Anthony Albanese is getting to the point where even if he walked on water across Sydney Harbor he would be criticized for not paying the bridge toll.
When political fortunes change and the public develops an opinion about a politician’s failures, recoveries become much more difficult to orchestrate.
But Albo has no one to blame but himself. The errors of this government – the serious ones and the superficial ones – are all of their own making.
Proceeding with the Voice referendum when it was clear it would fail and fail badly was downright stupid. It resulted in divisions and set indigenous rights back decades.
And breaking his ironclad electoral commitments on income tax cuts and not changing pensions brought his lack of confidence to the fore.
Regardless of the good or bad of the policy changes, Albo became just another politician whose word means nothing.
Then we have the litany of politically flawed decisions: the $4.3 million purchase of the oceanfront retirement home; revelations about business class upgrades on personal trips and his 21-year-old son’s Chairman’s Lounge membership.
And just on Monday he made the decision to travel to Western Australia to play lawn tennis, dressed in the best whites he brought with him for the trip, at Perth’s most exclusive coastal tennis club.
Going to play tennis after an alleged terrorist incident made no basic political sense. Albo on the left in the foreground
Doing that, along with the Labor Party’s fundraising activities after the firebombing of a Melbourne synagogue in a suspected terrorist incident, lacked basic political thinking.
These were foolish decisions in each and every one of them.
Even worse than the political faults themselves has been the Prime Minister’s unrepentant unwillingness to admit mistakes along the way.
That has only increased the image that Albanese is unashamedly belligerent and has given voters little reason to sideline Albo in the future.
Let’s not forget that spending decisions have worsened inflation and reduced the likelihood of rate cuts sooner rather than later. Australia is in a per capita recession, burdened by a housing and cost of living crisis that leaves voters under pressure.
It only makes voters more upset about the purchase of waterfront property and the antics of prime ministerial privilege.
Albo’s story of coming of age in a wooden cabin now seems little more than a distant memory for a politician who has spent his entire life living off the state, which has left him out of touch with the environment he likes. boast.
The Labor Party needs a major event to give Albo the chance to reassert his leadership. To help you recover from the failures you have created so far. To redeem himself enough to achieve a second electoral victory.
Terrorist incidents are not so common in Australia that they do not affect a prime minister’s social calendar. Above, the interior of the Adass Israel synagogue.
Albo, above, visits the synagogue four days after the event
Once the public decides that a prime minister is weak, has retreated and doesn’t stand up much philosophically, the benefit of the doubt that Australians often show their leaders is lost.
It happened to better prime ministers than Albo, and now it is happening to him in the first Labor term.
A reminder that Albo was never the political genius: his victory in 2022 convinced those close to him that he was. It was a victory courtesy of anti-Morrison sentiments more than anything else.
If Team Albo wants to win, it has to start by avoiding situations like the ones we saw yesterday in Cottesloe: a prime minister dressed in white playing tennis in an elite club instead of visiting the site of a burned synagogue.
Not that these types of attacks are so common in Australia that they wouldn’t interfere with a prime minister’s social calendar.
Beyond avoiding such obviously foolish decision-making, Labour’s message must be clear and simple, ditching routine phrases to make it sound credible.
In selling why Albo deserves a second term, parliamentarians must say: he has implemented laws that protect workers’ wages.
He achieved two budget surpluses, reduced inflation and made fair tax cuts.
Any of us can argue on the sidelines whether all of these things were good and partly flawed, but they are statements of fact.
The beginning of how to recover politically in the face of a tough re-election that did not have to be so tough.