As a Labor prime minister, does Anthony Albanese have an obligation to stand for Labor values? Paul Begley on trading principle for pragmatism.
Tory Prime Minister Winston Churchill reputedly referred to his Labour Party successor, Clement Attlee, as “a modest man with much to be modest about”.
What he might have meant was that Attlee pursued policy objectives accompanied by a minimum of fuss. In doing so, he created the groundbreaking National Health Service, brought key industries such as coal, gas and electricity into public ownership, and instigated sweeping public housing programs.
He also initiated the decolonisation of India and Pakistan, nations that Churchill thought well suited to exercising deference to British supervision.
Churchill’s epigram may have more aptly been applied in recent times to other leaders whose positive legacies amounted to little or nothing. Among British Labour leaders, Tony Blair and Keir Starmer come to mind. Australia’s present Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, would also be a likely candidate fitting that bill.
The principle of obsequiousness
As a politician who could have used his rise to prominence as a public acknowledgement that his claim to mediocrity was formidable, and distinguished himself by behaving with a modesty that befitted ordinariness, Albanese has instead attempted to transform his flair for obsequious appeasement of powerful populists into a political virtue.
His serial betrayals of principle have been combined with a domestic proclivity for command and control of an Australian Labor Party caucus which since 2022 has consisted of a leadership group of talented but weak ministers who appear to prioritise cabinet solidarity and their own positions in the pecking order, above all else.
Paul Keating’s observation about the beguiling attraction of getting invitations to dinner on the Whitehouse lawn is too close to the mark to be amusing in the cases of Albanese and Deputy PM Richard Marles. The only people they are likely to meet on such occasions, are fawning replicas of themselves,smitten with their own self-importance.
Imagine wanting to have your picture taken with Pete Hegseth,
especially when his body language reveals that Hegseth is keen to get away to more important things while Marles basks in the afterglow of being in the presence of a US Secretary of War, a former Fox News presenter in thrall to a geriatric in decline with a documented history as a fraudster and conman.
Murdoch Segal fawning
Imagine a prime minister wanting so desperately not to be criticised by Australia’s Murdoch-dominated legacy media that in July 2024 he appoints a person to a plumb position that gives her a voice so powerful that she is instrumental in forcing a royal commission to be held and to hog-tie it to terms of reference that assist her in demanding that performers, artists, students, teachers, doctors, nurses, lawyers and journalists comply with her dictum that any criticism of the pariah state of Israel is deemed antisemitic hate speech which can lead to loss of job or other penalty as she sees fit.
Imagine also that she is a likely longtime donor to far-right causes and is an implacable foe of Labor governments, including the Albanese Government which appointed her.
That decision has bound Australia’s government into lockstep with respect to the Donald Trump administration in the US and Benjamin Netanyahu’s far right government of war criminals in Israel, positions which have seemingly been adopted to protect Albanese from media attacks by News Corp and their acolytes in the legacy media.
The attacks come nevertheless,
even when he makes utterances designed to placate them.
At a media event in February, when asked to name one word that came to mind when Albanese thought of Grace Tame, the unprompted word that came out of his mouth was “difficult”. News Corp loved it, as he likely knew they would, but it didn’t win him any friends in those quarters.
Their loathing of Grace Tame is only matched by their loathing of Albanese himself. His persistence in trying to turn that around has been unrelenting, but it has also been in vain.
ISIS Brides v Australian IDF
When it became public in 2025 that a group of young girls who had foolishly left Australia with their ISIS boyfriends ten to twelve years ago were now wanting to return home, the prime minister did not have to say that he held those girls, now young women with children, in contempt, and cited his mother for good measure by adding that they had “made their bed and could now lie in it”.
The women, called by the press “ISIS brides”, had entered a declared war zone and had remained there, which is an offence under Australian law, so they had at least one case to answer when they returned home. But returning home is their right as Australian citizens.
News Corp lapped up what the prime minister said,
which may be why he couldn’t resist the temptation to say it. Yet they have persisted in assailing him for his weakness in allowing such ‘dangerous’ women back into the country of their birth.
Unsurprisingly, no mention was made of Australian citizens who had left Australia to remain in a war zone by joining the Israel Defence Force to enter into combat in a one-sided conflict in Gaza with an occupying force that the International Criminal Court had labeled war criminals.
America and Israel reject the authority of the UN court, and Australia increasingly appears by its muteness to follow suit.
Zomi Frankcom words of concern
It was a welcome change to see the PM’s usual muteness over Israeli atrocities transform into outrage last week when Israel absolved the IDF over the 2024 killing of Australian Zomi Frankcom and six other aid workers.
That said, Penny Wong’s summoning of the Israeli Ambassador Hillel Newman did not extend to an expulsion, despite Newman’s refusal to offer an apology or make any concession, but rather to suggest the outrage was another example of the many “haters of Israel in Australia”.
Albanese appears unable to cope when caught out with a Labor Party policy or response to events that are out of step with his political adversaries.
NDIS and migration
Last week he moved to pass a bill on the NDIS that will cut $38 billion from programs to assist Australians with a disability and their carers to live lives in the community rather than be shamed into obscurity.
To make matters worse, Labor abandoned its so-called ‘widow tax’ to please the Coalition and get their vote for the NDIS bill. The Government could have stood by the significant merits of the NDIS and pursued predatory third-party providers rorting the system, but that would have exposed it to
media attacks for which it appears to have no appetite.
Last April the leader of the Opposition, Angus Taylor demanded that the Overton Window on migration be opened sufficiently to allow discrimination against immigrants who don’t share Australian ‘values’, citing the Bondi shooting in a clumsy exercise that demonized Islamic migrants. When asked whether that meant he wants a monoculture as proposed by Pauline Hanson, Taylor claimed the word is too vague and wouldn’t go there.
Albanese won’t go there either but after Hanson’s National Press Club speech in June his government is considering cuts to net overseas migration numbers and the right to work for temporary migrants applying for protection visas.
At odds with Labor values
On the latter, rights groups such as Anglicare Australia and the Human Rights Law Centre are reported by SBS to have reminded the government that taking such a step would make that group of migrants “more vulnerable to wage theft, unsafe working conditions, exploitation and abuse” and be “fundamentally at odds with Labor’s values.”
The Albanese Government is sufficiently uncertain about whether it can stand by Labor values, or what those values amount to any more, that Home affairs Minister Tony Burke has indefinitely postponed an address on the subject at the National Press Club.
Albanese’s set of Labor values can stretch so far as to give a state funeral for Graham Richardson, an ethically challenged former Labor minister who became a News Corp darling in recent years, but when it comes to enlightened polices on areas such as immigration or disability services,
Labor values appear to be set by Pauline Hanson and Lachlan Murdoch.
Can Anthony Albanese credibly claim to be a successor of Whitlam?
Paul Begley worked in public affairs roles for three decades, most recently as general manager of government and media relations with the Australian HR Institute.