Give ’em enough rope, as the saying goes. Politicians, labouring under the delusion that ‘relatability’ is the key to electoral success, continually line up the softest interviews imaginable so they can put on a show of matey familiarity. Show their ‘real selves’, they think.
The only problem is their ‘real self’ is often more loathsome than their carefully curated public persona. A Canberra insider warned me, long ago, that PM Anthony Albanese’s ‘Sensitive New Age Guy’ image is a complete fraud. A bombshell (for all the wrong reasons) podcast appearance has blown up in Albanese’s face – and blown the ‘SNAG’ mask clean off. Albanese, left to be himself, showed us the true face of a crass, vulgar creep.
Anthony Albanese has been accused by the coalition of making “disrespectful” remarks about Japan’s first female prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, in the same podcast where he said he would “shag” Kylie Minogue, for which he has apologised.
Opposition communications spokeswoman Sarah Henderson on Monday called for the Prime Minister to apologise to Ms Takaichi and all women “caught up in his crude locker room talk,” on the Bush Deep podcast last Friday.
So, it turns out that, for all the PM’s finger-pointing at Pauline Hanson about ‘Trumpian’ policies, the true Trump imitator in Australian politics is the PM himself. But Donald Trump can get away with his crass behaviour (at least in his supporters’ eyes) because he’s never pretended to be anything else.
Anthony Albanese has spent so long pretending to be something other than the boorish lout we saw on the infamous podcast that the reaction from the Australian public is visceral.
Besides, it’s one thing to make grotesque jokes about a pop singer, quite another to do the same to the leader of one of our closest allies.
The prime minister recalled being gifted a ‘royal melon’ by Takaichi during her visit. When host Nikki Osborne joked about smuggling, Albanese confirmed she was a female leader and quipped that she had “a couple of melons” while making hand gestures.
It is understood the prime minister made the comments as he was given two Shizuoka-grown melons by Ms Takaichi, which were presented to signify Australia lifting restrictions on Japanese melon imports as part of a gift exchange.
So much for the caring, sharing modern man who lectures the rest of us about respect and decency.
Japan is one of our closest allies and security partners in an increasingly dangerous region. Its new prime minister is a formidable conservative woman who has broken barriers in a nation not known for rushing to do so. Albanese’s juvenile innuendo isn’t just embarrassing: it’s diplomatically idiotic.
Defence Minister Richard Marles and Tanya Plibersek rushed out to defend him, with Plibersek claiming she too is a “fan” of Minogue. The excuses write themselves.
This isn’t harmless banter. It’s the unfiltered Albanese, the one who doesn’t have minders and scripts. The one voters rarely see because the Labor machine knows the ‘caring PM’ brand is tissue-paper thin.
Once upon a time, prime ministers were expected to be remote, dignified… Now politics has entered the age of compulsory relatability.
The strategy is all too obvious: a dying legacy media means politicians are left to chase audiences wherever they can hope to find them: podcasts, socials, ‘authentic’ chats. But soft formats are high-risk precisely because they feel low-risk. Drop your guard and the 10-second clip that ends up everywhere is the one you can’t spin. Albanese wanted the warmth of informality. He got the exposure of his own crudity.
Sure, voters have bigger worries: mortgages, groceries, power prices, crime, migration and whether the lights will stay on. But these incidents accumulate. They reinforce suspicions about judgement, discipline and whether the man in The Lodge has mistaken celebrity chumminess for leadership.
Albanese has apologised, of course. Damage control demands it. But the apology only highlights the lapse. A prime minister may sit on a couch, but the prime ministership sits beside him, glaring like a disapproving school principal. Albanese forgot that. The public won’t.
In trying to seem like one of the lads, the PM revealed himself as something far less impressive: a vulgar try-hard whose carefully managed image is thinner than the excuses now being offered for it.
