Blundering Albo turns out to be Labor’s ace
Labor fans spent more than a decade wondering how John Howard kept winning elections. It was personal. Stability, prosperity and balanced books didn’t count. Those hardcore Labor supporters just could not understand Howard’s appeal.
Well, now it’s time for Coalition voters to be puzzled. By any rational reckoning, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his Labor government ought to be collapsing like Joe Biden on a bicycle.
But Albanese and Labor are cruising, despite debacle after selfcaused debacle. There are quite a few to choose from.
Australia’s rousing Indigenous Voice to Parliament rejection might have brought down Albanese, much as the Brexit referendum brought down former British Prime Minister David Cameron, but here we are barely five months later and everyone’s forgotten about it.
Foreign Minister Penny Wong last month donated $6m of your taxes to the UN’s Hamas wing – and then absurdly thanked Australians for their involuntary generosity.
That Hamas-boosting move basically put us within a handshake’s range of Hitler, but again we seem to have cheerfully moved on.
Albanese and his pre-election Labor team vowed to cut average power bills by $275 and are now on course to miss that target by four figures or so. No big deal, I guess, unless you’re the battlers paying for it.
Were they shown in black-andwhite, Treasurer Jim Chalmers’s speeches would look like historical documentary footage explaining why Argentina went broke.
And I’m not saying the Energy and Climate Change Minister resembles an introduced species, but if you saw a bunch of Chris Bowens in the yard you’d fair dinkum put out baits.
Plus we’ve got illegal immigrants turning up all over the place, Employment and Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke racking up bigger travel bills than a lunar-touring Apollo crew and Kevin Rudd primed for an international diplomatic incident in Washington.
Check Newspoll, though, and Labor is on course for a successful election-day scenario of 74 seats to the Coalition’s 62, with 16 seats parked in “other”.
Some of this is no doubt due to Australians’ disinclination to turn against first-term governments. As John Howard often noted, we even gave Gough Whitlam a second go.
Wong is correct; we are a generous people. Occasionally too generous.
Some of Labor’s continued polling popularity is due to an electoral/social cycle that is set against the Coalition.
Happened before and it’ll happen again.
Not much to do on that score for Peter Dutton and company than to bank some policy points (nuclear power, for example) and ride it out.
But a significant amount of credit should go the PM. As former Labor strongman Graham Richardson recently pointed out, Anthony Albanese is essentially a one-man cuddliness barrier protecting the rest of his government.
“What Labor has got is this likability factor with Albo. Everybody likes Albo, and it’s hard not to,” Richardson told Sky News.
“He’ll keep Labor’s numbers looking fairly good, so I’m glad we’ve got him,” Richardson continued.
“We’re going to have to hang on to him for a long time, I think.”
Albanese’s Labor-saving “likability factor” can even be seen in Pauline Hanson’s Please Explain YouTube cartoon videos.
Created by Mark Nicholson and Sebastian Peart of Melbourne’s Stepmates Studios, their miniature satirical masterpieces accurately depict Albanese as blundering, lazy and vain, but nevertheless relentlessly and hilariously optimistic.
(Full disclosure: Mark Nicholson and I share a segment every Thursday on Sky. He’s the funnier one.)
That cartoon characterisation rings true throughout the electorate. Many conservatives find Albanese to be incompetent, but not maliciously so.
His more realistic leftists allies also admit that the prime minister isn’t exactly overburdened with ability.
But who needs competence and ability when you’re winning on niceness? Albanese might be Trump in reverse: widely admired yet can’t get the job done.
His plan for Australia to become a renewable energy superpower is a case in point. Albo was out there last week seriously suggesting that Australia could compete with the likes of China as a solar and wind manufacturing powerhouse.
One or two small problems with that. For a start, seeing as we don’t have any Uyghur slave labour, solar panels made here are unlikely to come in below the cost of any produced in Xinjiang.
Back to Ms Hanson, who offered a perfect Albo verdict before the 2022 election. “I like Anthony, he’s a nice guy. He really is a nice guy,” she said. “But do I think he’s ready to lead this country? No I don’t.”
Niceness aside, he still isn’t.