Albanese was electorate officer, not ministerial adviser, to hard-left MP Tom Uren

Anthony Albanese was as an electorate officer – not a Canberra-based ministerial adviser – when his boss, Tom Uren, was a Hawke Government minister.

Anthony Albanese and Labor legend Tom Uren. Mr Albanese posted the picture on Instagram after Mr Uren’s death in 2015.

Anthony Albanese worked as an electorate officer – not a Canberra-based ministerial adviser – during the time his boss, hard-left Labor figure Tom Uren was a minister in the Hawke government.

After failing to nominate the cash or unemployment rate this week, Mr Albanese sought to re-establish his economic credentials by claiming he was an “economics adviser” to the legendary, reformist Hawke government.

But records obtained by The Weekend Australian, including ministerial directories from the 1980s, Parliamentary Questions on Notice in 1985, Mr Albanese’s biography and accounts from multiple Labor figures working in the Hawke government all indicate Mr Albanese’s job for Uren when he was local government minister was as an electorate officer based in Sydney, not a ministerial ­adviser in Canberra.

Parliamentary Questions on Notice, dated May 31, 1985, list Mr Albanese as the most junior member on Mr Uren’s staff as “Electorate Officer 1”.

Tom Uren's staff list features Anthony Albanese as an electorate officer.

Ministerial directories for the years Uren was a minister from 1983 until 1987 do not list Mr Albanese as a ministerial staff member.

In his biography, Albanese: Telling it Straight, for which the Labor leader co-operated with ­author Karen Middleton, his job title in the year 1987 is referenced as an “electorate officer”.

“In what might be described as a substantial case of bad luck, he would find himself in a second ­accident five years later (in 1987) when he was travelling in the back of a Commonwealth hire car in Canberra, where he was then working as an electorate officer to Minister Tom Uren,” it states, ­referring to a car accident Mr ­Albanese was involved in after an earlier one in 1982.

While based in Sydney, Mr ­Albanese would travel to Canberra with Uren on occasion. The first time was as a “note-taker”. On this trip, Mr Albanese described himself as “an excited kid”.

Born in 1963, Mr Albanese was 22 when he started working for Mr Uren in 1985. At the time, Mr Albanese was considered a Socialist Left militant warrior and he ­engaged in factional Labor Party activities, primarily based in Uren’s electorate office in ­Granville, Sydney.

Middleton also wrote about how Uren took on “the young protege with his militant reputation”.

Anthony Albanese speaks at the state funeral for Tom Uren.

In Uren’s autobiography, Straight Left, he said that in the first two years Mr Albanese worked for him – from 1985 to 87, the period when he was a minister – they barely spoke.

“Anthony was an activist in Young Labor and was one of the main organisers of the Left in NSW,” Uren wrote.

“For the first year or two I never really badgered him. I would have talk (sic) with him occasionally, and just observe him, but I watched him a lot more than he realised.

“I was a minister and was fairly busy, whilst he had his own jobs.”

A Labor source who was a staff member in the Hawke government told The Weekend Australian that Mr Albanese “was not on Tom Uren’s ministerial staff. He was not an assistant private secretary or private secretary – these were ‘adviser’ positions at the time.

“A research officer is an electorate staff appointment,” the source said.

Anthony Albanese with former Labor leader Mark Latham in 2004.

Former Labor leader Mark Latham, now leader of One ­Nation in NSW, said Mr Albanese’s “main activity wasn’t working as a policy adviser in Canberra, it was a young Labor organiser”.

“Albanese worked in his (Uren’s) electorate office, he was an electorate staffer,” he said.

“Albanese spent most of his time in Sydney organising Young Labor numbers in the inner city.”

During the 80s, Mr Latham worked for Gough Whitlam, the Labor Party head office and later for Bob Carr.

“I was making speeches on the other side of the debate from Albanese,” he said. “He was the standard bread-and-butter leftie opposing Keating’s reforms at every turn. The stereotypical leftie from central casting.”

A senior Labor figure, who declined to speak publicly, recalled Mr Albanese’s work at the time was heavily factional for the Left.

“Albo was one of the leaders in their hardline activities on policy and in stacking the branches and use of the union movement to ­attack the government that then became the modus operandi federally,” he said.

“Albanese was a very minor figure and worked out of the Granville office for a lot of the time, organising. I always thought he was an electorate officer.”

The Labor figure said that at the time Uren “was a very minor figure of no consequence in Canberra and that was reflected in his frustrations and ongoing attacks on the Hawke-Keating governments.”

During his time working for Uren, Mr Albanese engaged in factional Labor Party activities and also conducted research for the minister on economic policies.

The Labor Left regarded itself equally opposed to the Hawke government’s policies as the conservative opposition parties.

Uren was not in cabinet and was one of the strongest opponents to the Hawke-Keating economic reforms of the period. His policy views were regarded as entirely irrelevant and a cause for ­annoyance by the senior figures in the Hawke government, particularly treasurer Paul Keating.

Mr Keating was reportedly furious when Hawke ruled that he needed to win support from the full ministry, not just the cabinet, for tax reform in September 1985.

“He had to endure opposition from left-wing ministers Tom Uren and Arthur Gietzelt, amid a marathon debate,” author Troy Bramston wrote in the biography Paul Keating: The Big Picture Leader.

Mr Keating, Bramston wrote, “was turning away from redistributive economics, class warfare and an ‘us and them’ mentality”.

Mr Keating voiced his frustration with the Left faction’s views in an attack at state conference.

“The Balmain Lefties … were all in good restaurants quaffing wine till 3.30 in the afternoon. That’s what aways galled me,” Mr Keating said in his speech.

Mr Albanese did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Additional reporting: Jess Malcolm