Extract from ABC News
Analysis
Posted
They say a wise man doesn't hurry history.
But Anthony Albanese has no choice.Perched on an elevated platform in Perth's magnificent King's Park, the Labor leader has offered a faint glimpse of the "vision" he has for his prime ministership — that has to start no later than 2022.
It must start within two and a half years from now because political history tells us this Labor stalwart is already playing in extra time in his long public career and the chances of his party granting him another three-year extension to 2025 are probably slim.
In the opening line of his vision speech — the first of several such policy instalments over the next 12 months — Mr Albanese has declared that "Australia is at a crucial intersection" of history.
It's the same intersection he identified precisely six years ago when he campaigned against Bill Shorten in a membership ballot for the ALP leadership.
Back then, despite garnering almost 60 per cent support among rank-and-file Labor Party members, "Albo", as he's universally known, hit an abrupt road-block.
Now, he's picking up where he left off as a 50-year-old.
His vision for jobs and the economy draws strongly on the "four-point plan" he failed to convince the party (but really the factions of the caucus) to endorse in 2013: to prioritise jobs in innovative industries, to invest in education, skills and training, to make cities more sustainable and to deliver on the "fair go".
The 2019 Albanese statement deliberately, if only rhetorically for now, pulls the curtain down on much of Bill Shorten's policy emphasis of the last 6 years.
Gone are references to "the top end of town", in their place is an appreciation that "we must first and foremost be in the business of creating wealth" and ensuring that 2.2 million small businesses "thrive and flourish" for national prosperity.
There's the conciliatory olive-branch, "one understands that unions and business have a common goal".
And an obvious twist on climate change too, away from merely cutting coal-fired carbon emissions for electricity and back towards an embrace of steel-making and other manufacturers so Australian industry might make the machinery that makes the environment cleaner.
All of it, right down to the lithium value-adding and the tech-driven "Creative Economy Summit" is solid enough broad economic aspiration — and all of it based on that original "four-point" Albo plan that he hawked around at clubs and beer halls in the 2013 campaign.
But there's one key difference.
That campaign was waged just over 2,200 days ago — and at 56 years old, Mr Albanese cannot assume his party will afford him the luxury of two tilts at a Coalition Government, as it did Mr Shorten.
Often accused by friend and foe alike of being "slow out of the blocks" since being handed the job unopposed in late May, the Labor leader has consistently stressed he will "hasten slowly" on the development of detailed policies for the next election.
His idea is to be finishing with a flourish of energy and policies in what he calls the "final quarter" of the current parliamentary term, and it's clear from his every public statement on the last defeat that he has the broad outlines of a game plan in his own mind to reverse Labor's drop to a national primary vote of just 33 per cent.
Which is why these so-called headland "vision" speeches, scant on precise policy detail, are important building blocks towards the ALP's next national conference endorsing a slimmed-down policy platform.
But that conference will mark the outer limits of an always fractious party's patience.
From this time next year, history takes on a personal urgency for one Anthony Albanese.
Not because at 56 or (by then) 57, "Albo" could be considered too old for a crack at a prime ministership, it's just that so few recent leaders have come so late to the job in their parliamentary careers.
Having arrived in Canberra 23 years ago, Anthony Albanese will have a quarter of a century of politics behind him by the time he presents himself to Australian voters.
Even John Howard, considered one of the great "stayers" of modern politics, was at 22 years when he finally won office and 33 years when he left it.
As he stressed in the closing remarks of his vision speech, Mr Albanese "gets" that "the future isn't going away, it's already with us."
So is the past.
The Labor Leader is at that "crucial intersection" between the two — and now with just a couple of years left to get across it.
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