Steven Joyce: Don't expect too many favours from Albo

Anthony Albanese on the campaign trail. Like his predecessors, he'll always put Australia's interests first. Photo / AP

Opinion

OPINION:

In 2010, about a year into being Transport Minister, I was encouraged by officials to attend the Commonwealth Transport Ministers Council meeting in Perth.

It was a long way to go at a busy time. I asked what I would learn. The ministry chief executive paused, and perhaps unwittingly channelling his best Sir Humphrey, deadpanned "you will learn, minister, that it was a very good idea not to join the Federation back in the 1890s".

It didn't seem the best reason, but ministers were expected to attend some of these meetings and get to know our federal and state colleagues.

It was a fascinating introduction to the realpolitik which is the intermingling of federal and state governments in Australia. In an after-dinner session the night before the formal meeting, over a couple of bottles of Barossa shiraz, the main issues were thrashed out. There were no officials present, just 10 ministers having a chat. The only clue this was "the main event" was the couple of ministers who turned up with cue cards, which they held semi-surreptitiously in front of them like a poker hand.

At that stage it was a Labor Commonwealth Government and a mixture of state governments. Ministers' views seemed defined much more by the state from whence they came, rather than their political tribe. New South Wales was brash and self-confident, Victoria was inclined to stand apart, South Australia was adept at playing the eastern states off against each other, and Queensland and WA were "new money" states, secure and insecure at the same time.

Presiding over all this, and negotiating his way through the swamp of vested interests to get some things ticked off, was the Federal Transport Minister, one Anthony Albanese, or Albo. He was quite the master at his craft, no doubt learned over decades of horse trading in the New South Wales Labor Party. He appointed himself the unofficial tour guide to the new boy from Kiwiland, giving me a quiet background commentary on what would be happening, how it would play out and what the outcome would be. At this meeting, and another I attended in Cairns, he was rarely wrong.

I enjoyed his company. His politics was different to mine, but Australian Labor has always been more pragmatic and less leery of business and the economy than its New Zealand counterpart.

Years later we developed a minor habit of bumping into each other around Australia, once on a plane from Perth to the east coast, and again in a hotel bar in Brisbane after weary days on the road for both of us.

On those latter occasions Albo was Federal Opposition Leader, picking up the pieces from the failed Shorten assault on The Lodge in 2019. He was a humble guy with, as they say, plenty to be humble about. Labor had just lost the unloseable election, Australia had a new Prime Minister in Scott Morrison, and nobody wanted to know the opposition leader. There were just four of us in that bar, two Aussies on holiday, me, and Albo.

I suspect he's put in a huge effort to get to where he is now. Many people on his own team doubted him lasting three years as opposition leader, let alone making the leap to PM. He spent a lot of time traipsing around the back-blocks in the early days, listening and learning in the way Bill Shorten never took the time to do.

At the time of our more recent meetings, I was on my own journey of discovery around Australia. I did a project for the Federal Government on skills training reform, and a subsequent one for the Liberal Party reviewing the 2019 election. Both had me travelling to every corner of the continent listening to the aspirations and frustrations of everyday Australians. They provided great insights into the lucky country.

Anthony Albanese and Jacinda Ardern shake hands while standing for photographs ahead of a meeting in Sydney, Australia. Photo / Getty Images

The biggest was on one level obvious, the country's massive geography. Sure Australia has five times our population, but it has nearly 30 times our land mass. And that means it has many communities that have nothing in common with each other.

We have our geographic differences but they are much less likely to tip up a national political coalition than in Australia. Rural Queenslanders don't understand suburban Melbournites. Hell, they don't even have much in common with Brisbane-dwellers. When the good people of Cairns rail against the hopelessness of central Government, they don't mean Canberra, they mean Brisbane, and sometimes Townsville.

Perth was very happy to pull up the drawbridge on the rest of Australia during the pandemic. Plenty of people living there are still not sure about Federation. And so it goes. Australia can't even agree on a national footy code.

Thinking of Australia as a coalition of big and small tribes living remotely from each other helps understand why their politics is often more unstable and fractious than ours.

In the 15 years since Kevin Rudd was elected, they've had seven Prime Ministers. Sometimes it's impossible to keep squaring the circle between inner-city voters and those in the bush, between the East and the West.

Scott Morrison was the latest casualty of that.

Geography also explains Australia's obsession with security. One of the most amazing stats I heard on my travels is that the whole northern half of Australia contains just 1 million of the country's 25 million population. Yet a couple of billion live just up the road in Asia.

You can learn much about Australia's strategic insecurities by reading about the bombing of Darwin in World War II.

All this is to say that in our relations with Australia, Australian Prime Ministers will always, always, put their interests first. And even more, they will always put Australia's security interests front and centre, because that's the one thing most Australians agree on. Indeed, it was the basis of Federation in the first place. It's hard enough staying in office over there without making unsupported policy gestures to neighbours, be they about 501s or anything else.

In my personal experience both the current and last Prime Ministers of Australia are decent people, trying to do their best for a widely distributed population with hugely divergent life experiences and perspectives. If they change any policy to suit New Zealand, it will because it is supported by a broad swathe of Australians and it helps keep their rickety voting coalitions together. Apart from that they will be friendly enough, but nothing will happen. They always have more urgent fish to fry.

• Steven Joyce is a former National Party Minister of Finance. He is director at Joyce Advisory