Anthony Albanese has left the door open to a reshuffle before the next election
Anthony Albanese has left the door open to a reshuffle before the next election, which the Prime Minister has again stressed isn’t due until 2025.
Anthony Albanese has left the door open to a reshuffle before the next election, which he again has stressed isn’t due until 2025, indicating that he will “inevitably” make some changes.
Questions over a potential reshuffle have been raised following the failure of the voice referendum in October and the High Court detainee debacle in recent months.
On Friday the Prime Minister confirmed he was considering changes. “At some stage, if we re-elected or perhaps even before, you make some changes, inevitably, that occurs,” he told the Australian National University’s Democracy Sausage podcast.
“But I think the stability of the team has been a real strength. I can’t recall any new government having the same ministry in place two years after they were appointed.”
Despite sources in Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney’s seat of Barton confirming several Labor candidates were waiting in the wings should she quit politics, Ms Burney has maintained she is “completely committed to the job”.
Speculation also has arisen over Immigration Minister Andrew Giles’s position, given ongoing concern over the handling of the detainees released after a High Court order earlier this year.
On the potential for an early election, Mr Albanese said “next year is when it’s due”, reiterating his view that three-year terms were not long enough.
His comments came on the two-year anniversary of his election win, when he declared to the nation he was committed to implementing all three elements of the Uluru Statement from the Heart: voice, treaty and truth.
Mr Albanese said while he did his best to get a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous voice to parliament over the line, “that wasn’t enough”.
“The referendum was very difficult, of course, for people because it was such a modest request, really, but it was one that wasn’t accepted by a majority of Australians and we have to accept that,” he said.
After coming under fire in December for declaring the failure of the voice referendum was not “a loss for him” because he was not Indigenous, on Friday Mr Albanese said he “had to accept his responsibility as leader of the country” for the result.
“But it doesn’t diminish my determination to advance reconciliation. It will, of course, need to take a different path there.”
Mr Albanese previously has left the door open to establishing a Makarrata commission, and last week’s budget didn’t reveal any reallocation of the money set aside for the body, but he made clear his government would “take the time” to get it right.
While the $5.8m in funding for Makarrata – which the Uluru statement intended as a body to oversee truth telling and treaty making – was left untouched, Labor reallocated $20m for regional and local voices in the budget. The government remains under pressure from both sides of politics to set up Makarrata immediately or commit to using the funding for more “practical” measures to improve outcomes for Indigenous Australians.
Mr Albanese said he “would never forget” a moment days before the referendum vote, when an Indigenous woman at Uluru thanked him for what he was doing.
“And I said to her that I thought it was very difficult to achieve. I hoped she wasn’t disappointed, but I thought it would be very difficult,” he said.
“And … her eyes lit up, I’ll never forget it, and she said, ‘We have had setbacks for many, many years and generations, thank you for trying.’ And it was a quite emotional moment.”
He said he knew the referendum would be difficult after it lost bipartisan support.
“The appointment of Julian Leeser, who had been indeed one of the architects in a legal sense of the whole concept of a constitutionally recognised voice to parliament as both opposition legal affairs spokesman and Aboriginal affairs spokesman, that was a positive sign that the Coalition were open for bipartisanship. That didn’t happen,” Mr Albanese said.
“And that meant that it was always very difficult to achieve.”
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