Amid the slew of books, analyses and reports coming out about the May federal election, the media is finally pivoting to an important question: what happens now?
In Lone Wolf: Albanese and the New Politics, the latest Quarterly Essay, journalist Katharine Murphy attempts to answer this question by explaining exactly who Anthony Albanese is and how he ended up as the nation’s prime minister.
Until now we’ve relied on the 2016 biography by The Saturday Paper’s chief correspondent Karen Middleton, published when Albanese seemed marooned on the Shorten frontbench. Now, Murphy’s essay will shape just how the Canberra press gallery will come to understand him as prime minister and how they’ll analyze and report what the government does.
As Murphy admits, she expected Morrison to be reelected. Most of the press gallery seemed to agree: why waste time trying to figure out just another opposition leader? Now the gallery is catching up on the task of setting its collective assumptions of just who Albanese is.
How those assumptions get set matters. Just last year, we saw how Sean Kelly’s brutal, the-PM-has-no-clothes takedown of Scott Morrison in The Game became accepted wisdom. Morrison never really recovered.
Murphy draws a strong picture. She captures the political smarts — the emotional intelligence in the practice of government — that Albanese brings to the role. It’s an important quality for a leader: Kevin Rudd was largely brought down once the gallery decided he lacked the necessary emotional intelligence to manage the party’s over-eager rising stars.
Murphy carries us through the political experiences that shaped the prime minister: the 1980s inner-party fights, his mentoring by former ALP deputy leader Tom Uren, and on through his still-young landing on Labor’s backbench in 1996, crashing into the ambitions of the left’s other would-be leader Martin Ferguson.
However, her focus on Albanese’s handling of the climate, as both opposition leader and prime minister, could have been illuminated with a bit more detail regarding his long-term engagement on the issue. It was, after all, his policy work as opposition minister for environment, heritage and water leading up to the Rudd election that made him a senior policy thinker on the frontbench.
Murphy understands that if there was a moment when Albanese rose to the future prime ministerial shortlist, it was when, almost alone among the party leaders, he had the judgment to oppose the disastrous defenestration of Rudd in 2010, recognising in advance that it would destroy one of those rarest of political animals: Labor prime ministers.
It positioned him as the party members’ favourite when he grasped the opportunity of the Rudd-created leadership ballot in 2013, when exhaustion over the Rudd-Gillard fights had emptied out Labor’s frontbench.
As regular readers of Murphy’s style in Guardian Australia would recognise, she writes breezily, stepping through the decades with a light touch on the electoral campaign before jumping into the post-election challenges. Though like most political writing, the essay leans more into politics than policy, shifting a bit too quickly through his years in opposition and then as a senior minister in complex portfolios.
The narrative is also interrupted by a chapter that lurches to report the rise of the teals. An important story clearly told, but a distraction from the “how did the government get here” arc. Murphy’s essay is an early draft of how the media are coming to think of Albanese. There’s still a way to go before the gallery settles on a consensus on him.
The problem? Albanese is not the sort of person the parliamentary watchers on the Canberra balcony are used to seeing at the prime ministerial podium. It’s not just the now well-publicised childhood in public housing, nor being the only son of a single mother. It’s not even that he came out of the mainstream left of the party.
Perhaps it’s the fact he hasn’t spent his 20-odd pre-leader parliamentary years giving the gallery the impression he was openly maneuvering for the top job. Or that he’s seemed to prefer to exercise influence out of the public eye. Or that maybe, as the accepted wisdom seems to have become, he’s just been underrated.
Not everyone missed him. If, as Oscar Wilde says, “imitation is the greatest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to genius”, perhaps we should remember Kelly’s suggestion in The Game that Morrison based his fake daggy-dad persona on Albanese.
For Murphy, Albanese has built his own political image somewhere between humble brag and humility. He’s a gut-instinct politician, she says, who “intuits as much as he plans and calculates”.
To explain this conundrum of a prime ministerial contender hiding in plain sight for decades, Murphy reaches for the “lone wolf” analogy to ask whether the outsider on the Shorten team could become a team player. It’s a rare misstep in Murphy’s analysis. As she reports, Albanese had long been building his own pack.
The examples she gives from the opposition leader years — the embrace of child care in his first budget reply, the climate change/health reshuffle between Chris Bowen and Mark Butler — all came with extensive consultation and internal agreement (which Murphy reports).
The “lone-wolf” metaphor threatens to mislead with a look-back at the poor leadership style of the captain’s-pick culture that has degraded Australian politics and splintered parties over the past 15 years. That’s not the Albanese I’ve been watching for the past few decades.
Murphy’s narrative suggests a better concluding analogy might have been: leader of the pack. First his own, then Labor, and now the country. After all, her essay is attempting to ask a modern version of the question The Shangri-Las asked all those years ago: is Australia really going out with him?
Christopher Warren worked on Tom Uren’s staff in the 1980s, including a period overlapping with Albanese.
“As Murphy admits, she expected Morrison to be reelected. Most of the press gallery seemed to agree: why waste time trying to figure out just another opposition leader?”
If this is true, why should we bother with anything the press gallery have to say? It was clear from months before the election that Labor was a real chance.
It’s not news that most of the MSM coverage of the last election failed to predict the outcome. This was apparent from the day after the election.
I thought an ALP win was a certainty. Maybe Albanese’s fear of losing another unlosable election was the problem.
Labor was clearly 2PP in the lead in the final week, but guaranteeing that the floating mass of preferencers will actually do what they say on polling day always gives pause,
Agree. Banal observations generally.
Obviously the writer of this article does not follow Murphy very much. As one who has been at loggerheads at times with Murphy to me she was one of the few who actually saw Albanese was the Prime Minister.
Morrison was gone from the moment he said ‘I don’t hold a hose, mate’. It’s just that no one really comprehended it or faced up to it. Especially he himself, and so the repeated adding of instances of the ‘It’s not my job’ escape line, as he vanished further into the distance every time prime ministerial responsibility loomed before him, slowly reinforced and hardened the lying, do-nothing image. When it was obvious the ‘Teal’ people were going to cause some havoc because of the LNP climate debacle, Albo became a shoo-in at least six months before the election, though he didn’t evince confidence; didn’t even have to raise the primary vote in the end. I like Murphy, but she finds the hive mind orthodoxy of the press gallery hard to move from. In the end, most of them simply did their best to fulfill their own echoing predictions and wishful thinking.
Agree, maybe Murphy is a symptom of our ‘medium’; when one has the misfortune to see ABC Insiders, when Murphy is on she seems to unwittingly fit in well with the right wing media culture?
I think that journalists got caught out not recognising the same things both times – worry/concern/fear.
It was clear Morrison would win in 2019. His ability to whip up fear was phenomenal and Labor was offering the kind of policies that a master fearmonger could work with beautifully.
This year the same emotion came into play but we were worried/fearful of the Morrison reality instead. Labor came into that environment offering us policies and behaviour much more difficult for a known fearmonger to manipulate.
Albanese understands the ALP and he understands his own limitations. I don’t see him as a lone wolf.
As for his ALP predecessors: “Kevin Rudd was largely brought down once the gallery decided he lacked the necessary emotional intelligence to manage the party’s over-eager rising stars.” Really? Rudd micro-managed and so decisions were delayed. When Gillard took over while he was overseas the ALP experienced a PM whose in-tray was empty at the end of each day. Maybe that had something to do with it.
Rudd micro-managed and so decisions were delayed.
That line indicates to me that he lacked the emotional intelligence that is essential to the role of a good leader..
From the outside the actions of the senior ministers who destroyed Rudd and therefore Labor for a decade were acting in….a bubble. That KR was not a nice person seemed a matter barely related to what a Labor government is there to do. I assume noone who makes it to the top of a political party is a “nice” person.
Effective leadership is still necessary. Perhaps even more important when virtually everyone is self-obsessed and power hungry.
Gillard was our best PM since the Hawke-Keating era.
By a mile.
As a bonus she’s been a class act since.
Spot on. A perfect example of rightwing media. Workers as well as lnp supporters believed it. And look at who we’ve had since.
Gillard was the best since Whitlam.
Utterly brilliant.
He’s been in parliament since ’96 and you lot in the press pack are only trying to figure him out now? Do keep up.
They missed him because he wasn’t running around saying “Look at me, look at me”. A quiet achiever.
Achiever?
Loud or not, name a single accomplishment for the last quarter century of $240K+.
Agree. Deep as a pavement puddle of piss at noon.On a hot day.
Who knows what the future holds? It seems to me that Albanese is playing a long game, waiting until he can take people with him to effect change. Too much experience of LNP over-the- top scare campaigns, I think, have made him cautious about rushing through changes. I just hope he grasps the nettle sometime soon and doesn’t leave it too late.
I enjoyed Murphy’s essay.
Maybe. However, that would mean Albanese is counting on winning the next election or two, at the very least, with a working majority in the lower house and a biddable senate each time. What is he, and all who want some progress, left with if that does not happen? Make hay while the sun shines, or carpe diem, would seem a better and wiser strategy, exactly because, as you say, “Who knows what the future holds?”
Traditionally, new governments impose the unpopular stuff in year one, stabilise in year two and hand out the lollies in year three. Seems to work unless it upsets the donors.
Traditions need shakeups when you end up with conservatives in control for so long. I hope JMNO is right and he is bringing the people along for the long the ride. So far the ALP is not doing enough to the factors fueling the climate crisis.
I agree. It looks to me (maybe wishful thinking) that he is building his credibility as a safe, competent, reliable and trustworthy leader so that when the hard stuff comes and the poo hits the fan from the anti-Labor forces, he will be in a better position to discount them, claim moral superiority and public respect.
Spot on JMNO _ except for the wishful thinking comment. Albo knows what hes doing. Very under rated strategist . very good article by Christopher./warren
Anthony Albanese first came to my awareness after his Grievance Debate Speech in April 1998 where he excoriated John Howard. It was an accurate assessment of Howard’s character, a speech full of acerbic wit. Pretty much from that moment on it was apparent that Albanese had the ability to make it to PM; the only thing likely to prevent the right man from getting their was the ALP factionsi In the end their skulduggery could not stop him either. He copped plenty of criticism for that speech but the essence of the man is in there, the things issues he cares about and they are all ‘people’ centred issues. I have no doubt he is the right man for the job and I hope he is there for a very long time because it will take a very long time dealing with the lack of progress that started in this era with Howard.
Agreed Annika. Albo’s Prime Ministerial profile is calculated. Fortuitously, shared with a talented Frontbench. Key portfolios matched with balanced choices. Ministers on-side, willing, and up to task of both domestic, global, current needs, priority. Wong and Gallagher more than balance the gender game due to their professional competence. In a word, Albo’s leadership measured and shared. He has less an urgency, need, to focus upon building a profile . . . for success of his peers is also shared. And that insight confirms his leadership. Tough times ahead. Compared to the immediate past; Albo’s Govt acknowledges our Nation will be challenged?
That speech is a cracker! It’s obvious that like me, Albo despises Howard with every fibre of his being. Savoured every word.
anthonyalbanese.com.au/grievance-debate-prime-minister