What he’s saying is none of this would be happening if he wasn’t absolutely convinced the metamorphosis matters, to the voters, to the colleagues. “I’m not manageable,” he offers from the front seat of the car. Trying to tweak him would be fraught for any backroom attempting it.
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His default position on zhooshing would be: stop bothering me with this cosmetic bollocks, I know how to win.
This complexity is a barrier to malleability. He’s both everywhere, and one step removed. He’s Labor, master of an institution, a relentless networker – and a lone wolf. Albanese, being human, is a ball of contradictions. He’s already risen to the rank of deputy prime minister. He’s already been the chief tactician in a minority parliament, and a confidante of two prime ministers.
He’s an old dog for a hard road, not a soul-selling cynic, or a political ingenue in search of a svengali.Īs he told the National Press Club this week, his first political campaign was at the age of 12. But Albanese can be stubborn, headstrong and sentimental. This cohort bends into optimal shape without a moment’s hesitation.
Some ambitious politicians enter public life wanting to know how to be the product. If you know Albanese, it’s hard to imagine how on earth he consented to the optimisation. The fact he’s actually agreed to wear them is. Albanese’s new glasses aren’t in the least bit interesting. But in Albanese’s case, project optimisation is the most visible manifestation of his hunger for the win. What is happening substantively is always more important than parsing a makeover. He also took the hardest decision of his leadership: what Labor would do about climate policy. As Morrison lost altitude over the past 12 months, mired in controversy over the vaccination “ strollout”, battling the Brittany Higgins furore and the consequences of the Delta wave, Albanese lost more than 10kgs.īit by bit, as weeks ebbed into months, the wardrobe got sharper. The lack of bandwidth makes it tough to introduce yourself to people who don’t know who you are.īut the fierce competition for attention has given the Labor leader time to attend to project optimisation. Covid creates its own hierarchy of visibility – premiers first, Morrison next and Albanese after that. Out and about in the civilian world beyond politics and the media, I hear the persistent refrain that Albanese is not visible enough. Polls tell us there’s a chunk of voters who have no fixed view about the Labor leader. But they also say there is still a way to go. The first is: does Albanese want to win? Is he battle-ready? The second is: can Labor win? Is there a viable pathway to victory when the election rout in 2019 fattened the government’s margins – particularly in Queensland, the state that generally determines the national government?ĭealing with each in turn, colleagues say Albanese is currently in the best mental and rhetorical shape of his leadership. “It made me more determined.” ‘I feel a great responsibility’Īs we enter the federal election year, there are two questions to ask about Labor. He insists his core strategy to try to unseat Morrison was already locked and loaded, and he was already on a self-improvement path.īut he says the collision sharpened his thinking. He ponders the question briefly before saying the crash wasn’t “a lightbulb moment”. Less authorised history, or pre-campaign myth making.Īs we drive between Moruya and Mogo on the south coast of New South Wales this week, I pursue Albanese’s own account of the impact of the accident. The colleague says after that accident “it became: I am going to show all of you people.” This small inflection, the sprinkle of grit in the anecdote, the sense of bugger all of you, I’m going for it, feels truer to me.
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There are easier paths in life than visualising that particular career coda in full technicolour on the back of your eyeballs at 3am.īut the car crash, and the physical and mental reset afterwards, settled things. Flight in this context was the Labor leader visualising the worst-case scenario: after a career spanning the best part of three decades, failing to beat Morrison, an opponent Albanese neither likes nor respects. He has normal responses to pressure, expectation and risk. He hasn’t cauterised his emotions to survive. Albanese is from the human school of politicians. That trauma disrupted Albanese’s mental cycling between fight or flight. One colleague says the crash triggered more than a “life is precious” epiphany – it got the dander up. With the prime minister in the ascendancy, there were harbingers of internal mischief on the Labor side. Back at the time of the collision, Scott Morrison was airborne on an approval rating north of 60%.
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