Is there growing taste for a leadership change in the Labor government? It’d be a bold call this close to an election, but perhaps not out of the question. After all, Anthony Albanese’s leadership is a particular focal point of his government’s inexorable slide to one-term status. The sense that Albanese is simply not up to the job is only deepened by this week’s debacle over the recent Chinese navy live-fire exercises in the Tasman Sea.
Despite Albanese’s avowals to the contrary, it’s emerged that the government only learned that there was a Chinese fleet, possibly including a nuclear submarine, tossing ordnance around the busy air and sea between Australia and New Zealand, when a passing Virgin Airlines pilot happened to notice it.
At the same time as Albanese and deputy leader Defence Minister Richard Marles are looking again like clueless gooses, and as Albanese gets caught out in a dirt campaign against Peter Dutton, his treasurer is hitting the campaign trail. It would be far from the last time an ambitious treasurer – a job traditionally regarded as training wheels for a future PM – has set himself up to knife the boss.
Home Affairs minister Tony Burke has also been putting himself front and centre, with his North Korea-like mass citizenship rallies in marginal Labor seats.
The opposition leader is taking notice.
Peter Dutton says the “leadership race” to replace Anthony Albanese is underway as the federal election looms, declaring that the prime minister’s time in the top job is “over”.
The opposition leader has accused Defence Minister Richard Marles and Home Affairs minister Tony Burke of nursing leadership ambitions, and attempting to win their colleagues’ support to assume the Labor leadership.
He also pointed to Treasurer Jim Chalmers’s rush to campaign in marginal Hunter and central coast seats in recent days, and said Mr Chalmers was also a contender to take the reins.
Still, it’s a big call to knife even so dire a leader as Albanese, this close to an election. A putative new leader would have just two months to settle into the PM’s chair. But the shortest recent interim between a leadership change and an election, Kevin Rudd’s second spin in 2013, was just over three months. And Rudd lost the election. In a landslide.
That’s the other danger: that voters would see this as a return to the revolving-door leadership chaos of the Rudd-Gillard years.
Rudd also made it much, much harder to roll a Labor PM. Now it takes a three-quarter majority to unseat the leader.
Still, there’s no doubt that it’s conspicuously not the PM who’s out hitting the hustings as the official campaign draws inexorably nearer.
Jim Chalmers has launched a pre-election campaign blitz in vulnerable NSW Hunter and central coast seats, as he answers the calls of Labor MPs concerned that surging support for Peter Dutton and Anthony Albanese’s unpopularity will cost them their seats.
The fact that Hunter is even considered vulnerable is a sure sign of just how dire Labor’s predicament is. Hunter has been a rusted-on Labor seat for nearly 120 years. All but its first two MPs, from 1901 to 1910, have been Labor. If Labor are in trouble in Hunter, they really are screwed.
Amid consternation in Labor ranks over the prime minister’s ability to cut through and sell the government’s economic narrative, ALP sources say Dr Chalmers must play a central role in the campaign to help marginal seat-holders stave off coalition challenges across the country.
With pollsters predicting Mr Dutton is in prime position to form a minority government following the election, Mr Albanese is trying to sandbag seats and stem electoral bleeding ahead of an expected April 12 election […]
Dr Chalmers immediately hit the hustings on his return to Australia after meeting with US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Mr Trump’s National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett and putting forward the government’s case for tariff exemptions.
If Labor are so desperate to hold onto a formerly safe seat, why isn’t the prime minister out there, shaking hands and kissing babies?
Because Labor are desperate to hold onto a formerly safe seat.
After being razzed in Wollongong – like Hunter, a previously rusted-on Labor seat and a district heavily reliant on carbon-intensive industry – Albanese dare not risk the optics of being heckled again by blue collar workers in Labor heartland. For the same reason, the WA state government has politely told the PM to keep the hell away as they also gear up for an election in just weeks.
Instead, Canberra has sent the Reverend Sun Myung Burke to hold another mass Labor wedding in the West.
Hundreds of new citizens in Perth have been sworn in, schooled about electoral boundaries and funnelled past an enrol-to-vote booth, as Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke takes his audacious push to certify thousands of new Australians to the state that could decide the election.
Labor really are that brazen – and desperate.
