PM’s Luxury Retirement Castle Raises Eyebrows

History is littered with the careers (and sometimes corpses) of public figures who didn’t think before they opened their mouths. Even if what they said wasn’t wrong, optics are everything.

When Marie Antoinette apocryphally said, ‘Let them eat cake’, the word she (supposedly) used was brioche: a type of pastry which uses less flour than regular bread. At a time of acute flour shortages, it was a sensible enough suggestion. But that’s not how the outraged mob saw it. Optics.

Australian PM Anthony Albanese is as ham-fisted at managing optics as Boris Johnson partying at No 10 during Covid lockdowns.

Not least in buying a clifftop mansion in the lead up to an election where the housing crisis is a dominant issue. Optics.

Anthony Albanese has been forced to deny he is contemplating life after politics just months before an election campaign, after paying $4.3m for a clifftop house on the NSW central coast where he will live with future wife Jodie Haydon when it is time for them to vacate the Lodge.

The Prime Minister said he was “planning to be in my current job for a very long period of time”, after Peter Dutton congratulated him on the purchase by declaring Mr Albanese and Ms Haydon were “obviously planning for the next stage of life post-politics”.

A Labor MP said the purchase was “not a great look” for Mr Albanese, who will have to fight hard to hold on to government at the election with his personal standing suffering as Labor fell behind the Coalition on this week’s Newspoll.

Even worse, the leader of the ‘party of the worker’ is acting every bit the Bastard Landlord. Months ago, he evicted the long-term tenant of his Sydney investment property, claiming it was going on the market. The million-dollar-plus property has been pulled from the market, instead. Now, he’s going to be trousering a few grand a week from his new mansion.

Opposition finance spokeswoman Jane Hume says Anthony Albanese’s purchase of a $4.3m home on NSW’s central coast was “a little bit tone deaf” and would cause voters to question the Prime Minister’s priorities […]

“I think his judgment is brought into question here. At a time when the cost of living is still out of control, when Australians are really doing it tough, when they’re facing what’s going to be a very tough Christmas, when people can’t find somewhere to buy or even rent a home, this decision, at this time, is probably a pretty poor call.”

Even his own colleagues are smacking their foreheads.

Labor frontbencher Chris Bowen says Anthony Albanese did not consult with him about the purchase of the Prime Minister’s new $4.3m home on NSW’s central coast […]

Liberal deputy leader Sussan Ley says Labor MPs have been the ones causing disquiet about Anthony Albanese’s purchase of a $4.3m home on NSW’s central coast.

“I wish the Prime Minister and Jodie well,” Ms Ley told Sky News. “They’re planning for the next phase of their life.

“It’s actually Labor members that are backgrounding against their own Prime Minister, and no one loves to hate like Labor.”

Ms Ley said news of the home purchase came at the end of a “horror week” for the Prime Minister and “after a week like that, I’m not surprised that the Prime Minister’s Labor colleagues are starting to suggest that he’s out of touch, out of touch with ordinary Australians”.

The Greens, whom the polls indicate Labor will almost certainly need to partner with to even hope to hold on to government, are hammering the PM.

With Labor facing electoral pressure over cost-of-living and the price of housing, the Greens seized on the revelations of Mr ­Albanese’s purchase and labelled the Labor leader a property investor. Greens housing spokesman Max Chandler-Mather said: “Labor and the Liberals have created a housing system where a property investor can buy a $4.3m beachfront home, while millions can’t even find an affordable rental, let alone buy a house of their own. Yet Labor still want to give property investors $176bn in tax handouts.”

Even Labor-aligned pollsters are shaking their heads.

Pollster and former Labor strategist Kos Samaras said Mr Albanese’s purchase would reaffirm people’s prejudices about politicians, with professional adults taking three decades to save up for a house deposit in Sydney. “People think all politicians do this, that they have the capital and income to purchase such homes,” he said.

Mr Samaras said Mr Albanese’s comments about knowing what it was to struggle could cut through to constituents, if the Prime Minister was able to demonstrate he was not “pulling the ladder up after him”.

As for Albanese once again trotting out the tired old story of ‘I grew up in a cardboard box in the middle of a lake’, this isn’t achieving anything other than eliciting a chorus of frustrated groans from Australians who’ve heard it a hundred times too often.

Well may Albanese enjoy his luxurious retirement home. Millions of Australians can only dream of living in a hole in the ground.