When Tony Abbott won office in September 2013, he promised the Australian people that the “adults were back in charge.” It smacked of an old Liberal conceit: that they were the legitimate rulers of the nation while their opponents were only ever interlopers. Still, after three years of wretched Labor leadership conflict between Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, Abbott’s pledge of a return to stability in Canberra was undoubtedly a relief to many.
It was, however, a commitment woefully unfulfilled. The near-decade of Coalition government that followed was defined by leadership turmoil and abject public policy negligence. The least distinguished governing period in modern Australian political history culminated in Scott Morrison’s prime ministership, an exercise in vacuous performative leadership. It spoke to the good sense of Australians that they swiftly saw through Morrison’s legerdemain and came to loathe him for it.
It has taken another Labor government, led by Anthony Albanese, to resume mature administration. Compared to the delinquency of its predecessors, Albanese’s government has been competent, unified, collegial and scandal-free. It has also been legislatively productive. Less than twelve months from the next election, though, the opinion polls suggest a government struggling to survive.
Having come to power in May 2022 with a century-low primary vote of 32.6 per cent, Labor won increased favour in the electorate during its first year in office. Too tepid to be properly described as a full-blown honeymoon, the government’s primary support nonetheless climbed towards 40 per cent and Albanese enjoyed solid though never stratospheric approval. The electorate appeared to wish him and his government well.
Since the winter of 2023, however, Labor’s vote has slid back to the low thirties or lower and the prime minister’s leadership rating is anchored in negative territory. Providing “grown-up” administration has not been enough to spare Albanese Labor from the common fate of governments since the end of John Howard’s reign: early loss of public goodwill amid a climate of disenchantment with politics. How do we explain this apparent conundrum — and how much does it owe to the prime minister’s limitations?
Anthony Albanese’s prime-ministerial origins are unusual. Unlike many of his predecessors he was not consumed by a sense of destiny: in a quarter-century-long parliamentary career he came late to the view that he could be leader. His “log cabin” backstory, the leitmotif of his political vocation, is unusual too among modern prime ministers. He never tires of referencing his childhood in public housing, where economic frugality was made emotionally secure by a mutually adoring relationship between his single mother, reliant on an invalid pension, and her son.
Intriguingly, intense maternal investment is a trait Albanese shares with Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. In their case it encouraged overweening self-regard and a sense of boundlessness. They were men who would not be held back, zestful and abundant. For Albanese, self-belief was crimped by harder realities: his mother’s poor health and the absence of a father and siblings. The pull effect of his relationship with his mother vied with the pressing necessity for self-reliance. Journalist turned Albanese government media strategist Katharine Murphy discerned a “lone wolf”: a collaborator in politics who is also faithful to his own instincts and resources.
Labor became Albanese’s tribe before he was out of short pants. Later, studying economics at Sydney University, he was a firebrand student activist, his chip-on-the-shoulder resentments softened by a knockabout geniality that drew others to him. Aligned with the party’s left, he was initially employed as a researcher for the faction’s grand old warrior, Tom Uren.
The two men filled a void for each other. Albanese became a kind of surrogate son for the childless Uren, a former boxer and survivor of the Burma railway, and Uren — as Albanese has acknowledged — became a father figure for the future prime minister. They were alike in many ways — compassionate, sentimental and loyal, yet steely where required. The latter was a vital attribute in the party’s right-dominated NSW branch, a place of brutal, occasionally violent, realpolitik.
By the end of his twenties, Albanese was assistant general secretary of the branch. In that role, he grew adept at the hard-nosed game of transactional persuasion and forging networks of support in inhospitable circumstances. His friends attest, however, that his toughening did not come at the cost of his core decency. And, while politics was his path to influence and respectability in life, he was not a monomaniac. Travel, rugby league and rock and roll were passions. A frequenter of the Sydney pub band scene, he thrilled at the raw energy of punk. Its rage against establishment injustice echoed in him, though not its dark nihilism.
Albanese was fundamentally an optimist. Given his practical-mindedness and external orientation, serious reading doesn’t seem to have figured prominently among his pastimes. He is not a collector of ideas nor does he have an evident facility with them. In this respect, he is not alone among the modern crop of politicians. Formally educated to a level unattainable to many of their predecessors, they lack the erudition of the voracious autodidacts of the past.
Albanese’s rapid advance in Labor politics saw him win preselection for the seat of Grayndler and enter parliament, aged thirty-three, in 1996. It was the beginning of the Howard era and he had little choice but to learn how to wait. Early on, though, traces of the enfant terrible remained. During the Coalition’s first term, the upstart Labor backbencher derided the prime minister as “yesterday’s man, a weak man, a little man, a man without courage and a man without vision.” Gradually over the next decade, though, Albanese developed a sneaking admiration for Howard’s indomitability and dogged effectiveness.
When Labor finally returned to office under Rudd in 2007, Albanese assumed the senior ministries of infrastructure and transport. He was a fixture in those portfolios during the six subsequent years of tumult. As an able and tenacious administrator, he could point to the creation of Infrastructure Australia as one of his legacies. But his chief talents were as negotiator and conciliator. A Rudd loyalist who presciently foresaw that the Queenslander’s overthrow by Gillard would destroy two prime ministerships, he nonetheless conscientiously served the latter as government leader in the House of Representatives. He was integral to guiding through her minority administration’s busy legislative program.
Having waited upon two Labor prime ministers, Albanese arrived at the belief that he had the stuff of a leader rather than a mere “counsellor and kingmaker.” Though he was the preferred candidate of the rank and file after the 2013 defeat, the numbers were against him in the party room. During Bill Shorten’s two terms as opposition leader he was again responsible for the portfolios of infrastructure and transport.
Even allowing for the likelihood that Shorten was quarantining his rival, dallying for a dozen years in the same areas suggested a want of policy ambition or curiosity. He was coasting and in danger of being regarded as a spent political force. When Shorten retained the leadership uncontested after performing better than expected at the 2016 election, that indeed seemed Albanese’s lot. Yet history was always against Shorten: no first-cab-off-the rank opposition leader has attained the prime ministership since the second world war. Three years later, with Labor badly demoralised by its front-runner defeat and the party’s next generation wary of stepping forward, the fifty-six-year-old Albanese was the sole candidate to succeed Shorten.
Not since the middle of the twentieth century has a first-time opposition leader come to the job later in life or having served longer in parliament. He was a safe, seasoned pair of hands. He embodied the virtue of durability and was persuaded by the possibility of progress through patient attrition. The closest recent parallel was Howard, who had waited and waited until he was Liberals’ last man standing in the mid-1990s.
Albanese’s chief tasks in his new position were to overcome the two handicaps Labor’s post-election review identified as having cost the party office in 2019. These were a deeply unpopular leader and a cluttered policy program that had unsettled voters. Albanese has never had the voter turn-off effect of the unfortunate Shorten. Where Shorten had a baked-in reputation for shiftiness originating from his complicity in the prime-ministerial downfalls of Rudd and Gillard, attitudes towards Albanese were benign: he excited neither enthusiasm nor antagonism.
In common with most opposition leaders, he was only a vague presence in voters’ minds. He also had the great advantage of being up against a prime minister, Morrison, who by 2020 was synonymous with duplicity and inauthenticity. The 2022 Australian Election Study subsequently found that Albanese out-rated Morrison on eight of nine leadership characteristics. The gap was widest on compassion, honesty and trustworthiness, and narrowest on “inspiring.” Voters assessed him as fundamentally decent, if underwhelming.
One reason for this lukewarm response was the circumspect policy project Albanese took to the public in May 2022. Redolent of Howard’s second coming as opposition leader, Albanese’s approach was monotonously described as a “small target” strategy.
A frustrated Coalition government portrayed him as a thief in the night trying to steal his way into office on a threadbare program. This was not entirely fair. Albanese’s Labor offered significant policy differentiation. Its 2030 carbon emissions–reduction target of a 43 per cent cut, for example, was substantially more ambitious than the Coalition’s 26–28 per cent. Albanese pledged that a Labor government would fulfil the Uluru Statement from the Heart agenda in full: a constitutionally enshrined Voice to Parliament, truth-telling and treaty.
Still, reassurance was the overriding note in Albanese’s pitch for office. Campaigning in prose rather than poetry, he abandoned the contentious redistributive measures Labor had taken to the 2019 election: the curbing of negative gearing, capital gains concessions and dividend imputation. He also promised not to repeal the third tranche of tax cuts legislated by the Morrison government, which principally benefited high income earners, and emphasised asylum-seeker boats would continue to be turned back.
Probably most momentously, he also vowed to stick with the Morrison-conceived AUKUS defence agreement with the United States and Britain. Desperate to avert being cast as unreliable on national security, Labor had adopted this position with an indecent haste that negated the chance to subject the arrangement to due diligence. To those who cavilled that he was surrendering the party’s ideals, Albanese’s riposte was blunt: “One of my Labor principles is for Labor to win elections.”
A cliché of electoral politics is that governments lose elections rather than oppositions win them. This was unequivocally so in 2022. The Australian public reviled Morrison and longed to be rid of him. Their embrace of the alternative, though, was tentative to say the least. Entering office with that century-low primary vote, Labor’s was a loveless triumph. Together with the party’s low-octane campaign and attenuated program, the result raised as many questions as it answered about the new prime minister and his government.
Machiavelli counselled that a successful prince must be able to modulate leadership styles, to know when to be a lion and when to be a fox. Did Albanese have the capacity to switch to a more galvanising style or would the caution that defined him in opposition shackle him in government? Was he instilled with the driving sense of purpose and the knowledge and imagination to achieve major reform that meaningfully shaped the nation? Would Labor’s thin mandate, which Albanese was determined to adhere to, emaciate the government? And was the tepid voter response to Labor — and Albanese — a function of the lack of ambition of the campaign? As John McTernan, a former key adviser to British Labour prime minister Tony Blair and later to Gillard, wisely observed, “There is a cost to crouching too low.”
Asked which of his predecessors he would take a leaf from, Albanese galled Coalition members by mentioning Howard, the man he had observed closely from across the despatch box. More orthodox was his nomination of Bob Hawke, the gold standard of modern Labor prime ministers. Following Hawke’s lead, Albanese aspired to be an agent of community consensus who ran his administration in an orderly, collegial fashion. In his election night victory speech, he declared his faith that “it is a show of strength to collaborate and work with people, not weakness.”
If we take a cue from the leadership typology designed by political psychologist Graham Little, this attitude made Albanese a “group leader,” a relatively rare figure in the ranks of Australian prime ministers. Armed with soft skills, group leaders value solidarity and interdependence. They are typically self-effacing and empathetic. They tend to rise to the top following periods of strife and upheaval, when there is a yearning for respite and healing. The risk with this type of leader is passivity — that they don’t lead. Things can drift on their watch.
Needless to say, Albanese is no Hawke. The latter was far more than a chairman of his government, much more than an orchestrator of collaboration. He was a leader of rare alchemy: in Little’s terms, a compelling combination of “group leader” inside his government and “inspirational leader” outside it. The latter was manifest in a radiating exuberance that had a multiplier effect in the community.
There are other pronounced differences between the two men. Though his energies diminished over the term of his government, Hawke possessed extraordinary drive and stamina. A man of earthly excesses and coursing emotions, he was nonetheless intellectually rigorous and had an eye for policy detail. Albanese is altogether more mortal. Visceral rather than cerebral, he appears less engaged by policy. He is also prone to wandering into verbal marshes and, as the 2022 campaign betrayed, he is not always across his brief.
Instilled with a mighty sense of providence from childhood, Hawke had the inordinate confidence of a leader acting out his destiny. Albanese, on the other hand, insists that he never had a sense of entitlement. Hawke was blessed by an intoxicating blend of charisma and an effortless ability to convey the ineffable quality of authenticity. The unique “love affair” he enjoyed with the Australian people replenished the well of political capital his government drew on to sustain its sweeping reform agenda. Albanese boasts nothing like Hawke’s emotional connection with the public. He is workmanlike and inoffensive rather than magnetic.
Hawke had another vital asset: his double act with Paul Keating. Rivals as well as partners, the two men had complementary talents and generated a fertile creative tension. Keating supplied the audacity in the Hawke government, along with being its most captivating storyteller. Albanese has Jim Chalmers, a student of Keating and arguably the best communicator and keenest thinker in the government, who is said to chafe against his prime minister’s caution. Yet, where Keating was a ferocious political flamethrower, Chalmers is measured and amiable in public. Where Keating was prepared to act as an in-house insurgent, Chalmers is a patient team player.
As the prime minister had promised, the Albanese government began in methodical style. Experienced observers describe it as the smoothest transition to office of any recent administration, including Howard’s long-term government.
As it steadily went about ticking off election commitments, the government appeared a genuinely collegiate project in refreshing contrast with the overbearing style of recent prime ministers. During its first twelve months, Labor created a National Anti-Corruption Commission, formally committed to the United Nations for Australia to reduce carbon emissions by 43 per cent on 2005 levels, struck an agreement with the Greens that smoothed the imposition of a hard cap on the nation’s largest carbon emitters, steered through a substantial lift in the minimum wage, increased the childcare subsidy for low-income earners, enabled trade unions to negotiate multi-employer pay deals, and implemented some of the recommendations of the aged care royal commission to improve conditions in nursing homes.
The government’s conscientious attendance to what the German sociologist Max Weber described as the “slow boring of hard boards” that is democratic politics bucked the chaotic trend of the previous decade. The contrast with revelations about the Coalition’s convention flouting (Morrison’s secret commandeering of ministries, for example) and scandalous practices (robodebt among them) reinforced the impression that ethical respectability was finally returning to Australian politics.
Despite the indisputable early progress, though, there was a nagging feeling that something was missing. Politics, as Weber also observed, was about both “perspective” and “passion” — achieving the possible also required reaching for the impossible. An element of the heroic was necessary. The government’s actions had an unfortunate resemblance to a laundry list of modest measures which, while undeniably necessary, fell short of capturing the imagination and weren’t in any way paradigm shifting.
With dreams of social transformation supplanted by well-meaning but bloodless managerialism, Labor was suffering the curse of modern-day social democratic parties. The neoliberal revolution, with its assault on collectivism, had emptied out these parties’ belief system and left them muddled about the appropriate balance between the market and state, between capital and labour, and between rights and responsibilities. The confusion of purpose was not alleviated by neoliberalism’s own exhaustion. To the contrary, what was left in its wake was uncertainty about the next great policy regime.
The dilemma of social democrats is exacerbated in a landscape in which right-of-centre parties have pivoted towards aggressive conservative populism, a lusty, grievance-driven, frequently irrational politics. In response, social democrats have hewed to the sensible centre, a safe harbour but an emotionally desiccated place. It is almost as if the two sides of politics have swapped clothes. While an ardour-filled right claims the mantle of subversive enemy of established “elite” power, the mainstream left is pushed towards an earnest maintenance project.
That dichotomy is to some extent embodied in the contest between Albanese and opposition leader Peter Dutton. Albanese wanted his prime ministership to usher in a tranquil national political conversation but Dutton was having none of it. A foreboding political strongman, he relentlessly and recklessly pushes the hot buttons of fear and resentment in the electorate, especially on issues of race. Responding to Dutton’s incitements with a restrained stoicism, Albanese rebukes the opposition leader more in sorrow than in anger. This temperance might be statesmanlike and designed to douse social fires, but it can leave Albanese appearing limp next to Dutton’s muscularity.
The impression of stolidity is compounded by Albanese’s performance as communicator-in-chief. He is accessible to, and busy in, the media. Though he doesn’t shy away from serious outlets, journalists have noticed his predilection for “hokey” interviews on commercial FM radio designed to reinforce his everyman persona.
Nobody expects Albanese to sound like Robert Menzies or Gough Whitlam. In this demotic age, silver-tongued oratory is as likely to engender suspicion as to inspire. Yet one wishes the prime minister was a more effervescent communicator capable of striking an intense pitch. As Gillard did to her cost, he seems to operate on the premise that his government will be known by its deeds rather than through emotionally freighted words or gestures. He is mostly wooden, inhibited in body language and devoid of memorable or moving phrasing. Where Keating had the Redfern address, Rudd the Stolen Generation apology and Gillard, after provocation upon provocation, the misogyny speech, it is hard to imagine Albanese delivering anything comparably stirring or enduring.
The lament that governments lack an overarching narrative is commonplace in contemporary politics. Philosophical uncertainty and societal and media fragmentation militate against cohesive storytelling. But Albanese has showed little or no proclivity for weaving a compelling tale for his government, to joining the dots between its actions. In that absence, each measure risks disappearing into the ether as fast as the warp-speed media cycle.
Twenty twenty-three was the pivotal year of the Albanese government’s first term. Two things were defining. The first was Albanese’s March meeting in San Diego with British prime minister Rishi Sunak and American president Joe Biden to put flesh on the bones of the three nation’s AUKUS agreement. Under its terms Australia was to acquire eight nuclear submarines between the 2030s and the middle of the century at a gargantuan cost of up to $368 billion.
The announcement, made with the three leaders standing in the glistening sun against the backdrop of a symbol of American military might, the USS Michigan, was perhaps the apotheosis of Albanese’s journey to conventional respectability: the boy from council housing made good. Back home, though, opponents of the pact believed the prime minister and his government had been gulled by the nation’s traditional “great and powerful friends.” They raised a host of questions about the pact’s impact on Australia’s strategic autonomy, the likelihood of the submarines actually being delivered given questions about Washington’s future political reliability, and whether they would be obsolete by the time they arrived.
Yet caucus was conspicuously compliant. The noisiest critic of the agreement was Keating, who condemned it as the worst international decision by a Labor government since Billy Hughes tried to introduce conscription during the first world war. Declaring that Albanese and his ministers had “no mandate” for AUKUS inside the party, Keating forecast a major backlash at branch level. But the grassroots protests never amounted to more than a whimper.
This acquiescence in a far-reaching decision that went against the grain of Labor’s radical nationalist tradition said volumes about an often unremarked shift with the party. In a de facto split that has maimed both parties, Labor’s left has effectively migrated to the Greens. Untethered from moderates, the Greens veer towards strident — often breathtakingly cynical — exhibitionism; Labor, meanwhile, has lost an internal ginger group and a source of creative tension.
But the truly totemic battle of Labor’s term, also during 2023, was the Voice to Parliament referendum. When Albanese emotionally promised on election night to implement the Uluru Statement, he briefly let down his guard after three years of studious caution. Here is not the place to rake over the causes of the referendum’s emphatic defeat: suffice to say that the dismal record of referendums on this constitutionally “frozen continent” made it a long shot from the start, and it was virtually doomed once it was denied bipartisan support first by the Nationals and then by the Liberals. Afterwards, conservative proponents of the Voice naively accused Albanese of fatally wounding the referendum’s chances by not doing more to woo the opposition parties. The reality is that special rights for First Nations Australians, especially if constitutionally entrenched, were anathema to Dutton and the Queensland-dominated Coalition joint party room.
The opposition had another incentive to oppose the Voice: beating the referendum would wound the prime minister. Albanese had embarked on an exercise in defying history. He was the risk-averse leader attempting the quixotic.
The referendum defeat was indeed wounding for Albanese’s prime ministership. On the night of the vote he struggled to camouflage his bitterness at the people’s verdict. In the days and weeks after, he appeared demoralised and disorientated, as if the stuffing had been knocked out of him. Undoubtedly, the issue was close to Albanese’s heart. He had deeply wanted to deliver the Voice to Indigenous Australians.
While he vowed continued support for national truth-telling and a treaty, he realised their prospects had also been badly damaged. His recent “crab-walking” away from establishing a Makarrata Commission to oversee truth-telling and treaty-making suggests an unwillingness to spend further political capital. Painfully, he is joining a line of prime ministers who raised the expectations of the First Nations community only to let them down. Hawke, Albanese’s leadership model, acknowledged that his failure to fulfil his promise of a treaty with Indigenous Australians was the profoundest regret of his time in office. Albanese knows this sorry history, but seems unable to avoid repeating it.
In a larger sense, the defeat meant Albanese had lost the opportunity for an achievement that would have been etched in history, conferring on him authorship of a landmark step in the chequered march to justice in this country. It also effectively cruelled the chances for other heroic advances by his government. That the goal of Australia becoming a republic, for example, was now seen as a lost cause was confirmed by the dropping of the portfolio of assistant minister for the republic in a ministerial reshuffle in July 2024.
In the absence of movement in these areas, Labor would mostly be confined to prosaic tasks such as curbing cost-of-living stresses. Hardly the stuff to stir the soul or make Albanese a memorable prime minister. His post-referendum funk perhaps owed something, too, to a loss of confidence following a lacklustre and meandering campaign performance in which he had been outpointed by the Coalition’s fear-mongering opposition leader. That performance only accentuated questions that had lingered since Labor’s small-target election victory. It seemed to confirm that Albanese lacked the magic to inspire the electorate on a path of transformative change.
Nor could it have helped Albanese’s state of mind that the referendum campaign had coincided with an ebbing of support for his government. Conducted against the background of worsening cost-of-living pressures and a crisis in housing affordability and supply, it was a setting in which worried Australians were susceptible to the view that the Voice referendum was a prime-ministerial indulgence and a distraction from what ought to be the government’s priorities.
Albanese failed to convince them otherwise. Polls showed that by the time of the referendum Labor’s primary vote had fallen to the low thirties and disapproval of his performance outstripped approval. Likewise, surveys indicated declining levels of trust in government and a ratcheting up of dissatisfaction with democracy. Once more Australia was spiralling into the cycle that had plagued the country for most of the twenty-first century: a precipitous loss of support for national governments and deep-seated public disenchantment with how politics worked.
In the almost twelve months since the referendum Albanese’s prime ministership has reverted to subdued incrementalism. The government roused itself from its post-referendum doldrums at the beginning of 2024 by announcing the recasting of the third tranche of the Morrison government’s tax cuts to provide a far more equitable spread of their fruits. It seemed like a Labor thing to do. Tellingly, however, the initiative was reported to have come from treasurer Chalmers, who had long been agitating within the government for the change.
Albanese had only belatedly agreed, concerned that reneging on his election promise to keep the tax cuts intact would hurt his standing. Far from rounding on the prime minister, the public understood and welcomed the move. Soon after, in a by-election in the Melbourne outer-suburban electorate of Dunkley, he and his government received a fillip when the party’s primary vote held up and it comfortably retained the seat. That result at least punctured any notion of an unstoppable Dutton-led Liberal conquest of outer suburbia Australia.
Even so, political momentum has eluded the prime minister and his government in 2024. The May budget featured cost of living relief measures and a centrepiece $23 billion, A Future Made in Australia, designed to revive domestic manufacturing, spur the nation’s transition to a net-zero economy, and integrate Australia into a global economy that Chalmers declared to be undergoing the greatest transformation since the Industrial Revolution. The policy provided funding for a vast array of projects, including $20 billion under the grandiose banner of the “renewable energy superpower.” Labor’s headlining of the package evinced that its activities in the field of climate change, though not without limitations and contradictions (the government continued to approve new fossil fuel projects and extend the lives of others), was the one field in which it believed it could nail its colours to transformative change.
Labor enjoyed no electoral dividend from either the budget or the delivery of the tax cuts from 1 July. For the government it must have been especially disconcerting that polling suggested its actions were barely registering with the population, let alone inducing feelings of gratitude.
Three reasons suggest themselves. First and foremost, the measures were too modest to have a significant effect on the lived experience of many Australians in an environment — by no means unique to Australia — of stubborn inflationary pressures and relatively high interest rates. Perilously for Labor, voters were defaulting to their traditional habit of seeing the conservative side of politics as the better manager of economic affairs.
Second, a decade of policy indolence by the Coalition had left Labor with a backlog of problems resistant to quick or easy fixes. Housing was a prime example. And third, Labor’s messaging was confounded by a balkanised and highly polarised media landscape. Whatever credit it claimed — or deserved — the audience was scattered, often out of reach, in online rabbit warrens. Needless to say, social media’s influence as a transmitter of (mis)information and a platform for inflammatory opinion formation is proving ever more inimical to persuasive engagement with the electorate. It is instead consummate at engendering impatience and inciting grievance, which rapidly and capriciously deprive leaderships of community goodwill. In a vicious circle, governments are sapped of a willingness to embark on major reforms.
With less than a year to the next election, the time for governing is closing. Labor has continued to eke out worthwhile reforms, including protections for gig economy workers and efforts to put the National Disability Insurance Scheme on a sustainable footing. In other areas, though — for example, banning gambling advertising, or whether the census should include questions on expanded gender options and sexuality — it has looked timorous and vacillating. The latter episode was reported to have begun with a “captain’s call,” not only something that recent prime-ministerial history indicates rarely ends well but also a breach of Albanese’s standard practice of collegiate decision-making. Worse, it revealed a prime minister lacking confidence in his ability to shepherd public discussion and jumping at the opposition leader’s shadow.
By now, the entrenched view of Albanese within the public is that he is well intentioned — he does not elicit animus as Morrison did — but also insipid and weak. The fact that focus groups are landing on the word “weak” to describe the prime minister is evidenced by how Dutton and Coalition shadow ministers have fixed the term on Albanese. He is regarded as a hostage to, rather than a shaper of, events.
Dutton, by contrast, is perceived as “nasty” and divisive but strong. Far from shying away from that reputation, the opposition leader is leaning into it, as exemplified by his recent provocative call to block all Palestinian refugees from war-ravaged Gaza. His inflammatory brazenness has more than once left Albanese looking defensive and leaden. That some polling is finding that Dutton is the preferred prime minister — a position seldom enjoyed by opposition leaders — suggests that a proportion of Australians equate “strength,” even at the cost of social cohesion, with leadership.
Anthony Albanese has demonstrated that he is a different type of leader — one whose modus operandi is to doggedly nudge the country along. In a leader-centric era in which alternative authority figures have melted from view, we expect much from our prime ministers — too much. The challenge is arguably amplified for Labor office-holders. They are inheritors of the party folklore that its leaders are weather makers, exalted figures in a pantheon of great reformers. Filling those historical shoes is no easy thing. Moreover, there is a habit on the political left of devouring its own, of railing against the sacrileges and pusillanimity of Labor prime ministers and governments while they are in office only to appreciate their value once they are gone. Progressive frustration with Albanese has elements of this.
When he won office in May 2022, Albanese declared a hope that his “journey in life” — the boy reared in council housing who rose to be prime minister — “inspires Australians to reach for the stars.” Thus far inspiration has been missing from Albanese’s repertoire.
Today’s United States is hardly a reference point for democratic leadership, yet the emergence of Kamala Harris as the Democrats’ presidential candidate has illustrated the possibility of joy to lighten and energise the political mood. Similarly, the British political writer and broadcaster and former politician, Rory Stewart, has identified the importance of humour leavening the mundane but essential work of centrist leadership. Joy and humour can be powerful antidotes to the menacing catastrophising of right-wing populists like Trump — and Dutton.
Albanese and his ministers have provided grown-up administration, worthy and sensible, but it has also been dour work, a government of grinding necessity. Albanese sits atop, a decent and sincere man yet a model of prime-ministerial staidness and a dampener of political passions. He has also been wanting in explaining the journey the nation is on, why it matters, and what lies on the horizon. Dare we say, the vision thing.
The 2025 election will test whether Australia is tipping into a zone of ungovernability: whether an able administration can endure beyond a single term. Little can be taken for granted in our fractured, volatile electorate, but my hunch is that Labor will survive the election — as it deserves to — albeit with serious prospect of being reduced to minority rule.
For a number of reasons, historical, cultural and institutional, the centre holds better in this country than it does in many other parts of the globe. I also suspect that the nation is neither as fearful nor as paranoid as Dutton is banking on, with women and young voters likely to prove major obstacles to his ambitions. An Albanese mantra is that he has been underestimated all his life. For him, winning a second term will be further affirmation of that. The temptation in those circumstances will be to continue to trudge along towards a far off promised land, heading a government of honourable but modest deeds and pinched emotions.
Our best prime ministers have learned on the job and grown in office. With a lifetime in politics and hardboiled into a wily, flinty operator, does Albanese still have growth in him? Having acquired comfortable respectability in adulthood, is there anything left of the passionate incandescence of his youth for him to draw on? Can he yet spread his leadership wings? •
