Make Albo Great Again? PM seeks salvation in Adelaide, turns on ‘wrecker’ Dutton
Anthony Albanese landed in the City of Churches seeking to upgrade himself from a distracted leader with a penchant for luxury travel to a can-do guy focused on cost-of-living concerns.
After his fortnight from hell, Anthony Albanese came to the City of Churches seeking salvation.
While his speech was billed as Building Australia’s Future, a better slogan would have been Make Albo Great Again, with this carefully stage-managed rally aimed at making the battered Prime Minister look more prime ministerial.
Mr Albanese landed in Adelaide seeking to upgrade himself from a distracted leader with a penchant for luxury travel to a can-do guy focused on cost-of-living concerns.
This wasn’t Labor’s formal campaign launch but felt like Anthony Albanese’s personal relaunch – a crucially timed chance to shed the excess baggage of the past two weeks and remind Australia what he stands for.
The lethal net effect of the Qantas/Copacabana combo was to project the PM as a man fond of the trappings of office and planning for a new life when he’s out of it.
The message from Mr Albanese in Adelaide was clear. I am not in this for me, I am in this for you, and I’m not going anywhere.
It was a message delivered to the cushiest of crowds – a 500-strong hand-picked audience of fellow federal MPs and ministers, members of South Australia’s Malinauskas government and rank-and-file true believers and unionists, whooping and cheering his every word inside the Norwood International School hall.
There were no questions from journalists, no walk-arounds, no random engagements with unvetted punters. Nothing was unscripted. The only speaker who didn’t avail herself of the autocue was the Indigenous woman who delivered the welcome to country on behalf of Adelaide’s Kaurna people.
And it gave great insight into how Labor will run the looming campaign, with Mr Albanese pitching himself as a compassionate and optimistic leader versus the apparent heartlessness and negativity of Peter Dutton.
Arriving to the sounds of GANGGajang’s anthemic Sounds of Then (This is Australia), and greeted with an automatic standing ovation before he’d even uttered a word, Mr Albanese told the crowd he had always been driven by one key principle.
“No one held back and no one left behind,” he said. “The principle has guided me my whole life. It’s why we are so determined to win the election next year.”
In contrast, Mr Albanese said, Mr Dutton had proven himself a wrecker as a minister and could not be trusted to care for ordinary Australians and protect their incomes and jobs.
“Peter Dutton has spent every day as Opposition Leader hoping for the worst for this country,” Mr Albanese said to loud cheers.
“He’s wrong about our country and his agenda is all wrong for Australia. The challenges facing us won’t be solved by cutting. The opportunities ahead of us won’t be seized by wrecking. This is a time for building.”
The party rally confirmed just how savage and personal Labor will be in attacking Mr Dutton during the federal election campaign.
The structure of the one-hour event started with Foreign Minister Penny Wong as the warm-up act revving up the crowd; she said it was Labor’s hope that having reduced the Liberals to just one suburban SA seat at the last federal poll, they could go one better by winning Sturt in 2025.
Then Richard Marles emerged as Labor’s attack dog, the Defence Minister and Deputy PM devoting almost the entirety of his speech to denigrating Mr Dutton as the man whose mantra was “stop it, block it, wreck it”.
Mr Marles’s speech showed Labor will dust off its “Mediscare” tactics again, targeting Mr Dutton over his role as health minister in the Abbott government.
“As health minister Peter Dutton decided to cut bulk billing,” Mr Marles said to cries of “shame!” from the throng.
“No wonder doctors voted him the worst health minister ever … if we give Medicare back to Peter Dutton it will be lost forever.”
Mr Marles rounded out his attack by turning to the Liberals’ nuclear energy plans, saying a vote for Mr Dutton meant “a nuclear reactor in your backyard”.
By the end of the event, Mr Dutton had been labelled inter alia as “bullying”, “wrecking”, “frightening”, “whingeing” and “heartless”.
The positive aspect of the Prime Minister’s speech went to his keynote announcements of HECS debt relief for graduates and a new promise to extend fully free TAFE places to get more young people into trades and vocations, easing job shortfalls and boosting the housing market.
One telling feature of both Senator Wong’s and Mr Albanese’s addresses was their attempt to predict and defuse Liberal attacks on Labor’s economic record through the cost-of-living crunch.
Senator Wong said the two key economic stories of the past fortnight were the decline in inflation to 2.8 per cent and the Covid management report finding the Morrison government had contributed to inflation with excessive stimulus spending.
She said the 2.8 per cent figure was “a result of the Albanese government wisely steering Australia through tight times”.
For his part, the man the Liberals targeted in 2022 with the slogan “It won’t be easy under Albanese” said people had been better off economically under Labor than they were under the Liberals.
“When we came to government annual inflation had a six in front of it and was rising,” he said.
“It now has a two in front of it and is falling.
“We have delivered back-to-back budget surpluses for the first time in two decades. This is an economic record we can be proud of. It is the foundation for building Australia’s future.”
Mr Albanese ended on a Trumpian note, saying he regarded Australia as “the greatest country in the world” but that he wanted to chance “to make it even greater”.
And while obviously no one mentioned the Qantas Chairman’s Lounge, Peter Malinauskas used his closing remarks to remind Australia that in Mr Albanese “we had a grounded leader whose sole interest was in helping the average person”.
“The PM has never had an easy job,” Mr Malinauskas said.
“The PM has never had it easy at all, which explains why he keeps on getting it done. The great thing about Albo is he’s always worked hard, but he’s never forgotten who he is working for.”
It might have been the best hour Mr Albanese has had this past fortnight, his speech delivered clearly and in a relaxed tone, successfully road-testing the key messages for the campaign to come.
Let’s see how it goes beyond Don Dunstan’s old stomping ground in middle-class Norwood, and out there in cash-strapped suburban Australia, as opposed to a private room filled with party acolytes following a completely scripted format where everything went according to a much-needed plan.
