Albo kicks Shorten from where it hurts: the centre

Critics of Bill Shorten will claim that he is entering the danger zone.

As Bill Shorten’s numbers slip, ­Anthony Albanese becomes more ­emboldened. Picture: AAP

Critics of Bill Shorten will claim that he is entering the danger zone.

His personal numbers are going backwards and the ­Coalition is creeping back into the game. And Anthony Albanese’s look-at-me tactics can’t be helping.

The genial Labor frontbencher is becoming increasingly brazen in his public contradictions of Shorten, even if they run counter to the ideology of the National Left, of which Albanese is a member. The irony is comical. As Shorten, the Victorian right-wing former union leader, is forced further down Gorky Road by a power-mad Left leaching away at the working-class base like Chernobyl, Albanese — the pragmatic leftist — moves evermore obviously into the vacant ground in the centre.

His claims now that Labor should be friendlier to business have been the most damaging. This is a direct repudiation of Shorten. Only slightly less subtle last week was his refusal to follow Shorten’s script on opposing the government’s cut to immigration .

Albanese is playing up an ­ideological flexibility that Shorten doesn’t have the luxury of ­indulging. As Shorten’s numbers slip, ­Albanese becomes more ­emboldened. Whether Albanese genuinely holds these views with great conviction is reasonably open to scrutiny considering his claim once to have devoted his political life to fighting Tories.

As one internal critic of his said, “he appears as a man forced to drink arsenic as he smiles for the sake of political convenience”.

That is not to say he isn’t right. The true irony is that much of what Albanese says is what Shorten once would have, and did as union leader. This has been Shorten’s predicament. In negotiating a path to power he has been constantly hindered by a rabid caucus.

Albanese is not bound by this reality. But his risk is being cast as a wrecker fuelling disunity and further damaging Labor’s prospects .