Has Anthony Albanese killed his own brand?
The PM’s ‘good guy’ image remains, but its legitimacy is facing fresh scrutiny ahead of next year’s federal election.
In May 2022 Anthony Albanese was an inoffensive Labor leader in the right place at the right time. But the times have changed dramatically. And, with them, so has the Prime Minister’s electoral standing. The inevitable question Labor faces as it prepares for a second-term election: Is Albanese still the right leader for the times?
The world presents a significantly altered landscape to that which existed when Labor came to office only 2½ years ago. The downturn in economic settings and the unforeseen peripheral ideological contests, such as that over the Middle East, have been dramatic.
These convulsions have propelled Albanese towards a critical point in his evolution as Prime Minister. The personal brand he has worked hard to cultivate has been significantly eroded, while the credibility of his central claim to authenticity is under direct challenge. The “good guy” image remains, but its legitimacy is facing a new scrutiny.
As one senior Labor figure muses: “Has Albo killed his own brand?”
Concerns about Albanese’s personal and political judgment now are being made forcefully within some Labor circles.
Not that this is a terminal moment for the Prime Minister. It is not. The objective analysis suggests that, compared with other incumbents during this economic crisis, Albanese is holding up well. And perhaps surprisingly.
Canada’s progressive leader Justin Trudeau is on a net approval rating (satisfied minus dissatisfied) of minus 41. Britain’s new Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer, elected in July, is already on minus 25, French President Emmanuel Macron is at minus 55 and outgoing US President Joe Biden is on a rating of minus 17.
Albanese’s net approval rating is at minus 15, according to the latest Newspoll.
Every Australian prime minister before Albanese has had, at one point, a worse approval rating. And many went on to win elections from negative personal territory.
Albanese would argue that he is an incumbent leader in a period that is poison for incumbents.
And in absolute terms, Albanese is not a wildly unpopular Prime Minister. Yet Labor hardheads aren’t in denial about the challenge and the failure, as yet, of their leader to define the party’s second-term offer to voters.
Albanese’s approval rating at the height of his powers, shortly after the 2022 election, soared to plus 60 as he proved critics wrong about his ability to navigate the world stage.
But this was before it all started to go wrong.
Some within Labor circles are now concerning themselves with the question of whether Albanese’s personal and political judgment since then has become a principal issue for Labor’s re-election prospects. Can he successfully lead Labor to a second term or is Albanese now a drag on the party’s vote? Has he become a liability in critical outer suburban and regional seats where the election contest will be hardest fought?
With parliament rising for the year this week, there is no great confidence within the government about what the new year will hold heading into a campaign.
With the Coalition having recently taken the lead in published polling for the first time since the 2022 election, it is clear the trend has been pointing away from Labor and Albanese for some time.
Peter Dutton is on the rise. This is what has changed.
Dutton was quick to become the object of ridicule and contempt when he took over the Liberal leadership, earning the moniker of Mr Potato Head. Few took him seriously. For Labor, the conventional thinking was that if all other strategies failed Dutton would remain Labor’s ace in the hole.
But this is now where Labor finds itself, with an inflation problem that lingers well beyond the point where economists had originally forecast its end. The primary strategy is having to be rethought.
As one Labor insider put it, when everything else goes to crap, governments can say at least they are ahead on preferred prime minister. But Labor can no longer lay claim to this advantage, either.
Dutton has now become a demonstrable threat for Labor. This is a significant change in the dynamic.
Albanese is the direct beneficiary of the caucus and party rules Kevin Rudd implemented that make a leadership spill during a term of government infinitely more difficult. There is no suggestion that Albanese’s leadership is under any practical threat. What happens after the election is an open question.
“If the rules weren’t there, then you’d have to say there might be a few in the caucus starting to quietly count numbers, at least in a theoretical sense,” one senior Labor source said this week.
This is rich considering the performance of many of Albanese’s ministerial colleagues, and it misreads what is an essential truth.
Despite a post-election narrative that suggests he was an asset for Labor at the 2022 election, Albanese was never elected as a popular leader. In fact, few voters elected Albanese with any great enthusiasm. He had a shocking campaign and the public noticed.
The accepted conclusion is that voters just wanted to get rid of the Morrison government. Albanese was in the right place at the right time and offered the promise of safe change.
There are those in Labor who have indulged in a misty hindsight to misread this result. And what occurred after that victory led to the myth-making around Albanese that lies at the heart of Labor’s paralysis in mounting a response to its current malaise.
In the months that followed the election, Albanese’s approval ratings soared to Rudd-like levels.
Albanese set about implementing an agenda that in the early stages left the electorate little to be too concerned about. Promises were kept and methodically his cabinet worked through ticking boxes on pledges.
But the victory was also mistaken for voters giving permission to Labor for that part of its agenda it kept largely from public view – a more radical and ideologically driven rearrangement at an institutional and policy level that has undermined Albanese’s promise of renewal rather than revolution.
Albanese undeniably enjoyed a honeymoon period. This was of enough concern to Dutton in the early stages that the Opposition Leader is said to have told senior leadership privately at the end of 2022 that if Albanese continued to succeed in getting legislation passed, then the Coalition would wither. The Greens appeared to have come to the same conclusion. What followed was an orchestrated obstruction of Labor’s agenda.
The spectacular failure of the voice referendum damaged Albanese irreparably. He has failed to recover from it. And it is the erosion of satisfaction with Albanese’s performance that has underwritten an electoral cynicism.
It is curious that among the chief concerns of some of Albanese’s colleagues was his personal decision to buy a $4.5m clifftop spread on the NSW central coast with his fiancee Jodie Haydon.
The Australian understands that Albanese consulted with colleagues privately about his decision to buy the new house but perhaps didn’t disclose the sale price. “The Qantas upgrade issue was bad enough, but to buy a $4.5m house in the middle of a housing and cost-of-living crisis was crazy,” one Labor source says.
Albanese was aware enough of the controversy that he felt the need to reassure colleagues that this was a “Canberra bubble” issue and voters weren’t paying attention to it.
Maybe so, but within weeks the issue had entered the pub trivia quiz scene, suggesting it may have reached many more ears than Albanese may like to admit.
One Labor source says the problem with this story is that it undermines Albanese’s well-worn hardship story that became a key part of his appeal.
The logic behind that is you cannot have someone trying to sell a message when they have lost credibility.
The counter-argument is that $4.5m is not an absurdly expensive house in today’s market and that people expect a prime minister to live in a decent house and not necessarily next door to them.
It’s not the kind of thing that would intrinsically bother people. The greater damage has been the distraction of having to talk about it at all. The weeks spent talking about Albanese’s house and upgrades on flights gave the impression that the government was focused elsewhere.
This has been political dynamite. There is now an entrenched perception that the government’s primary concern lies beyond the material needs of voters.
The polling supports this thesis; that the erosion in support is underlying and not heavily influenced by the distractions in and of themselves.
The latest Newspoll showed a drop in Albanese’s net approval ratings to minus 15. But in the wake of these controversies, it represented only a point or two of decline. Albanese was already on a downward trajectory that these two issues had minimal influence over. So is it really the problem that some now claim it is when assessing the broader and more obvious issues Labor has?
The fact is these issues of personal judgment from Albanese, while politically bad, have not led to any further decline in his favourability beyond the statistical error rate. There is a broader assessment that Albanese is still regarded as a “decent bloke” among many voters. One poll recently suggested that drinkers would prefer to have a beer with Albanese than Dutton. If that is still the case, it may now be with a caveat that the Prime Minister is shouting.
The key issue, rather than Albanese’s approval ratings, is that Labor is heading to the next election behind the Coalition.
And for Labor MPs, underlying this issue is whether Albanese’s missteps are dragging down the party vote.
Again, there is evidence to the contrary. In the latest Newspoll, Labor’s primary vote lifted two points to 33 per cent to sit just above its 2022 election result. Ultimately, as leader, Albanese is responsible not only for his own numbers but those of the party he leads. His supporters would argue that having won an election with a majority on these numbers, the analysis of Albanese should be that he has kept the government in a potentially winning position.
The risk is that when leaders aren’t loved, they can become a drag on the vote – and that can crystallise quickly.
While a sense of disquiet has crept into the Labor caucus, optimism is starting to spread through the Liberal partyroom.
Dutton has taken the Coalition further than anyone on their side had believed he could. This is something Labor strategists hadn’t been prepared for, either.
By any measure, Dutton has done everything that could have been expected of him as an Opposition Leader tasked with restoring the party after a devastating defeat.
But while his approval ratings at minus 11 are stronger than Albanese’s, they still remain in negative territory. And caution has to be applied to the reading of these numbers. Newspoll asks a specific question of voters: “Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way Peter Dutton is doing his job as Opposition Leader?” In this context the approval rating applies to how he is doing his job, which is putting scrutiny on the government.
There is a likeability factor that naturally will blend into these numbers, but overall it can’t be viewed as a measure of popularity.
It would be difficult to make a case that people are enthusiastic about Dutton, just as they aren’t inspired by Albanese. Dutton’s net approval in the first Newspoll after the 2022 election was minus 4. It is now minus 11.
But the stability in his personal numbers is inconsequential when it comes to the crunch. What matters is that Dutton has lifted the Coalition primary vote back up to 40 per cent. This is higher than any period for the Coalition since the second half of 2021.
With the trend in its favour, the Coalition may find itself in the unexpected position of being competitive at the next election. This is not where Labor expected it to be.
And Albanese certainly would not have been imagining that Dutton would be challenging him in the key contest of who people believe would make a better prime minister.
On most published polls, within statistical limits, Dutton has drawn almost level. He is proving to be a far better politician and Opposition Leader than anyone on the Labor side foresaw, demonstrating a ruthless approach to politics.
Whatever one may think of the moral question, opposing the Indigenous voice to parliament was smart politics. And it was a decision made against plenty of advice to the contrary from senior Liberal Party figures.
Dutton’s fortunes have gradually flowed from there, just as Albanese’s have diminished. Even senior Labor figures grudgingly accept that Dutton has performed better as an Opposition Leader than they had anticipated.
Having won the debate on the voice, Dutton would consider that he is now winning the political contest over energy. He also quickly picked a side on the Israel-Palestinian issue. This was instinctive. And while it is an issue that will not engage most voters, it has been an opportunity for Dutton to present as a conviction politician. This makes it all the more difficult to demolish him.
Considering the baggage that Albanese has accumulated, the question is whether this blunts Labor’s fallback strategy of demonising Dutton’s record in the previous government.
There is a view that voters still have reservations about what sort of prime minister Dutton would make. A chief concern is that he hasn’t succeeded in broadening his appeal. The conventional Labor thinking remains that Dutton will be a net negative for the Coalition on election day. But this was always a plan B for Labor, with the party having expected to have built momentum during its first term.
But will Albanese present a similar downside risk for Labor?
So far Albanese has failed to put enough definition around what his second-term offer to voters will be, with a reliance on a belief that people will have reservations about what sort of prime minister Dutton would make.
There is an acceptance now on the Labor side that the party may be in trouble if it can’t manufacture a shift in perception about its own record and what it has to offer voters for the next three years.
More of the same will not be a winning formula. It will need more than a narrative that Albanese helped the country through a difficult period, based on an unknowable that it could have been worse under the other side.
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