He’s careful, stable – even prosaic. But Albanese may just have nailed the mood

There is a change of air pressure, as if someone has thrown open the doors of the century-old Commonwealth Offices to the Melbourne night, that announces the arrival of the prime minister before he enters the room. Down a marbled hallway, a cheerful “Howdy!” clatters through the mostly deserted space before a smiling Anthony Albanese bounds through the door and offers an outstretched hand.

It is nearing the end of a long day before an even longer one planned for the next, when Treasurer Jim Chalmers will hand down his fourth budget, and the PM’s people have called at short notice to say the boss is up for a chat.

That much is clear.

We are alone, save for his press secretary, Fiona Sugden, an adviser whose institutional memory dates back to Kevin Rudd’s days in opposition, and a couple of neatly pressed security guards back down the hall. Albanese presents energised and chuffed with having added a few hours earlier the signature of Queensland Premier David Crisafulli to a schools agreement which, he says, commits and properly funds all states and territories to finally deliver the Gonski reforms.

Although Education Minister Jason Clare led the work over many months to reach agreement, Albanese intervened personally in negotiations with the state premiers to clinch the deal. He recites each one out loud, as if confirming a national checklist: Cook, Malinauskas, Rockliff, Allan ... Minns, Crisafulli.

“That for me is a source of real pride,” he says. “It is going to happen. It now will happen.”

Adding a Liberal premier, days out from calling an election, to the numbers he already has for his government’s “Better and Fairer Schools Agreement” is classically Albanese.

His rise through the organisational ranks of the Australian Labor Party from its minority, oppositional left, his command of parliamentary process through Labor’s majority and minority governments of Rudd and Julia Gillard, his building of relationships in and outside parliament through the accumulation and reciprocation of dependable support, his ability in life and in politics to turn lousy cards into a winning hand, are all reasons he is sitting in the big chair today.

A question before voters, one framed by Peter Dutton’s Coalition and, for different reasons, Labor grey-beards frustrated by what they see as an absence of ambition from Albanese’s first term in office and what he is promising for a second, is whether, having demonstrated the requisite skills to become prime minister, he can provide the leadership Australia needs.

Those party grey-beards – for the sake of naming a few, retired union boss Bill Kelty and former Labor ministers Gareth Evans, Barry Jones and Kim Carr have publicly questioned to varying degrees the Albanese government’s priorities or appetite for substantial reform – would have gained little solace listening to Albanese outline to this masthead his plans for the next three years.

When asked to nominate his greatest priority for a second-term Labor government, Albanese doesn’t name a policy area or specific reform. Instead, he offers a nebulous, single-word response: “Opportunity.” He expands this to “creating opportunity for people to fulfil their potential, no matter how humble or disadvantaged their origins are”.

From this platitudinous start, he sketches what his government has done and plans to do to restore bulk-billing rates under Medicare, restructure the health system with the provision of more urgent care clinics, provide the means for public schools to realise David Gonski’s vision of needs-based funding, refashion childcare into universal early education, boost public and social housing, and through the Future Made in Australia program, enmesh Australia’s take-up of clean energy and investment in advanced manufacturing with the broader strategic objectives of national security and economic resilience.

It is an earnest, commendable to-do list. But, reduced to its simplest form, a Labor government is seeking re-election on a promise to put more money into public services, reduce emissions and create jobs. As Daniel Craig’s nonplussed James Bond said to Q upon being given a gun and a radio, “Not exactly Christmas, is it?” As a reform agenda, it falls short of Labor’s self-image as the party that does the big things.

Yet, before we lapse into comparisons with Hawke/Keating or what might have been under Rudd/Gillard, there is much more going on here. To understand Albanese’s ambition for his government and the country, you need to dig deeper into who he is, what he is seeking to do and how he has shaped the modern Labor Party into his own image as Australia’s careful reformer.

‘That Camperdown kid’

The first thing that strikes you on meeting Anthony Albanese is how lean he looks. This speaks to more than losing a few kilos. The floppy, sandy hair he sported when he first entered parliament is grey and neatly clipped, and the off-the-rack suits replaced by a well-tailored cut. There is a sharpness to him, in contrast to the candidate who on the first day of his last campaign couldn’t recall the cash rate. Having famously declared he likes fighting Tories, he has finally turned up fit for a stoush.

He still feels the effects of the serious car crash he survived in 2021, when a 17-year-old behind the wheel of a Range Rover crossed over the centre line and ploughed head-on into Albanese’s Toyota Camry on a winding backstreet in Marrickville. It is one of three serious road accidents – “none of them my fault!” he adds – that have left Albanese with a 63-year-old back that stabs with pain when he gets up from sitting too long. But three years in the top job have hardened him. He has sworn off booze until after polling day and says he is in bed most nights by 10pm. So far, he has found time to watch only two episodes of the latest season of The White Lotus.

It is not a natural state of being for Albanese. When he is asked during a campaign stop in western Sydney whether he is going to that night’s game between his beloved South Sydney and their eastern suburbs rivals, the Sydney Roosters, he grumbles that he’s not allowed to have fun. “I will watch it on the TV. If I have fun, I get into trouble,” he says. It is unclear whether Albanese is talking about voters, his minders or the media, but staying home from Friday night football is no small sacrifice for an obsessive Souths fan. Only a week earlier, in a bizarre intervention, he publicly defended the club’s mascot, Reggie the Rabbit, after the man inside the bunny suit was caught on camera engaging in post-match biffo with a little boy.

As it turns out, Albanese misses a belter. The next day, while visiting a family farm in flood-affected western Queensland, the PM turns the conversation to Latrell Mitchell’s second-half heroics. Jacob Eggerling, a nine-year-old Broncos fan, sizes up the man in the Akubra and thinks better of arguing about football with the prime minister of Australia.

Pat Conroy has known Albanese for 30 years. Conroy grew up on the Central Coast of NSW, joined the party at age 15 and learnt about politics as a small cog in what was then known as the Frank Walker machine. He first met Albanese in 1994 when the then assistant general secretary of the ALP’s NSW branch travelled up from Sydney to help organise the local left faction for a preselection skirmish.

Conroy was still at university when he began working as a researcher for Albanese, the newly elected member for Grayndler, and is still working for him today as the defence industry minister. He saw up close Albanese’s transition from party official to parliamentarian, frontbencher, cabinet minister and leader of the house, to opposition leader and, in 2022, prime minister.

He says that Albanese, through these iterations, remained grounded in Labor’s historic mission to improve the lives of working-class people, a conviction informed by his experience of growing up in a council flat looking after his single mum, an invalid pensioner, in Sydney’s Camperdown. Conroy describes Albanese’s personal mission in different terms.

“It is a marrying of the historic mission of Labor with an incredibly hard-headed view about how you go about achieving that,” he explains. “I see people in the party who specialise in symbolic victories and often, symbolic defeats. That is not what the PM is about. The PM is about effecting change and reform that improves the lives of Australians. To do that, you have to be hard-headed and pragmatic, and you have got to win elections.”

The idea of Albanese as someone who has never forgotten where he came from is both cliched and fundamental to his politics.

On the last Saturday before the election was called, he attended a black-tie dinner at the grand ballroom of Sydney’s Fullerton Hotel – the setting of Scott Morrison’s speech that conceded to him the 2022 election – to mark the 10th anniversary of the Hellenic Initiative, a support organisation for the Greek diaspora. Tickets cost between $550 and $1000, and Albanese was seated next to Andrew Liveris, the Brisbane Olympics chairman and former Dow Chemical boss hand-picked by Donald Trump in his first term of office as US president to advise him on domestic manufacturing.

Once the speeches were done, Albanese slipped out, went home, threw on a pair of jeans and an open-necked shirt and took his partner, Jodie Haydon, to the Camperdown Hotel.

They walked in to the delight of Sherie Dewstow, who had booked a room to celebrate her 60th birthday. When they were growing up together in Camperdown, Dewstow lived in a council flat diagonally opposite Albanese. Albanese’s mum, Maryanne, looked after her little sister during the day and would often be waiting when she got home from school. At the party were another 20 or so people from the old neighbourhood – Clayton, Albanese’s wharfie mate from Fremantle; Scott, who used to work at the local council; Wendy from Melbourne. As musician and songwriter Don Walker wrote, they soon settled in to play “Do you remember so and so?”

Albanese says it was the biggest reunion of childhood friends he’d been to. Some brought their children, others their grandkids. “I just had this epiphany. These people are why I am involved. This is what makes it worthwhile –people who really need a Labor government to make a difference.”

Dewstow is a member of what she calls the Canberra Eight. These are the Camperdown kids who, on the night before Albanese’s first parliamentary sitting day as prime minister, travelled to the capital to see their friend at the dispatch box. When Albanese found out they were there, he invited them to dinner at The Lodge. Dewstow describes standing in the entrance to The Lodge, with her friend Albo grinning at her, and his dog, Toto, wagging its tail, as a pinch-yourself moment. “I said ‘Gee, I wouldn’t mind this public housing’,” Dewstow says. “He laughed and said, ‘You know, it is only a lend, I’m not here forever.’”

This returns us to what Conroy describes as Albanese’s personal mission. It is one thing for Labor to win an election. It is another for federal Labor to convince voters it can be trusted to govern long-term. This has rarely happened in 124 years since Federation and not at all this century.

As Albanese noted while campaigning at the Blacktown Workers Club, a venue not far from where Gough Whitlam launched his “It’s Time” campaign, Labor is Australia’s oldest political party and claims to be its greatest, yet has spent two-thirds of its history in opposition.

Albanese’s quest is to break this pattern. In off-the-cuff comments to mining and energy workers while campaigning this month in the Hunter Valley town of Cessnock, Albanese reminds them that big reforms help no one unless the changes can be preserved. To do this, it is not enough for Labor to win. It must learn to keep winning.

“The best governments are ones that get elected and get re-elected and make sure that it continues,” he tells the Mining and Energy Union meeting. “That’s why Medicare is still there today – because Bob Hawke won election after election after election. Gough Whitlam introduced Medibank, and it was gone after three years. We know these things can be undone.”

After listening to the PM’s speech, the union’s general president, Tony Maher, says this goes to the heart of what motivates Albanese. He wants to make laws that help people – including the Mining and Energy Union-initiated Same Work, Same Pay workplace laws which make it illegal to pay labour hire workers less than permanent employees to do the same job – but he knows that good laws have to stick.

Maher has spent a lifetime with Albanese at the intersection of union and party politics. He sees in him unusual traits for a Labor leader. He describes Albanese as cautious, empathetic and someone who hasn’t moved through politics thinking he was preordained for the top job. But he is tough. Maher, a veteran of the Mining and Energy Union’s bitter split with the Construction, Forestry, and Maritime Employees Union and disputes with some of Australia’s most powerful companies, describes Albanese as one of the toughest people he has met.

“It’s a defining characteristic of him that he doesn’t flinch under pressure,” Maher says. “In a legislative process, lots of politicians will give you promises and commitments but when the pressure is on, if they want it off the table, they will make a compromise. When it comes to Albanese, he is that Camperdown kid.” As a recent example, Maher points to Albanese standing firm in the face of a BHP and Qantas-led campaign against the Same Work, Same Pay laws.

“He was never someone who was determined to get to the top,” Maher reflects. “He just seemed to never have that burning ambition. Sometimes, they are the best ones. I think he will go down as one of the greats, frankly. But he needs that second term.”

Anthony Albanese is a complex study. Those who work with him most closely – ministers and trusted colleagues in his government – build the picture of a careful, methodical agent for change. He is not a charismatic leader or strong orator. His speechwriters weep for the number of well-crafted lines lost in Alboesque syntax. But he is a fastidious planner, strategist and alliance builder who maps out the steps to get somewhere well before he declares his intention to go.

Health Minister Mark Butler, one of the prime minister’s closest friends in parliament, has been a constant presence on the Albanese campaign. “I think he’s a principled and ambitious politician, but he is also careful,” he says. “His carefulness is a product of his upbringing. He is in areas quite moderate. He is not a raging leftie. He is a really interesting, complex mix of ambition and prudence; the sort of prudence, I think, that comes from a pretty rugged upbringing, having to look after his mum in challenging financial circumstances for his household.”

A teenage Albanese made his political bones in the Left faction radical leadership group of Young Labor, but there is nothing radical about his approach to being prime minister. He is a stickler for personally returning phone calls from his MPs instead of delegating this task to staff, and letting rival parliamentarians know when he is visiting their electorates. He speaks directly and often to journalists he trusts within the press gallery. He is sensitive to their criticism. Having been set upon, like a scene out of Lord of the Flies, by an unruly media pack during the previous election, he has wrangled the travelling press corps to the point where they now wait quietly with their hand up to ask a question.

He describes himself as the most accountable leader in the world due to the number of press conferences he holds, but is quick to anger and slow to forget when, in his judgment, proper scrutiny morphs into personal intrusion.

Albanese remains furious about the media treatment of his and Haydon’s decision to buy a clifftop home together on the NSW Central Coast late last year. His grievance, one he has expressed privately to many people, is that it was a personal decision, taken jointly by a couple planning their future, for reasons that anyone who has been through a marriage break-up should understand. The house is close to Haydon’s family and, more to the point, somewhere other than the Marrickville home Albanese shared with his previous wife, former NSW deputy premier Carmel Tebbutt. Albanese was dismayed – as was his security detachment – to see the precise location and floor plan of the house published in the mainstream press. He has made a mental note of who among his critics have beach houses of their own.

He has also not yet forgiven The Australian Financial Review for a series of columns written by Joe Aston two years ago questioning why Albanese’s then 23-year-old son, Nathan, gained membership to the Qantas Chairman’s Lounge. Since the stories were published, Albanese has not attended any business summits or events promoted by the newspaper. The paper, which is published by Nine, the owner of this masthead, has since changed editors and is hoping for a thaw in relations.

A striking contrast between the 2022 federal campaign and this one is the extent to which Albanese feels in control of the daily tempo, tone and agenda. His travelling team is led by his chief of staff, Tim Gartrell, an erudite political operative who managed his first campaign for Grayndler 28 years ago, when Labor’s hold on the inner-west seat was under siege from opponents of the contentious third runway at Sydney’s nearby airport. Back at Labor HQ, national campaign director Paul Erickson has a hot hand, having overseen the 2022 campaign and byelection victories in the Victorian seats of Aston and Dunkley.

His senior media minders, Sugden and long-serving press gallery journalist Katharine Murphy, are adept at managing press access within the limits of media bus mutiny. Murphy knows her boss’s tendency to go “off diary” – she wrote about it in a Quarterly Essay about Albanese before she went to work for him – but so far, he has stuck to a meticulous campaign script. Murphy titled her essay, “Lone Wolf”. This time, Albanese is travelling with a pack of senior ministers, with Butler, Richard Marles, Penny Wong, Jason Clare, Katy Gallagher and Don Farrell all toggling on and off the campaign plane.

Albanese remains deeply scarred from the Rudd and Gillard tumult. “The events of 23 June, 2010, where I said if you do this, you will destroy two prime ministers tonight – that is what happened to both Kevin and Julia,” he says. “I believe it was a good government. We have gone through the Global Financial Crisis and come out the other end. How do you have a legacy of saying vote for us, we’ve been a good government in our first term, when you have just deposed the elected prime minister?

“One of the ways I have been able to ask for and get the discipline we have had this term, and that sense of purpose, is because people know the role I played in all that.”

NSW senator Tim Ayres, a union leader throughout the Rudd/Gillard troubles, says the lessons of those years forced Labor to confront and change its culture. That began under Bill Shorten’s leadership and continued under Albanese. The result has been a term of government remarkably free of scandal and disunity and a party that more closely reflects Albanese’s political make-up.

“There is no hyper-factionalism, there is an ethos of focusing on the public interest,” Ayres says. “Yes, it is fundamental to have a long-term Labor government to entrench reform and do the kind of things we believe are important for the future of the country, but you only establish that if you put the national interest at the heart of it.

“The PM has come to the view that long-term Labor governments govern from the centre. That is not an ideological centre – which is an unhelpful distinction – but from the centre of where Australian people and their interest are. This is a rejection of the hyper-partisan, polarised, identity politics. He has got good Labor values, with a focus on rights and aspiration and the national interest, but he is not captured by any of the new politics or culture war stuff that parts of our politics are desperate to drag us into.”

Where the 2010 leadership change from Rudd to Gillard blindsided voters and weird goings-on inside Scott Morrison’s government were only revealed after he was voted out, Albanese has sought to restore predictability to office. “That is who we are; we are a considered, measured government,” Albanese says. “We have flagged what we are doing and here’s how we are doing it.”

The great exception to Albanese’s rule – careful, centrist government – is the Voice. On the night he was elected prime minister, in his first comments to the nation from the stage of the Canterbury-Hurlstone Park RSL in western Sydney, Albanese committed his government and himself personally to the Uluru Statement from the Heart. His commitment was heartfelt and genuine. But it triggered an ill-conceived rush to a failed referendum which, in the words of human rights lawyer Frank Brennan, one of the members of a senior advisory group which provided design models for the Voice under the previous government, “was a disaster for the country and a tragedy for First Australians”.

Australia has a miserable strike rate with referendums, and the Labor Party’s is worse. Of 26 changes to the Constitution proposed by Labor governments, only one has succeeded. Yet, despite this, Albanese staked his leadership on a question not yet framed and constitutional changes not fully developed. He resisted calls to legislate a Voice before a referendum or to hold a constitutional convention to give the public greater ownership of what was being proposed. He declined to use his powers of negotiation to secure bipartisan support. He was bitterly disappointed when the Dutton-led “No” case sank the referendum but shouldn’t have been surprised. To borrow Pat Conroy’s words, it was the ultimate symbolic defeat.

With apologies to John Howard, the times may suit Anthony Albanese.

In the months leading up to Donald Trump’s election last November, cautious incumbents around the world were road kill. Confronted with destabilising and socially corrosive forces unleashed by the pandemic, spiking inflation and wars in Gaza and Ukraine, social democratic governments looked staid, flat-footed, even quaint. From the moment Trump upbraided Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, disruption became instantly uncool. Albanese’s promise of careful, stable progress, at the risk of sounding dull, may have picked the mood of an anxious electorate. And that was before Trump declared a trade war against the rest of the world and a global recession loomed.

In suburbs and towns that will decide this election, promises of better healthcare or better local schools and a prime minister who can relate to people in difficult circumstances are things that matter. Anne Urquhart agreed to give up the remaining three years of her Senate term to try to win her local seat, the northern Tasmanian electorate of Braddon, because Albanese asked her to. It is unlikely she would have said yes to another leader. On the day Albanese flies in to make a local hospital announcement, Urquhart explains that more money for health and schools might not be a bold idea, but it is what her constituents most want.

“People being able to get in to see a doctor, people being able to pay to see a doctor and people having access to medical needs is so important,” she says. “Lifting the education skills and the education levels of people across communities is so important because we know that leads to a better life for people. If people think that is not exciting or sexy, I tell you it is in this electorate because that is what people care about. That is what they tell me.”

Tu Le, Labor’s candidate in the Uber-marginal western Sydney seat of Fowler, is running for parliament a month after having a baby. She says her own family circumstances are reflective of her electorate. She wouldn’t be able to contemplate a parliamentary career without access to subsidised childcare, and her husband recently benefited from a free TAFE course. “These policies are being received very well. They are bread-and-butter issues for our community and fundamental things that people are concerned about.”

A key moment in understanding Albanese is his opposition to Bill Shorten’s proposed changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax. While a political pragmatist might have objected to these measures for the reasons they cost Shorten the 2019 election, Albanese says his fundamental problem with the policies was the messages they sent about Labor’s attitude towards aspiration and wealth. “We celebrate success,” he says. “We just want everyone to have the opportunity to be as successful as they can be. That’s how you build a successful nation.”

Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles says an important signpost to where the Albanese government wants to take Australia is its plans for universal early learning. This was a difficult argument for Albanese to win inside a party hardwired to means-test government services. The idea of wealthy families receiving subsidised childcare remains an anathema to some Labor MPs. Albanese saw the debate in different terms.

“His point was to stress the universality,” Marles says. “Medicare is universal. Public funding of schools and universities is universal. That is the society we are building. It isn’t about penalising people who have attained wealth. We have a progressive taxation system and there are elements of means-testing throughout the welfare system, but there is a power in universality.”

Albanese is not promising to deliver universal early education in the next term, but it is embedded in his long-term plans for government. In a second interview with this masthead, conducted as Albanese was flying back to Melbourne after addressing a campaign rally in Brisbane, he walks through a staged reform process which, he hopes, will eventually see universal, publicly subsidised childcare viewed in the same way as we think about government-funded schools.

The government has increased wages and improved the retention rates for childcare workers. In the next term, it will help build more early learning centres in regional and outer suburban areas. Eventually, if Australia adopts something similar to the Canadian model, all kids will have access to early learning for $10 to $20 a day. “It becomes as normal as your kid, when they turn five, getting to go to the local public school,” he says.

Education Minister Jason Clare says the ambition of what the government is working towards in early education, schools funding, free TAFE and reduced HECs debts is meeting challenges that Australia’s education system and economy are facing. The Universities Accord report found that by 2050, Australia will need 80 per cent of its working-age people to have tertiary qualifications. The figure is currently 75 per cent, at a time when the completion rate in government schools has dropped significantly over the past 10 years.

Clare says this is why, for Albanese, creating a practical path towards realising the Gonski reforms is deeply personal. “He wants for every child in Australia the opportunities that he got,” Clare says. “He grew up poor, but he got a fantastic education. Education changes lives. He is proof of that. That is him. That is Albo.”

Albanese’s embrace of aspiration is one half of a political mantra he has repeated nearly every day of this election campaign. No one held back, no one left behind, is a catchphrase Albanese adopted soon after taking the Labor leadership. He now has the words printed on a bandana for Toto. Marles says the first time he heard Albanese say it, he understood its subtext. “It was about us being a party of aspiration,” he says. “That question was really put on trial in the 2019 campaign.”

It is also, like Albanese’s intrinsic connection to Labor’s historic mission, writ large in the PM’s life. As he leans into the cream leather upholstery of the Royal Australian Air Force VIP jet, he recaps the story in dot point form. “I was supposed to be adopted out as a child born out of wedlock. I got told my father was dead until I was a teen. I’m prime minister of Australia. I support people aspiring to a better life.”

Albanese is not promising to do politics a different way. His re-election will not usher in an era of dizzying reform. His essential offer is considered, dependable government in increasingly crazy times. It is not exciting but it may be enough.

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