Peta Credlin: Anthony Albanese is not cut out for the top job as PM

Anthony Albanese is affable and seems genuine but he’s not up to the job as PM as his gaffe-prone campaign — and litany of misjudgments and mistakes — prove, Peta Credlin writes.

In any normal election, voters would make their choice based on the principles and policies of the various parties and candidates.

But sadly in this election, the policy debate has been almost non-existent as Labor plays its small target strategy and the Liberal Party is too scared to actually stand for the values on which it was founded.

So instead, the election ends up a contest about character that pits an unpopular prime minister against an increasingly incompetent opposition leader; the bloke you don’t like versus the bloke who just isn’t up to it.

No wonder so many voters, with less than two weeks to go, say to pollsters they still haven’t made up their mind who to vote for; meaning this election is still anyone’s to win.

After Anthony Albanese’s gaffe-prone start to the campaign, you’d think he would have used his time in Covid isolation to swot up on the big issues and on Labor’s policy to deal with them.

Labor leader Anthony Albanese is not fit for the job as PM, Peta Credlin writes. Picture: Liam Kidston

Instead, his ignorance last week of Labor’s six-point plan to improve the NDIS is probably his biggest own-goal yet. This wasn’t a “gotcha” question about a fact he should have known off the top of his head. It was a question about his own policy, and he couldn’t even nominate one of the six points.

This inability to grasp basic detail and demonstrate the competence we should be able to expect in a national leader isn’t a one-off.

It’s been a running sore in this campaign and it comes after a horror couple of months where he was seen wanting on integrity issues over his failure to address the serious bullying allegations involving his frontbench “Mean Girls” and the sudden death of his colleague, the late senator Kimberley Kitching.

Let’s consider the litany of misjudgments and mistakes since the election was called. He refused to take a “tough question” from a member of the public during a media-stop in Perth. He didn’t know the unemployment rate or the official interest rate even though they’re both central to the economic debate.

He told fibs about being an “economic adviser” to the Hawke government when he was merely a junior office boy who never got near the numbers in Canberra. He told fibs about whether the Parliamentary Budget Office had costed Labor’s Urgent Care Clinics policy (they hadn’t).

He didn’t know Labor’s policy on border protection and what he did know, he was weak about defending. Given shortages, he couldn’t explain where the nurses would come from to implement Labor’s aged care policy.

Anthony Albanese’s campaign has been riddled with controversy. Picture: Liam Kidston

He repeatedly verballed the government with claims it would extend the cashless debt card to pensioners. And finally there was the NDIS debacle.

It’s little wonder that he’s taken to using senior shadows as his “human shields” to take questions at media events when it all gets too hard, ripping into journalists (as he did on Friday) and now even cutting press conferences short to avoid fair scrutiny.

Yet voters know that it’s the PM who takes responsibility for all the big decisions of government and that it would be Albanese’s knowledge, instincts and judgment that would shape our nation should the government change.

It’s not enough that his ministers be competent (and not all them have distinguished themselves – witness his deputy Richard Marles’ past pro-China history coming back to haunt him); he has to be competent himself.

If Albanese were Joe Biden’s age, at least some of this could be excused as the understandable lapses of an old man under great pressure. Having to be rescued by colleagues would not be so culpable.

It’s one thing for the US President to be past his prime. Our problem is that we might end up with a PM who wasn’t good enough even in his prime.

US President Joe Biden is past his prime, Peta Credlin writes. Picture: Olivier Douliery/AFP

I spent six years advising opposition leaders and know what success looks like – after all, Tony Abbott reduced a first-term Labor government to minority status in his first campaign and won the second one in a landslide. Because oppositions have no public service backstop, you’ve either done the work or you haven’t. And it’s your plans for the nation and the clarity of your message that decides victory or defeat. Stop the boats, scrap the taxes, build the roads of the 21st century, and fix the budget.

No one had any doubt about what Opposition Leader Abbott stood for – and no one ever had to hand him a cheat sheet on Operation Sovereign Borders or the economy.

The problem in this campaign is that it pits an opposition running a small-target strategy against a government that’s also a small target.

On so many policies, like net zero, Labor and the Liberals are mostly just an echo of each other, so it’s brown battling beige. That’s why the competence issues now dogging Albanese are such a problem.

In the 20 years I’ve known him, albeit from the other side of politics so they never really let down their guard, he’s affable and seems genuine, but I know the job he’s auditioning for and, honestly, he’s just not up to it.

Watch Peta on Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm

Originally published as Peta Credlin: Anthony Albanese is not cut out for the top job as PM