No regrets: Anthony Albanese wants another go as Prime Minister
Anthony Albanese has refused to acknowledge regrets or mistakes made since the 2022 election and launched a defence of Labor’s response to rising anti-Semitism, his role in the defeated Indigenous voice referendum and failure to lower power bills by $275.
Anthony Albanese has refused to acknowledge regrets or mistakes made since the 2022 election and launched a defence of Labor’s response to rising anti-Semitism, his role in the defeated Indigenous voice referendum and failure to lower power bills by $275.
The Prime Minister on Friday fired the starter’s gun in his first major speech of the election year, splashing an additional $3.5bn on public school funding in the key election states of Victoria and South Australia and giving $10,000 in incentive payments to trade apprentices.
Mr Albanese, who has unveiled tens of billions of dollars in announcements this month, used the politically charged speech to accuse Peter Dutton of planning “economic surgery” focused on “cutting wages off at the knees and putting Medicare on life support”.
Ahead of the imminent release of Medicare and bulk-billing election policies, Mr Albanese urged voters to stick with Labor and framed the election as a “choice between two fundamentally different approaches and vastly different agendas”.
The Prime Minister said the Opposition Leader, who is expected to finalise the Coalition frontbench reshuffle on the weekend, wanted to “take Australia back”.
“He doesn’t like questions, because he doesn’t have any real answers. He’s obsessed with talking Australia down, to try and build himself up,” Mr Albanese said.
“But this is not a time for wrecking, for cutting, for thinking small, aiming low and looking back. This is a time for building, for looking after people and looking to the future.”
In a Q&A session following the speech, Mr Albanese deflected questions about whether he would take responsibility for mistakes surrounding the voice referendum, Labor’s promise to slash power bills by $275 and the government’s leadership in tackling rising anti-Semitism.
Mr Albanese said previous Liberal leaders had promised Indigenous constitutional recognition; he blamed the global energy crisis for failing to lower power bills; and he defended his government’s response to anti-Semitism and maintaining social cohesion.
Mr Albanese, who ruled out holding any referendums if he won a second term and declared Labor’s revamped stage-three tax cuts as one of his top achievements, said “what we do each and every day is do our best”.
“No government’s perfect, we do our best, but we’re focused. One of the things I will say is this, there is no day in which we say, ‘OK, what’s our personal interest here rather than the national interest?’ Every single day we focus on the national interest and dealing with things that come at us,” he said.
“I’m happy to stand in support of the record that we have, but also to say that that’s not enough. That’s not how you win a second term. You win a second term through also what’s the offer for the second term?”
Following Donald Trump’s return to the White House, Mr Albanese said his government would remain a staunch supporter of the Paris Agreement and flagged Australia would “seize” clean energy opportunities.
As the US President threatens trade tariffs against countries that don’t align with his America-first vision, Mr Albanese said Australia could potentially embrace its “first-mover advantage”.
“We’ll wait and see what the implications are for where capital flows. But I say as well that many of the issues that have been established in the US, such as through the Inflation Reduction Act, we’ll wait and see what the implications are for their domestic politics.
“Because that has resulted in a flow of capital being focused on the United States because of the advantages that they have. Now we have engaged in investment and attempts to attract capital here. There’s a lot of jobs involved in the transition to net zero.”
Mr Albanese, who announced new school funding agreements with South Australia and Victoria but is yet to secure deals with the NSW and Queensland governments, said Labor was committed to “stepping up our commitment to schools over the decade”.
The 61-year-old, who did not include any new cost-of-living relief measures in the speech, said his Building Australia’s Future election slogan “is about all of us”.
“Building Australia’s Future is about your future. Building Australia’s Future means building better Medicare. Building Australia’s Future is about what we sell to our region and the world. Building Australia’s Future is about training Australians for that future.
“For Labor, nothing is more important to building Australia’s future than education. Building Australia’s future through every stage of education will be a defining priority of a re-elected Labor government.”
Visiting the marginal Labor seat of Boothby in Adelaide on Friday, Mr Dutton opened the door to establishing Australia’s version of Mr Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency led by tech billionaire Elon Musk.
“I think it’s a very strong argument for it. If you go back to the Howard government when they got elected after the Hawke and Keating years, there was a hell of a mess to clean up, as there was after the Whitlam years for the Fraser government,” Mr Dutton said.
“When Anthony Albanese leaves office, we will have a huge mess to clean up. Now, I hope that he can leave office this year because if they get back in, they can only do it with the Greens and that will be a disaster.
“We are going to cut public servant jobs in Canberra because I think there’s a higher priority for that spend. We’ve got an enormous amount of debt – almost $1 trillion. We reward efficiency, but we’re not going to tolerate inefficiency and waste, and I don’t think that’s controversial.”
Mr Albanese and Mr Dutton on Friday also traded barbs over their competing energy policies, pitting renewables against nuclear power. The Prime Minister, who ruled out any formal coalition with the Greens in a hung parliament, said “we’re building new energy to bring bills down now; their nuclear fantasy means pressing the pause button for 20 years and then funding the most expensive form of new energy on the planet”.
“Nuclear power means lower wages, in a smaller economy, with less energy, that costs more.”
Mr Dutton on Friday said he would never form a government with the Greens, but acknowledged he would have to negotiate with independents if he can’t form a majority government.
The Liberal leader accused Mr Albanese of presiding over “an energy policy trainwreck”.
“The government’s energy policy is going to see power prices go up and up if Mr Albanese’s elected at the next election,” Mr Dutton said.
“The government’s energy policy has been such a failure that they’re now having to turn on diesel generators to keep the lights on. The government’s renewables-only plan has driven up the cost of everybody’s electricity.”
Asked if he was planning further changes to the tax treatment of superannuation before or after the election, Mr Albanese said Labor understands “how important superannuation is”.
“If they were in government I would expect changes to superannuation which undermine it. If we’re in government, we’ll continue to be supporters of superannuation because of what it does for retirement incomes, but what it also presents as a national asset to be able to invest in the national interest.”
Reflecting on the biggest lesson about governing he had learned as Prime Minister, Mr Albanese said “you have to deal with things as they are rather than as you want them to be … you deal with them whilst always keeping your eye on that horizon”.
He said few people would have believed the Ukraine conflict would still be ongoing in 2025 or have factored in the full extent of the long tail of Covid and its impact on global inflation.
On his first term legacy and headline achievements, Mr Albanese cited “keeping us out of recession, 1.1 million jobs, getting inflation from a 6 to a 2, making sure that people’s living standards are looked after, that they’re not left behind”. He also highlighted completing the NBN, finishing Gonski public school funding, bolstering Medicare and moving towards universal childcare.
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