Wooley: Is Albo being transparent or see-through?

The PM’s long relationship with the discredited Alan Joyce now appears both embarrassing and compromising, writes Charles Wooley

If you are what politicians call “ordinary Australians” (I think they mean those who fly economy) it is time to realise that the Prime Minister of this country might want your vote, but he certainly doesn’t want your travelling companionship.

This is no partisan political comment. Albo is by no means alone in preferring to fly up the front. When I fly economy (journalists were busted decades ago) I notice that most people up the pointy end aren’t paying for the flight.

I see politicians from every party, including the Greens and the independents along with a scattering of public servants, all enjoying the business class treatment at your expense. While they regard you, my down-the-back biscuit and cheese eating fellow travellers as not the sort of people they want to sit near.

Over the years I know the political class so well. There is nothing they hate more than having to engage with “ordinary people”. They dread going into the pub for an obligatory election campaign meet-the-people.

The horror!

Nor would they ever be up for travelling up the back of the plane and suffering the sort of high-altitude question time they so richly deserve.

They’ve got too much to answer for, which is why slumming it for hours down row 20 with inquisitive voters is the last thing they would ever want to do.

That would be almost as bad as paying for their own dinner tonight. Or even worse, being stranded without an awaiting driver and having to hail a cab after staggering out of that expensive restaurant.

Mark Knight’s cartoon first published in the Herald Sun on October 29, 2024.

I hear many of Labor’s federal front bench are alarmed that Albo is doing as much as he can to lose the next election.

But he is unlikely to stand down in favour of a more politically astute leader. So, they are stuck with him, lurching towards what is looking like an electoral train crash sometime in the new year.

Barnaby Joyce said on morning television this week: “There’s a lot of people who just fly generally, get offered upgrades and take them. I think we all do that. The difference is when you solicit it, when you ring up Alan Joyce and say something along the lines of, “Hey Alan, I’d like an upgrade, my name’s Anthony Albanese”.

And that’s the one that doesn’t pass the pub test.

Now Barnaby you will remember is hardly a model of political probity. So, it is a measure of Albo’s appalling lack of judgment that he has kicked yet another home goal.

First there was the ill-timed announcement of his purchase of the clifftop $4.3m home at Copacabana on the NSW Central Coast. There was speculation he was either buying a retirement house or just getting into some more property speculation. Disregard the politics of envy here. When Australians are struggling to get or to pay a mortgage it looks bad or clumsy or both.

But not as bad as Albo reminding us too many times how “he did it tough” growing up with a single mum in a council flat. That overplayed get-out-of-jail card is looking increasingly untenable.

Maybe Bill Shorten got it accidentally right about Albo, whom he praised this week as a “fundamental believer in transparency and he has been very transparent”.

The PM wasn’t the only one in hot water over flight freebies this week. With Peter Dutton conceding his office had asked for a flight on billionaire Gina Rinehart’s private jet. Picture: YouTube screengrab.

Many of the PM’s colleagues are worried that “transparent” might well mean that Australian voters can see through him.

Certainly it’s not a good look. The allegations are that the PM has been jaunting with Qantas as far back as 2009 when he was transport minister and his close and long relationship with the discredited Alan Joyce now appears both embarrassing and compromising.

Mr Albanese received a reported 22 free flight upgrades to Europe, Honolulu and Los Angeles around the time the government was considering Qatar Airline’s bid for new Australian flights in competition with Qantas.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was evasive over Qantas flight upgrades following reports this week that he liaised directly with former Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce in order to get freebies. Picture: James D. Morgan/Getty Image

Qantas of course opposed the application, and the Labor government refused to allow it.

But it’s all murky. Nothing is straightforward. Asked in a press conference a curly one about his son’s membership of the exclusive Qantas Chairman’s Lounge, “Did you ask or was it offered to you?”

There follows a not untypical piece of Albo-speak, so I leave it to you to judge whether he was transparent or just see-through.

“All that happened was my relationship ended and my plus one when that happened, and I put out a media release when my marriage ended. You can’t be more transparent than that, and my plus one became my son.

“And I think that people’s families shouldn’t be the subject of targeting. That is all that happened, simple as that.”

I love my kids but as PM I would not be compromised by shoe-horning them into some exclusive and pretentious private club.

Many have said Anthony Albanese’s recent purchase of a $4.3m home, on the Central Coast in NSW, sent his credibility sailing over the clifftop. Picture: Realestate.com.au

Unless like Albo I had forgotten where I came from and who it is I am supposed to represent.

Oh yes I remember now. It’s that mob way down the back of the plane.

What is really simple is that leadership of our country should never be out of touch and always above board.

Our people deserve that and when they don’t get it governments fall.

But as is so often said “a week is a long time in politics” and there are months to go until the next election.

And there are 227 federal politicians in Australia, all of them flying up the front of the plane and all living high on the hog. Anything might yet happen and if they all start dobbing on each other who knows what will come out?

We might even get so distracted we completely forget or at least downgrade the importance of Albo’s silly, vain and pretentious peccadillos.

Charles Wooley is a Tasmanian-based journalist