Real Albo needs to stand up

FOR most of his time in public life, Anthony Albanese has been the hardest of hard-left warriors, yet now the Opposition Leader wants us to believe that he’d govern from the centre, like Bob Hawke, even though he used to say that the Hawke government had “absolute contempt for working-class people”.

Who and what is the real Albanese – the recently reinvented moderate, or the left-wing firebrand who once boasted that he lived for “fighting Tories” (rather than serve the Australian people)?

Should he be elected, based on his consistent record rather than his recent words, Albanese would be our most left-wing PM ever. Last week, he did an interview which generated the front-page headline: “I’m not woke.”

That’s what he wants you to believe. Can we trust him and do we know him?

So far, he’s really only telling us what he says he won’t change. He says he won’t change us into a republic, at least not in his first term; he says he won’t hit us with all the new taxes on retirees and on investors that Labor promised last time; he won’t close down the coal industry and he won’t change the government’s policy on turning boats around, or on nuclear submarines.

That’s what he reckons: even though he’s always been a fervent republican and it’s part of Labor’s platform. And even though he used to believe in wealth taxes and death duties, he has declared he couldn’t bring himself to do boat turnbacks, has frequently said there’s no market for thermal coal, has always been fiercely anti-nuclear, and has repeatedly described himself as a “socialist”.

In his recent “getting to know you” interview with 60 Minutes, Albanese told us, yet again, about growing up tough with a sole parent, pensioner mother.

Good on his mum for raising someone who might be PM and good on him for making the most of his chances in life, but surely there should have been something, since then, that’s been at least as character-forming and at least as instructive about the man who wants to be our nation’s next leader.

One reason voters feel they don’t really know the alternative PM is that he’s actually made very little impact on our public life, despite 25 years in parliament, a short stint as deputy prime minister and three years as Opposition Leader.

In his six years as transport minister in the Rudd-Gillard government, nothing much happened to duplicate the Pacific Highway or to upgrade the Bruce Highway; there were no big road projects in any of our capital cities; and hardly any of the big rail projects he announced ever came to fruition. Nothing happened on the Western Sydney airport – that had to wait for the Tony Abbott government.

In the absence of an already wellknown political identity, another problem for Albanese is the perception he’s not capable of standing up to senior members of his own team; that he’s a puppet of factions who call the shots rather than someone with the backbone we need, now more than ever.