative. He needs to get to the polls early enough to avoid delivering a budget that will expose our structural decline but, he hopes, late enough to see an interest rate cut that will give some relief to households and an indication of economic progress.
The Prime Minister does not have a story, plan or purpose. Albanese only has political moves, and they may not be enough, even if he is only fighting Tories.