Voters would tune into Albanese

A Labor figure chided me a few months ago for suggesting there were shades of Jeremy Corbyn in Anthony Albanese. I’m sure Albo would now welcome the comparison, given the stunning British election result last week.

Corbyn and Albanese hail from the hard left of their parties. They have often voted against the majority position at party conferences. They have sometimes put themselves at odds with the leadership of the party. They have been on the wrong side of policy debates. And they have been deemed too radical for voters.

Yet given Corbyn’s success in the British election last week — lifting Labour’s vote from 30.4 per cent to 40 per cent and gaining 30 seats — maybe Albanese is what Australian Labor needs to rebuild its flagging voter support.

Newspoll does show that, with preferences, Labor would win an election held today. But the two-party vote figure masks the real state of Labor today. Labor’s primary vote is a dismal 36 per cent. At the last election, just 34.7 per cent of voters opted for Labor. It has rarely been worse.

Voters don’t trust Bill Shorten. They don’t respect him. And they are not listening to him. His ­approval rating is a terrible 33 per cent. And he trails Malcolm Turnbull as preferred prime minister by 33-45 per cent. If Turnbull was not so unpopular himself, Shorten’s position would be untenable.

When many voters look at ­Albanese, they see a man with authenticity. What you see is what you get. He is blue-collar Labor. He is steeped in Labor values. He’s a fighter. It was the same things that many British voters saw in Corbyn.

Labor members want Albanese to lead their party. In the 2013 leadership contest, he won 60 per cent of the party membership vote but fell well short in the caucus component of the ballot.

As a result, Shorten won with 52 per cent of the combined vote. A danger for Albanese is that he lacks majority caucus support. Then again, many Labour MPs were arrayed against Corbyn.

Corbyn and Albanese are both anti-establishment and they have their own brand independent of their parties. Corbyn had a clear message: “For the many, not the few”. Labor’s manifesto promising to redistribute wealth, reregulate industry and re-nationalise the railways had appeal. It was class warfare warmed up for a new generation that sees a government that does not work for them.

Albanese is also a class warrior. If he led the Labor Party, the ideological battlelines with the ­Coalition would be clearer than they are under Shorten.

But Labour did not win the election. It fell well short. We may have reached peak-Corbyn. We might just have seen the electoral limits of a lurch to the left. It remains to be seen whether Corbyn can build a bigger coalition of support to win government. The same goes for Albanese: can he expand Labor’s support?

Albanese is not “ultra-left” but he is outside of the mainstream moderate ­tradition within Labor that ran from Gough Whitlam to Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. But so is Shorten. Would Albanese do ­better than Shorten?

At least voters would start to listen to Labor again. The party would have a leader with strong values, principles and ideas. It would have an authentic leader. And Albanese may capture the Zeitgeist of the times just like ­Bernie Sanders in the US and ­Corbyn in Britain.

An Albanese-led Labor Party may not win an election but at least the true believers will have someone worth fighting for.