Will the real Anthony Albanese please step forward? The hardscrabble lad from the housing commission? The red-ragging radical in the Billy Bragg t-shirt? Or the newly-minted, slimmed-down, soberly suit-n-tie “fiscally conservative moderate who rejects wokeness”?
The opposition leader is not nicknamed “Each-Way Albo” for nothing.
The Anthony Albanese who was elected Labor leader three years ago never had a chance of becoming prime minister. But Albo ’19 is not Albo ’22. The transformation of Albanese as a political leader has been the most extraordinary in Australian history.
This metamorphosis has been personal and political. He has had a cosmetic makeover, has jettisoned long-held policy views and has embraced a small-target political strategy. Even the young firebrand Albanese would not recognise his mellowed middle-age self today.
You have to at least give Albo credit for his remarkable weight loss. And to be fair, my own 20s self would hardly recognise my mid-50s self. But my evolution from left-wing firebrand to libertarian centrist was much slower and is of much older vintage. I haven’t voted Labor for nearly 20 years — and I would have walked away sooner, were it not for Mark Latham, the last genuinely working-class, old-school Labor man. Latho ended up siding with One Nation, and I can’t blame him.
But Albanese’s red streak is of much longer duration and was much deeper-hued, and his road to Centrist Damascus conversion suspiciously recent. In the 80s, he was all about supporting “the revolutionary forces in El Salvador” — Marxist revolutionaries. Even as late as 2015, he was advocating open borders, imposing wealth taxes, restricting negative gearing and abolishing franking credits (a form of double-taxation).
When John Howard made over his own nerdy image in 1998, Albanese dismissed it all as “same stuff, different bucket”. Should we suspect the same of him?
Now, the Australian people are presented with a new Albanese. The scale of the change in his policy views and political values is without precedent. He is now, he says, offering a mainstream centre-left Labor agenda. He would have no trouble being accepted into Labor’s Right faction.
The Australian
Are Australian voters buying it?
Labor strategists are spooked that they haven’t got the momentum they so hoped for. Campaigners know it as the Big Mo. Gough Whitlam had it, Bob Hawke did too – and Rudd delivered a Ruddslide with it in 2007.
But then, the momentum was supposedly all with Labor in 2019. The only thing is that it didn’t seem to carry over to Bill Shorten. Shorten wore the “Shifty” tag in the same way Albanese is dubbed “Each-Way”.
Still Labor led in all the polls — just as they do today. But, just as the “popular vote” counts for nothing in US presidential elections, nation-wide aggregates in Australia matter little, compared to seat-by-seat numbers. And there, things aren’t looking quite so spectacular for Labor. Even the expectation that Labor will win easily has its strategists worried: when voters think one lot are going to ramp it in, they feel slightly more inclined to vote for the underdog.
Labor, starting with 69 seats, needs to win seven for a majority. At the moment it can net only five wins nationally.
The Liberals campaign is all about holding the suburbs and the regional seats. This is where Labor actually needs to be picking up seats like Longman to Brisbane’s north and Braddon in Tasmania, which they currently aren’t.
Labor has more seats under threat than it can gain in suburban or regional Australia. The Liberals know this.
The Australian
A hung parliament is a very real possibility. Which goes a long way to explaining why the Coalition are so heavily targeting the blue-green “Independents” in wealthy inner-city and harbourside-mansion seats that once belonged to the Liberals. As we’ve so often seen, climate bothering is very much the pursuit of the idle rich. That’s why the Greens have the wealthiest voter bloc in Australia.
Should push come to hung-parliament shove, Labor will have no compunction in heaving its blue-collar base over the side and making kissy-kissy with the millionaires wearing XR buttons.
