Forget the polls showing voter dissatisfaction with his performance, forget the unrest over the unpopular budget delivered less than two months ago, forget the rising tide of populism threatening to destabilise traditional politics.
Anthony Albanese shows all signs of feeling as on top of the world as Taylor Swift heading into her wedding fiesta.
At the end of what’s proven a gruelling budget session of Parliament, he’s got the core elements of the tax plan passed into law (fixes to come) and has set up some solid work for when politicians return to Canberra, including limits on gambling ads.
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He even won the battle of the speeches at the press gallery’s annual Midwinter Ball. Not that anyone outside the room is supposed to know about it, but it was the only topic of conversation at the parliamentary cafe on Thursday.
A surer measure of the prime ministerial mood is his appearance on the Bush Deep podcast by comedian Nikki Osborne, aka Bushie.
Filmed at the Lodge a couple of weeks ago but released on Friday, a relaxed Albo sips whiskey, jokes about wanting to “shag, marry, date” Kylie Minogue, sings the national anthem’s second verse, and agrees with Osborne’s proposition that he and newlywed wife Jodie Haydon are “bonking like rabbits”, adding: “It’s always a good aphrodisiac, a Souths win.”
Not the kind of areas a politician worried about their standing ventures into.
The ALP conference is a few short weeks away and the Prime Minister is in command of the party and ready to be lauded for his record-breaking election win.
Sure, there’ll be a fight on something, everyone agrees you have to have a fight to keep the grassroots happy.
Cabinet minister Tim Ayres was emphatic on Friday morning when quizzed about reports of a push at this weekend’s NSW Labor conference to try and make the Federal government scrap the grandfathering bits of the tax plan it’s just made law.
“We’ll be very, very direct at the conference. Don’t you worry about that . . . We’ve ruled out some areas of reform and grandfathering is a really important principle,” he said.
The numbers at conference will be more finely balanced between the party’s left and right than in previous years since the CFMEU’s been barred (although the theoretically strongmen of the left weren’t reliable votes anyway), but Mr Albanese and his team believe they can keep it in check.
The contrast with Angus Taylor as federal politics enters its winter lull couldn’t be starker.
The Opposition Leader rounded out a sitting fortnight replete with tactical blunders and worse One Nation-related polling news by getting dragged into the wake of a NSW ICAC investigation that is examining one of his close party allies, Dallas McInerney.
It prompted former State minister David Elliott — no factional friend of Mr Taylor — to give blistering interviews to two newspapers calling for the leader’s immediate resignation. Mr Taylor says the investigation has nothing to do with him.
He plans to spend most of the next month travelling to every State and Territory to spruik the Budget plan that few can remember (one Liberal MP was surprised this week to learn that shadow treasurer Tim Wilson had given a press club address about it).
Mr Taylor lacks the bounce that is buoying the Prime Minister’s step, and the drag is showing.
