It was a little after noon and Malcolm Turnbull’s government was collapsing under a second leadership challenge in as many days from Peter Dutton. After a string of ministerial resignations and frantic Liberal number-crunching, the House of Representatives had just been adjourned for the day. So heightened was the civic emergency in Parliament House on 23 August 2018 – a few hours of Hunter S Thompson-esque treachery and weirdness – that government wheels effectively halted as the nation contemplated Turnbull’s demise and the next day’s rise of Dutton, Scott Morrison or Julie Bishop.
The cause-and-effect nature of leadership challenges draws most senior politicians into the helter-skelter, sliding-door liminality of it. Anthony Albanese was no stranger to the treachery and arithmetic of leadership familicide after the epic Rudd-Gillard-Rudd death roll that culminated in Labor’s 2013 election defeat. So it might reasonably be assumed he was glued to the rolling coverage or intimately involved in war-gaming tactical options for whoever would emerge as the next Liberal prime minister.
But as the drama intensified, Albanese took a call from his mate John Alexander, the then Liberal MP for Bennelong, a former world No 8-ranked tennis player. “That day when Scott was taking over from Malcolm, they ceased parliament – and so I called him [Albanese] up and said to him, ‘Well, you know all about this stuff, there’s nothing we can do is there?’,” Alexander recalls.
“And Anthony said, ‘No, there’s not really.’ And I said, ‘OK, well we’ve been promising to have a proper [tennis] practice session and to work on your game. So let’s go [to the Parliament House tennis] courts and do it. And that’s what we did while all of the politics was going on. So for about an hour and a half I did a full sort of work on his game – I taught him how to hit a slice serve.”
As Albanese seeks re-election for a second parliamentary term, this illustrates something about his political approach. Precisely what depends if you’re consulting allies or critics. And you don’t spend the better part of 45 years as a Labor activist, functionary, leftwing factional leader, backbencher, frontbencher, deputy PM and prime minister without amassing a player’s box full of both – and that’s just on your own side of politics.
Albo on the hustings
“I’ve always regarded him as light-on,” says one Labor critic. “You’d have to ask why he would be playing tennis that day instead of marking up the next Tory leader alongside [then Labor leader] Bill [Shorten].”
The answer probably has more to do with the enduring enmity between Albanese and Shorten, since the latter won a leadership contest between the pair after Rudd’s defeat in 2013.
But “light-on”, says one professional intimate, is a caricature Albanese deeply resents, along with allegations he is somehow “indolent”, “confusing” or “weak” (Dutton’s preferred focus-group-honed slight that Labor movement enemies also sometimes allege).
“He doesn’t like to be bombarded with shedloads of information,” this associate says. “He doesn’t feel the need to read dozens of long briefing papers ahead of decisions and he’s appreciated clean, relatively concise arguments and briefings.”
According to a range of supporters, Albanese tends not to overly “sweat the small stuff” – a strong, practical trait in a leader. Unlike some other PMs, notably Kevin Rudd (whom he served as deputy prime minister for less than three months in 2013), less briefing material is often more for Albanese.
They insist that as chair of federal cabinet he tends to avoid micro-management – at least in the room. The treasurer, Jim Chalmers – accepted by many in Labor as Albanese’s likely successor – praised the PM’s “collaborative style of leadership” in his post-budget address to the National Press Club.
One of Albanese’s inner circle says: “Cabinet government works best when ministers are invested with the confidence to run things in their portfolios with relative autonomy. He knows there is no need to micro-manage … unless, of course, things go awry – then he can act very forcefully. Intervene and assume control.”
Countering that, a detractor observes: “He doesn’t read widely enough. He has effectively managed to paralyse dissent on many fronts, especially in caucus. He’s also got a glass jaw when it comes to internal criticism. And he’s a score-settler.”
While this frank character assessment may point to traits opponents find unlikeable and undesirable (not to mention at odds with the image of hip contemporary music lover DJ Albo and the knockabout Labor everyman), it certainly belies Dutton’s caricature of him as weak and ineffectual.
This, however, is not the “Albo” on the hustings who can converse with ease about pretty much anything (sporting stats and infrastructure are favourites), and work a pub, childcare centre (he’s good with babies and animals) or boardroom with the best.
A self-reliant scrapper
At his press conference to announce the 3 May election date, Albanese asked journalists if they were ready. They were. Asked in response if he was, Albanese said: “You bet. Born ready.”
This was no throwaway line, but reflects how he views himself: a solo-flying scrapper and an uber-resourceful, vigilant, self-reliant survivor.
The son of a beloved single mum, Maryanne, an invalid in and out of hospital during some of his formative years. A boy who grew up in public housing in inner-city Sydney, at times “dirt poor”. Some Australian political leaders, left and right, will inflect their backgrounds with social grit. But Albanese’s log cabin story stands among the most authentic in the Labor canon alongside that of the train driver Ben Chifley and, irrespective of his later polish and elan, Paul Keating, the former clerk who left school at 15.
Albanese’s personal self-sufficiency has profoundly shaped his approach. He is gimlet-eyed to political threat, internal and external. This can sometimes render him overly cautious – although he can also rely too heavily on his own instinct and as a result have a cloth ear when it comes to anticipating likely public reaction. He has always been a ruthless, unsentimental enemy and adversary, capable of whatever-it-takes bastardry – you don’t otherwise survive as a pre-eminent New South Wales left figure against a dominant right faction.
This acute self-reliance prompted Guardian Australia’s former political editor Katharine Murphy (now on Albanese’s staff) to label him a political “lone wolf” in her 2022 Quarterly Essay.
Solo flyers can easily crash and burn in party politics, a realm in which alliance-building and consensus, and the physical and intellectual need to rely on others, need to be balanced with a leader’s intuition and initiative.
Meredith Burgmann, a former Labor president of the NSW upper house, has been friends with Albanese for more than four decades. She says: “He once said to me that what makes him the person and the politician he is, is that he had to look after himself so much from the time he was very young. He was very close to his mum, and they were very tight and loving. But she was often unwell, sometimes in hospital, and he had to bring himself up in some ways. He had to be self-reliant. He had to run his own race from a very young age.”
This made him very tough, she says. “I don’t think I’ve known a tougher person in politics – absolutely unsentimental when he needed to be. But he will also cry at the drop of a hat, especially when his mother is mentioned.”
Albanese choked up when he referred to his mother on the day he announced the election.
He was often ruthlessly efficient as assistant secretary of the NSW Labor party when it came to renewing the federal and state parliamentary party.
A former colleague says: “You know, these were old fellas, much loved, and he’d have to tap them on the shoulder, dispense them for new blood, which he absolutely did without sentiment.”
The journalist and author Paul Cleary was a year behind Albanese at Sydney’s St Mary’s Cathedral school. They sold newspapers after class in the city’s financial district and later studied political economy at the University of Sydney.
Cleary wrote in The Australian in 2013: “I discovered that Albanese had become a fierce political warrior from the Labor Left when I enrolled in the same [university] course. During those formative years Albanese was a vehement hater of his political foes, which seemed to be anyone on the right side of the left faction. When I once asked him about a political opponent who had died in a car accident, he had no kind words to say.”
Old-school authenticity
Self-reliance. Resilience. Trust in one’s own survival instincts. These qualities served Albanese well as a student politician of the left and later in the right-dominated state secretariat.
But sometimes they can rub up against the mechanics of party leadership and the day-to-day business of being prime minister. Your days are fully accounted for. The machine takes over most aspects of your life so you can focus more intently on the politics. Someone does your schedule, almost to the minute. Drives you everywhere. Cooks your meals, does your dry-cleaning, tells you when to fit in exercise and have down time with family or your dog (in Albanese’s case, his beloved cavoodle Toto).
“So, if you’re conditioned to be instinctively self-reliant, to do everything for yourself, not having all sorts of stuff done for you, this requires a shift in attitude – a willingness to be done for. He doesn’t resent it. He’s just constantly aware of the adjustment this requires,” says one in his orbit.
It is doubtful if Albanese (elected on his 33rd birthday on 2 March 1996, when John Howard ousted the Keating government) initially held the prime ministerial ambition, that proverbial baton in the knapsack, that most new MPs carry, no matter how fancifully.
Burgmann doesn’t think so.
“I remember when he was assistant secretary, he said to me, ‘I know I’m really good at this stuff and I think it’s where I should stay’. I never ever heard him say ‘I want to be prime minister’. But that might just have been him being careful and sensible, because those who say that sort of thing can really give you the shits.”
Albanese had never been (and may never be) called polished or poised in appearance or delivery. It’s become intrinsic to his Labor appeal. There has long been an air of somewhat rock’n’roll dishevelment about him. He’s liked a beer or three (though he’s off the booze now), a party and he’s doubtless inhaled. He is also known for long, fact-laden, listicle-like answers, often with too many sub-clauses, delivered in a voice that can grate. But he also exudes something you can’t buy, fake or cultivate in public life: old-school Labor working-class authenticity.
“Albo was always very working class in his ways and manners and everything,” Burgmann says. “He was always aware … that he wasn’t quite the right look.”
In 2015 Albanese had his “working-class teeth” fixed up, and before the 2022 election he sharpened his image, losing 18kg and acquiring new glasses and suits, perhaps to signal greater political match fitness.
Alexander says: “You know people thought he lost the weight for other reasons – but I can tell you he lost it to improve his tennis. When he lost the weight he was so much quicker around the court.
“He is a very good player. Winning on the court was very important to him. He goes hard,” says Alexander. Albanese still plays regularly, including with his son, Nathan, at Marrickville Lawn Tennis Club.
First-term troubles
Even Albanese’s most assiduous supporters concede that, despite the appearance of match fitness, he had at best a lacklustre 2022 election campaign. After a couple of early slip-ups, Albanese found a cautious momentum that won Labor nine seats, and a majority of two, though with just a 32.5% primary vote (the lowest since 1934).
After three terms of Coalition government, Morrison, all bellicosity and bluster by the end, was electoral poison compared with Albanese, the workmanlike everyman. Despite his Labor pedigree and having served in parliament for 26 years, including as a senior minister and deputy prime minister, Albanese was not readily defined in the public imagination. Labor critics are still concerned people don’t properly know what he stands for. He did not come to the top job with the monolithic public Labor profile of a Gough Whitlam or Bob Hawke, with that of Keating’s rottweiler-in-Zegna persona, or even Rudd’s morning show, FM-bro nerdy notoriety.
But he was also far more than some Chauncey Gardiner at the head of Labor’s queue, a political leader who embodied the post-Morrison national desire for a less combustible, voluble and divisive political discourse. He was personally popular in the polls, and was elected on a raft of solid Labor policy promises on education, childcare, wage increases, energy rebates, environmental protection, renewable energy and housing affordability initiatives among others.
All politics is local, it is said. But it is also undeniably global. The war in Ukraine was already putting pressure on fuel prices. The Israel-Gaza war added to the uncertain international atmosphere while precipitating simmering local tensions. A second Trump presidency – much more belligerent and aggressive and now playing havoc on global financial markets and economies – compounds the pressure on Australia’s leadership.
Still, as the Albanese government entered 2025, Labor had a solid story of achievement to tell: the far more equitable redistribution of Morrison’s stage-three tax cuts; inflation down from about 6% to less than 2.5%; significant jobs growth and increases in real wages; minimum wage increases and boosted salaries for aged care and childcare workers; cheaper childcare and medicines; significant reform to education funding, and free Tafe.
But there was little evident political dividend for the government, and questions were being asked internally about whether Albanese was outlining a narrative coherently enough when others, not least Chalmers and the education minister, Jason Clare (now instructively Labor’s campaign spokesperson), did so with greater fluency and apparent ease.
Labor continues to bleed on the issue of home affordability.
It has also acquiesced to the political influence of big mining (especially in Western Australia) and Tasmanian aquaculture at the expense of promised greater environmental protection and conservation of endangered species.
The party’s primary vote in public opinion polls still hovers barely above 30%. Labor’s position (and public sentiment towards Albanese as measured by the research) has slightly improved this year, especially since the interest rate cut in February, though it continues to oscillate. But most indicators suggest a hung parliament in which the most likely scenario is that Labor would be able to govern only with the support of the teals and/or Greens.
How, after just three years in government, does Albanese find himself in such a precarious position, teetering on the abyss of leading only the second federal government since James Scullin’s in 1931 to be ousted after one term?
Albanese’s supporters insist he is still determined to use his prime ministership to, in the words of one, “change things permanently for the better for people who have little or nothing”.
It is why, they say, he is using the election to bolster core historical Labor initiatives on health and education, childcare and wages – at a time when the right, globally, seems intent on “dismantling society”.
Clare says Albanese articulated his ethos about the function of Labor governments on election night in 2022. “He said that Labor governments opened the doors of opportunity and now we want to open them a bit wider.” That is what he’s been doing, Clare says.
He talks about Albanese’s imperative of extending the primary public policy initiatives of Labor governments back to Whitlam, especially on healthcare and education – “the core business in the Labor party for as long as I can remember”.
“The boss comes from very humble beginnings. It was the education that he got … that changed his life and he’s never forgotten that.”
Labor’s first-term troubles seem to have been seeded in Albanese’s 2022 election pledge to constitutionally enshrine via referendum an Indigenous voice to parliament during his government’s first term. Albanese’s rationale was based in part on an assumption that if Labor won, the Liberal leadership would transition to Josh Frydenberg, a purported moderate who was likely to support the voice referendum and bring his party with him. It was a gamble; did Frydenberg really have that sway over his party’s dominant conservative faction?
On the night he won, 21 May 2022, Albanese reiterated his referendum pledge. Three days later, Frydenberg conceded defeat to the teal Monique Ryan in his seat of Kooyong. Dutton assumed the Liberal leadership and opposed the referendum.
Despite entreaties from elements of his caucus (some privately complain they were never given the opportunity to adequately express concerns) that a referendum defeat would immeasurably stunt the opportunity to advance the imperatives of the Uluru statement from the heart, Albanese went ahead with the vote, which duly sank.
It was a lonely corner he was in.
The defeat emboldened Dutton and his base obstructionism. It also fortified his daily attacks on Albanese on everything from national security (not least regarding China) and, even more nefariously, the advance of Australian interests in the tariff showdown with Trump.
A wedding, a clifftop home and Aukus
In talking to a range of Albanese’s critics and supporters, the characteristics most often referenced are his self-reliance and stubbornness, whether as strengths or pejoratives. So, too, his capacity to cut dead Labor critics who challenge him.
“Of all of the things Dutton could label Albo, the most inaccurate, the least correct would have to be ‘weak’,” Burgmann says. “People might call him all sorts of things, but weak is just not right. He is the very opposite of weak.”
A politician who defers to their instincts against better advice can, on a good day, end up being celebrated as a crazy-brave diviner of the electoral zeitgeist. On a bad day they’ll be deemed a deluded loser, incapable of reading the room.
Sometimes, it is said, Albanese will not be told. Other times he won’t ask. Other times he simply doesn’t want to hear.
On unwillingness to be told, rewind to the PM’s decision to attend the wedding of Kyle Sandilands alongside, as the headline records, “a nightclub mogul and a former convict”.
On not asking, rewind to the purchase with his partner, Jodie Haydon, of the $4.3m “clifftop home in Copacabana” on the NSW central coast.
Those who have known Albanese for decades insist they have rarely seen him personally happier. He was “floored”, one friend says, a “total mess”, said another, after the breakdown of his long marriage to Carmel Tebbutt in 2019. He never imagined finding another partner.
Haydon has a large extended Irish Catholic family who have warmly welcomed Albanese and his son, Nathan. He loves spending time with them. Family for Albanese was always intimate (his father, whom he met only late in life, lived in Italy), it was mostly his mother and a beloved aunt. Suddenly family is boisterous and expansive, warm and very big. Haydon has never before owned her own home.
Still Albanese, to the chagrin of many furious party members, was disinclined to seek advice on the purchase during a cost-of-living “crisis”, which renders too many people priced out of home ownership. Colleagues considered it reckless. Regardless of its emotional import to him, it was a terrible reading of the electoral room that cast serious doubt on his judgment.
In one of the more incisive recent interviews of his prime ministership, Albanese told the Squiz podcast: “I didn’t expect someone to come along and … I wasn’t looking for another long-term partner, but Jodie and I have found each other, and that’s fantastic. And we made a choice to buy a home together for down the track and sold another home. Not all decisions are about politics. Not all decisions do you put into a focus group. It’s about us and our life together and I think people understand that.”
And perhaps on not wanting to hear, consider 15 September 2021, when Albanese and a few shadow ministers agreed after just a two-hour briefing to sign on to Morrison’s $368bn Aukus submarine deal – the most critical and expensive strategic defence decision Australia is likely to make this century.
Internal critics have expressed exasperation about the process – or absence of it in caucus – that led Labor to lend support to the deal. Many will reduce Albanese’s motivation to a simple fear of being labelled by Morrison back then a waverer on national security.
Now Trump has dramatically changed the complexion of the US-Australia alliance and cast even greater doubts about whether the Americans will ever produce nuclear-powered submarines for Australia.
Labor MPs are increasingly anxious about the future of Aukus and the alliance. Increasing numbers believe – or hope – the deal will be revisited by a re-elected majority Labor government.
Caucus, it seems, may yet have its full and frank say in a returned Albanese government in which, perhaps, the self-reliant loner becomes more genuinely consensual.
Then again, that all depends on how long he stays in politics.
At times when his judgment has seemed most absent – after the referendum and when buying the new home – there was never a threat to his leadership. In that he was the beneficiary of the collective trauma of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years.
But the ending has yet to be written.
“I think if we are returned in a minority he’ll be gone by Christmas,” says a detractor.
“No,” says a supporter in the parliamentary party, “I think if we win he will go full-term and govern far less cautiously second time around.”
