Pearls and Irritations

Some events of recent weeks have been a reminder of the phenomenon the ancient Greeks called hubris. The Greeks thought of hubris as a character flaw in a leader that led to delusional overconfidence and complacency that blinds a leader and results in a tragic fall.

Anthony Albanese does not present himself publicly as the brash leader that the Greeks saw in King Oedipus, who refused to listen to the warnings of the seer Tiresias, and brought about his own ruin. Nor is Albo at first glance anything like the hot-headed King Pentheus who refused to heed advice and threatened dire punishment to anyone engaging in worship of Dionysius, while unknowingly bringing upon himself a gruesome end at the hand of Dionysius.

When dealing with the Liberal-National Coalition party and its public relations arm News Corp, it’s safe to say that Albanese listens and is responsive to a fault. Whether on the supposed dangers of releasing refugees from indefinite detention following a High Court ruling, allegations of CFMEU thuggery, restricting teenagers’ access to social media, or banning gambling advertising, the PM bends over backwards to be agreeable with respect to Peter Dutton’s concerns and, at times, accommodates his fake outrage.

Even when Albanese departed from an appeasement line as he did finally with the Stage 3 tax cuts, he was careful not to simply repeal the tax laws, but instead he overhauled them in such a way as to ensure the very rich still received a healthy tax benefit.

At a time when the primary votes for major parties are in decline, Albanese seems content to remain small-target after two years in power and persistently disappoints his supporter base without explaining why.

His decision to embrace Morrison’s AUKUS, and his dithering and impotence on big issues such as Gaza and the farcical National Anti-Corruption Commission, provide constant disappointment. By neglecting his Labor supporter base one way or another, he keeps supplying gifts that keep giving to Murdoch’s News Corporation and Peter Dutton’s ostentatious displays of indignation and high dudgeon.

Given that Albanese doesn’t communicate adequately with the people he disappoints, it’s worth looking less at what he says about what he values, and instead look at what he actually does. Doing so might help gauge where he’s coming from as the nation’s elected leader.

An example from very early in his prime ministership related to him exercising his personal authority over staffing allocations by cutting the adviser staff of independents from four to one. His rationale was that One Nation was given an unwarranted bonus staff allocation by his predecessor that needed correction.

Never mind that Albanese had gained greatly by Teal Independents campaigning on energy policy and climate change, gender equity and government corruption. They were central questions during the 2022 election campaign that saw his government elected. At the time Climate 200 independents led the charge by fearlessly taking up key issues about which a small-target Labor Party kept quiet, and were central in defeating Liberal Party MPs in five heartland electorates in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. Along with Senator David Pocock in Canberra, the Teal independents were all new to the Parliament yet within days of being elected Albanese used his personal power to make it very difficult for them to do the work they were elected to do.

His rancour appeared to be a calculated slap in the face. What could have occasioned such a mean-spirited response to new MPs that assisted his election prospects? The only sensible explanation is that the Teal victories were in fundamental defiance of the two-party system of government. It’s now an open question as to whether Albanese is so wedded to the Labor-Liberal duopoly in which he grew up, that he places the perpetuation of its existence on an equal or higher footing than supporting his natural political allies.

Another curious revelation was reportedly using his influence to get his young son membership of the Qantas Chairman’s Lounge. Membership criteria of that august body is opaque but is given by invitation to the lions of industry and other travellers of prominence as a rite of passage. Young graduate students would usually not rate, especially if they carry the baggage of Labor Party connections. Yet Albanese signalled to his son that the Chairman’s Lounge is a club to which he should aspire to belong.

A similar clue to what he appears to value was his decision to make a date in his diary to attend the Tennis Australia Open final at Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne during January. The audience at that pricey event is predictably populated by corporate executives and well-off Melburnians. With his overhaul of the Stage 3 tax cuts, Albanese had just a few days earlier trimmed the tax returns of many audience members at that event by around $9,000 a head so it would have been surprising had they not booed him when the camera flashed his picture on the big screen.

A diary secretary doing his appointments might have advised him that the tennis open audience will not likely be favourable to a Labor Prime Minister at the best of times, and that his attendance at the event could end up costing political capital for no gains, as it did. But his attendance as an official VIP was a likely indication of who he likes to mix with and what he personally values.

Why, for example, has he been a longtime supporter of the Hawthorn AFL football Club? Support for a club located in the leafy blue-ribbon heartland electorate of Kooyong with a long connection to Liberal titans such as Robert Menzies and Andrew Peacock, sits oddly with a Labor stalwart from the left faction of the Party in NSW.

As a member of the Labor left, it might have been expected that he would not lend his support to a club led by the Liberal Party firebrand Jeff Kennett. He would have been forgiven if, as a NSW Prime Minister, he switched his AFL support to Greater Western Sydney, but he didn’t.

The Hawks have won 13 AFL premierships; GWS Giants have won none. Yet despite being a sitting Prime Minister and a genuine longtime supporter, Albanese has not been offered the Number 1 ticket holder status. That honour is shared instead by legendary full forward Peter Hudson and Gwen Crimmins, the wife of the late Hawk hero Peter Crimmins, names that would mean nothing to most people north of the Murray River. In view of that snub, switching his support as PM to GWS would seem to have been a no-brainer.

That said, no-brainer decisions are not always what they seem with a dithering Albanese. He is, after all, a Prime Minister who had the option to void Scott Morrison’s AUKUS deal in 2022, which was also a no-brainer. Instead, he appeared to place mixing with dignitaries at a state dinner on the White House lawns ahead of the values entailed in preserving Australia’s national sovereignty. A New York Times report put it succinctly in September 2021, writing that Australia “bet the house” by casually “throwing its lot in with the United States for generations to come”.

In his chosen field of politics, Albanese increasingly looks and sounds indecisive as he searches for ways to acquiesce to the demands of his political and media opponents. His successes are given scant coverage in the legacy media or are characterised as failures. Examples that stand out were his significant diplomatic achievements with Australia’s Pacific Island neighbours and winning back $20 billion of trade lost by his predecessor’s bellicose rhetoric. Both achievements were projected by the media as “Airbus Albo” on indulgent holiday frolics.

By contrast, Opposition leader Peter Dutton’s adversarial pronouncements are routinely delivered with supreme certitude and given blanket coverage by the legacy media. The tactic is used time and again by Dutton and his friends in a mainstream media dominated by New Corp, and Albanese falls for the tactic so predictably that Bernard Keane from Crikey News once suggested that Dutton had become a de facto member of the Albanese Cabinet.

Given that the PM had campaigned in 2022 on his personal profile as a young Labor son of a struggling single mother, it appears that the media forces now ganging up on him have worked out that perception of his aspirational inclinations are an Achilles heel. Accordingly, as if on cue, the media are intent on juxtaposing his poverty-stricken background with personal decisions he has made from an early age that appear to flagrantly contradict that persona.

Accordingly, they employ a single-focus lens through which they gleefully make a meal of the three-bedroom seaside home Albanese has co-purchased with his future wife and his historical acceptance of flight upgrades to first class by Qantas. In the ordinary course of events, neither of these would be news stories, yet each was given widespread media that extended well into saturation coverage for a full week. The crowning irony is that these runaway non-stories swamping the news cycle and founded on a cost-of-living crisis narrative, have ensured that the big story of the week has been getting scant coverage; namely that Australia’s inflation rate has hit a 2.8% low with its implications for cost-of-living relief.

Albanese has been warned for two and a half years to do something about media ownership. Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull initiated a petition for a Murdoch Royal Commission that attracted more than a half a million signatures. Zoe Daniel moved a motion in the House to establish an Inquiry into media diversity, and Sarah Hanson-Young tabled a Bill in the Senate to look at the distortions to mainstream news arising from the concentration of media ownership. Like his ancient Greek predecessors, Albanese has stubbornly refused to consider any of these warnings, and with seven months before the next election, the media are now showing that their intentions are less than honourable, and they are intent on using anything to bring Labor down on the strength of its choice of leader.

As a credible re-election strategy, Albanese’s default impulse of pandering to his Liberal Party opponent is both problematic and hubristic. Unless he can find a way to swivel or hand over the leadership, Australian Labor could be in for a nasty surprise next May. It’s not as though Labor lacks alternative leaders. Against a background in which Kamala Harris was successfully jettisoned into the role of US presidential candidate last August for an election in three months, government ministers such as Tony Burke, Clare O’Neil, Jason Clare and Jim Chalmers are forthright communicators whose leadership credentials are increasingly discussed by unhappy Labor supporters. Whether there is any purposeful discussion among the Prime Minister’s parliamentary colleagues around tapping him on the shoulder, is another question.

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