The ragged young bloke wearing a jean jacket over a black rock-band T-shirt was a frequent sight around my Sydney workplace in the 1980s. Anthony “Albo” Albanese, then in his mid-20s, was an edgy presence, hell-bent on crushing the right wing of the Labor Party, where he worked as an organiser.
I was a new recruit to the Sydney Morning Herald. Albanese sought me out because he needed the Herald – then a newspaper that carried grunt in politics – to help get him out of a bind. Right-faction Labor Party thugs had rifled through his desk, told party receptionists not to put calls through to him, and turned his office into a library while he was overseas. They’d padlocked his door with a chain.
Albanese used the Herald to launch a public campaign to regain his office at Labor’s Sussex St headquarters in downtown Sydney. It worked, and he went on to become a feared back-room capo within the party – the unseen power in the absorbing 1996 film Rats in the Ranks, which dealt with power and lust on the Labor-controlled inner-Sydney Leichhardt council.
While endearingly mischievous and Machiavellian, you would not have picked the young upstart, Albo, as a future prime minister. Let alone one who has now overtaken the length of service of Gough Whitlam, will, in three weeks, overtake Julia Gillard, and, if he serves the next three years, will outlast the illustrious John Curtin, Paul Keating and Ben Chifley – leaving only Bob Hawke with a longer term in office for Labor: eight years and 267 days.
With Labor now holding at least 86 of the 150 seats in Parliament, Albanese’s second-term victory sets up the party for another in three years. It also gives a Labor prime minister a power and gravitas not seen since the charismatic Hawke came into office in 1983.
The re-elected government is expected to have a majority of left-faction MPs in caucus for the first time ever at a federal level, giving the once perennial minority faction the right to demand half of the maximum 30 positions in the executive.
How might such a large, left-leaning majority differ the second Albanese government from the first? Though few were talking about it in the hours and days following the May 5 victory, those behind the Australian republic project will surely be emboldened. Albanese, himself an avowed republican, appointed a minister charged with promoting the republic after he first became prime minister in 2022.
Bruised by the spectacular failure of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament referendum in October 2023, the republic project – it would also have required a “yes” vote in another national referendum – was quietly euthanised. Albanese lacked the bottle to risk another such defeat.
That may well change now. However, no matter how much Aboriginal leaders might wish it, there will be no second go at establishing their advisory body to Parliament, known as the Voice and enshrined within the constitution. The Australian people spoke and rejected it.
More immediately, expect the Australian trade union movement, heavy financial backers of the Labor Party, to have some early victories. They are pushing for a universal long-service portable entitlements scheme, the expansion to freelancers of “gig worker” minimum standards such as protection from “unfair deactivation” (where, for example, an Uber driver has been ejected from the company’s digital platform), and paid leave for reproductive health needs.
Although opposition leader Peter Dutton’s woeful campaign and his association – deliberate or not – with the mad excesses of Donald Trump propelled Albanese to victory, Chris Hipkins and the New Zealand Labour Party should be buoyed.
In an unhinged, bellicose world, the bland and the beige can triumph.
New Zealander Bernard Lagan is the Australian correspondent for The Times, London.
