Haydon has found it to be revealing. She’s remarked to friends that Albanese plays hard – he almost always wins. He doesn’t restrain his competitive instinct even for his fiancee.
Illustration:Jim Pavlidis.
Albanese presents himself as an ordinary,easy-going,amiable sort of bloke. But beneath the surface bonhomie is a fierce competitor. He had to be combative to achieve ascendancy in his own faction,the NSW Left,for a start. He led the so-called hard left in a pivotal struggle against the soft left in 1989.
His prize was the post of assistant general secretary of the NSW Labor Party. That’s the peak job for the left in NSW;the right is perpetually dominant.
Then Albanese had to play hard just to protect his faction’s interests,just to protect himself,while in that job. He returned from holidays one time to find that he’d been locked out of his office by right operatives and bundled into the admin area of the Sussex Street HQ. He brought union delegates in to knock the locks off the door and forced his way back in.
“Iron sharpens iron,” says one of his close internal allies. “When he wins,he wins,and when he loses,he remembers.”
When he wins,he wins. When he loses,he remembers.Alex Ellinghausen
Albanese lost the contest for the Labor leadership against the right’s Bill Shorten while Labor was in opposition. But he continued a subterranean fight for internal power. With the help of Andrew Giles,today the minister for immigration,Albanese purged a Shorten support cell in the left – the sub-faction controlled by the Victorian left warlord Senator Kim Carr.
One consequence of Albanese’s 40 years of internal Labor struggle is his near-complete dominance of the national left of the party. “He has the personal loyalty of 90 per cent of the left,” explains a faction member,or 40 of the 44 members in the left parliamentary caucus. “No one previously had more than 50 per cent.”
Tony Abbott once observed that the “the point of being prime minister is that you’ve got to be a national leader,not just a tribal chief”. Abbott himself never quite made the transition.
But Albanese is trying hard. He likes to boast that he runs an orderly,methodical government. He models his cabinet on Bob Hawke’s style,presiding as chairman of the board and delegating to his ministers,rather than Paul Keating’s emperor system or Kevin Rudd’s command-and-control method. He stays calm,speaks carefully and suppresses public outbursts.
He’s succeeded on the hate index. No one hates Albanese. He’s not well defined in the public mind. Most people can’t say what he represents and few can name an achievement of his. But they don’t hate him. This is a valuable accomplishment for a leader heading towards an election;just ask Scott Morrison.
But sometimes the fierce competitor surfaces,as he did this week. On Wednesday,asked about the government’s view on the Gaza war,,a party he loathes at least as much as he loathes the Liberals,and possibly even more.
Remember that,in his inner-west Sydney seat of Grayndler,the longstanding threat to Labor is the Greens,not the Liberals. Albanese has been fighting the Greens for his seat for 28 years.
“Our social cohesion is a national asset that all of us have built and all of us have a responsibility to uphold and defend,” Albanese told the House. “Right now,our communities are distressed ... We have a responsibility to not add to that distress through misinformation.”
Before turning his ire on the Greens:“It is unacceptable that misinformation is being consciously and deliberately spread by some Greens senators and MPs,who have engaged in this in demonstrations outside offices and online. That includes knowingly misrepresenting motions that are moved in this parliament.”
Protesters have camped outside in Marrickville for months. Two weeks ago they became so unpleasant that he closed the office. So it can no longer service the needs of local people who want his help.
“Our staff do work to provide assistance to people dealing with Medicare,social security,migration and other issues,” Albanese pointed out. “They deserve respect,not abuse,not assault,not attacks on the office.”
It’s the same or worse outside another half-dozen Labor MPs’ offices. Harassment,abuse,vandalism. One MP,,was jostled by abusive protesters. Bricks through windows,graffiti accusing MPs of supporting “genocide”,the symbol for Hamas painted on offices. The protesters claim to be pro-Palestinian but often cross the line into antisemitism.
Greens leader Adam Bandt says the party has nothing to do with any of the violence or antisemitism. But here’s how one Labor MP,former doctor Michelle Ananda-Rajah,representing the Melbourne seat of Higgins,drew the connection this week:“I sat in this chamber when the leader of the Greens political party ... accused Labor MPs of being complicit in genocide. Within hours,an online campaign was launched calling for a ‘national day of action against Labor MPs complicit in genocide’.
“Those were the exact words. The next day,offices were vandalised and rendered unusable. Staff were scared. Scarce resources like police,the AFP,cleaners and tradies were diverted. The words spoken in this chamber ricochet around this country,tearing at our social fabric,and the gun gets fired here.”
Albanese holds the Greens responsible for dog-whistling,cheerleading the antisemitic agitation that has been whipped up in Australia. Many other Labor,Coalition and independent MPs share his anger. So when the prime minister deplored the Greens in the House,he was roundly supported on all sides. Cries of “shame” rang out,aimed at the Greens.
Peter Dutton got to his feet to add his own spirited denunciation of the Greens for antisemitism,concluding with:“The Greens political party today is properly and rightly condemned.”
This was a threshold moment in Australian politics. It was a bipartisan branding of an important minor party as an illegitimate force,for violating the foundational tenet of liberal democracy – to uphold equality,freedom and human dignity,to advance no one’s rights to the point where they diminish another’s.
The major parties put the Greens in the same category as Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. Where One Nation has a history of discriminating against Indigenous people and Asians,the Greens now are condemned as antisemitic. The Greens reject the accusation.
The Greens under Bandt had made serious progress in the transition from being a party of protest to a party of problem-solving;the rabidity of their campaigning on this matter has set them back enormously in mainstream Australia.
Dutton has gone the logical next step – he’s calling on Albanese to refuse to accept Greens preferences at the next election. The Liberals,of course,get none. But the prime minister’s distaste for the Greens doesn’t extend to self-harming Labor’s share of the two-party preferred vote. He sidestepped,saying it was a matter for the party’s organisational wing. In this,his principles extend only so far as his politics will allow.
Albanese’s competitive mongrel has asserted itself in two other forms in recent weeks. Immigration Minister Andrew Giles has fumbled the detainees question for half a year,and only on Friday sought to bring it decisively to an end with a new ruling on visa cancellations.
But Albanese has defended Giles with a fierce determination against pressure from outside and inside the government. Yes,he’s the same Giles who allied with Albanese in purging the Kim Carr faction. And the prime minister is showing defiant tribal loyalty to him,protecting a minister who would have been sacked months ago on any reasonable assessment of competence and skill in crisis management.
The other manifestation of Albanese’s mongrel is his decision to define the terms of the next election,a year from its due date. He told my colleague James Massola last week that the election would be a referendum on nuclear power versus renewable energy. The best form of defence,as the adage goes,is offence.
Albanese tries to look like a statesman but his inner scrapper is only just beneath the surface. Just ask Jodie.
Peter Hartcher is political editor.