Albanese appears ready to embrace the world steamrolling towards us

Breath of fresh air: Albanese with Foreign Minister Penny Wong. Picture: Getty Images

Does it feel to you like we’re coming up for air? In terms of our nation. Where it’s at and where it wants to go. I almost feel like I’ve left an abusive relationship. One where my needs and desires were ghosted. My voice wasn’t listened to. Where the things I held dear in terms of our national character were ignored. I had only one way of fighting back. My vote. To a teal. A drop in the ocean that became a tidal wave of rebuke on election night, among women in particular. A rebuke to one man above all who’d done his best to shape his once-mighty party in his image. Who’d done his darndest to stop the future; intent on stubbornly blocking reality as it roared at him, as if trying to keep the modern world at bay.

The Morrison campaign felt like a throwback to a time when we worshipped the god of coal, liked women in their place at home and were in thrall to religious bigotry – and it wasn’t the Australia I knew. Loved. It made me feel like I’d been living under a regime of wrong-think, for years; that I didn’t belong to this world. It felt like our country had become fossilised, barricaded, desperately clinging to a dying fossil fuel industry in the face of catastrophic climate change and fearful of The Other, the great unknown that was “different” – whoever that was. The Chinese, a refugee Tamil family, trans kids. Was this really us? Did this government actually listen?

One issue above all galvanised the youngest voters around me. “That woman, on the posters, what does she stand for?” “Climate.” “She’s got my vote.” All it took. One word. Climate. These young people weren’t consuming traditional news outlets. Weren’t watching the telly, that quaint, old-fashioned thing. They were on TikTok, a platform telling them to vote Green with a side order of the Legalise Cannabis Australia party. Different worlds. Fragmentation. Climate urgency. The future.

Anthony Albanese has three short years to stamp that future with his legacy. He appears ready to embrace the world steamrolling towards us, the world Scott Morrison seemed so eager to back away from. One of Albanese’s earliest gestures as prime minister was to change two of the three Australian flags that serve as a backdrop to parliamentary press conferences. The new flags? Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander. The telling gesture came as new treasurer Jim Chalmers announced “that beautiful family”, the Murugappans, would be imminently returning to Biloela. I wept with relief. At so much. The generational shift. The muscle memory of a tolerant, friendly nation. The urgent big-heartedness. The gracious choice of words. Our language of governance had changed, overnight. The nation felt refreshed.

It seemed for so long we’d been held hostage by a Stockholm syndrome that preferred us angry, divided, ungenerous and suspicious. The modus operandi: deny reality, delay reality. Pretend climate change isn’t happening. Slacken any will to progress indigenous relations. Devalue the ABC. Denigrate and downgrade the tertiary sector, scientists, artists. Our thinkers and visionaries, our Cassandras. We who did not agree with this discourse were made to feel wrong, frivolous, othered; a rump of ridiculousness removed from what “real Australia” was thinking. Yet so many craved accountability; wanted kindness, decency, integrity, fairness.

And now, Albo. A man in a hurry. A sense of urgency flavoured his victory speech. There’s a perception that a solid record of achievement in government is important to him. He stated during his campaign, “One of the things we’re doing at this election is underpromising so that we overdeliver.” There’s an impatience for change. And Scomo? What did he do for our nation in terms of visionary change? Crickets. Where had my beloved country gone under his watch? He wanted the past, calcified, not the future. Bring on the breath of fresh air.