It’s half-time in the race to polling day, and as Anthony Albanese emerges from COVID-19 isolation, Labor can’t afford for anything else to go wrong.
What will stand Albanese in good stead for the three weeks ahead, according to those who know him well, is his fighting spirit. “Everything that he has got in life he has had to fight for,” says a colleague who has known him since his days as a young firebrand in the party’s youth wing. “There is nothing that he was ever handed on a bloody platter.”
He became the first person in his family to finish high school and went on to Sydney University to study economics. But his studies often took second place to a passionate involvement in student politics, which saw him marked out early as a rising star of the Labor left. In 1996, on his 33rd birthday, Albanese was elected to the federal parliament, having by then managed to turn his local electorate of Grayndler from a bastion of the party’s right into a stronghold for the left.Credit:His first taste of the frontbench came six years later, in 2001, and by 2007 he was a cabinet minister under Rudd.
He won 60 per cent of the membership vote but narrowly lost to the right’s Shorten who edged him out with the majority of caucus votes, including some who’d defected to Shorten from the left. Butler, who managed Albanese’s campaign, would later tell Albanese’s biographer Karen Middleton, “an act of treachery did him in”.“I believe I’m a better leader now than I would have been if elected in 2013,” Albanese says. “I have made sure we have proper shadow ministry processes.
Of himself and Shorten, he says “we are fine. I spoke to him before the debate and got his advice about what happened last time, and I spoke to him after as well. He’s an important part of the team”.I quiz Albanese about his recent declaration that Labor’s “historic mission” was to lift more people into the middle class. Wouldn’t his youngermission,” he replies.
Craig Emerson, a former adviser to Bob Hawke, one-time cabinet minister, and co-author of the party’s review of its 2019 election failure, says Albanese’s firm grip on mainstream values is “very important”.
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