Is Anthony Albanese finished?
Albo is a sitting duck in the sights of the right. His “troubles” are being trumpeted from talk-back to the Melbourne tabloids and across social media, where the enormously well-funded dark-money megaphone of the right, the Advance Australia network, is busy amplifying outrage and sharpening its next campaign weapon. There is, and long has been, an industry devoted to vilifying Labor.
On my left is an historic organisation dedicated to humanity, equality and justice. Founded in 1891, the Australian Labor Party emerged from the trade union movement, built by working Australians who decided that if power resided in parliament, labour would have to confront it there.
On my right? Founded in 2018, Advance Australia is a right-wing political campaigning operation, structured as a web of charities and front groups, operating largely beyond the transparency rules that bind political parties and their donors, while running tightly targeted culture-war and electoral campaigns against Labor, the Greens, unions, climate policy, and progressive social reform.
With its Orwellian name and regressive purpose, Advance is taking no prisoners in its war on the party of the wage-earner. Its targets are predictable yet carefully chosen: Anthony Albanese for alleged weakness; Labor for timidity; government itself for failing to serve the mythical “real Australia”.
Clowns like Craig Kelly and Old King Coal himself, Matt Canavan, provide colour, but the deeper story is structural: the right-wing commentariat is now better funded, better organised, and more ruthless than at any point in Australia’s democratic history. The machinery shaping the national argument from the margins is no longer improvised. It is strategic, disciplined, and flush with cash.
Against that backdrop, Albanese is attempting to govern within a political and media ecosystem designed to grind him down. Every Labor leader since Whitlam has felt the same gravitational pull.
Each time, the Murdoch empire and its imitators treat Labor governments as temporary aberrations between the “proper” custodians of the realm. The idea no longer needs selling. It is simply assumed. The result is familiar: every Labor hesitation becomes a crisis, every Coalition failure a footnote, and every unforced error; a travel claim, a stadium stoush, a botched response to tragedy, another chance to land the cut.
The Small-Target Trap: Governing Like an Underdog
Albanese’s small-target strategy worked as a campaign tactic. It’s useless as a governing philosophy. The Prime Minister’s steady, understated style made sense in opposition, but in office, it too often reads as reticence. He speaks softly in an age that rewards loudness, compassionately in an age that scorns empathy, and with deliberation in a media environment that trades in snark, snide and speed. That makes him a rare kind of political figure: decent and disciplined, but branded as dull. The “weak Albo” trope thrives in this climate because it fills the silence his style sometimes leaves.
But the problem isn’t just style. It’s strategy. By failing to define his government’s narrative, Albanese cedes the field to opponents who are happy to fill the void. When Sussan Ley and Josh Frydenberg—neither known for political courage, vision nor caution with finances can land blows over the Bondi massacre, it’s not just a PR failure. It’s proof that Labor’s caution is being weaponised. When Labor-lite, “Cuisine minceur,” NSW Premier, Chris Minns outmanoeuvres the PM on Bondi it’s not just a state-federal spat. It’s a pattern. And patterns, in politics, become perceptions.
Minns’ leadership during the Bondi crisis is applauded as decisive, bipartisan action, upstaging Albanese’s federal response; making it seem cautious and reactive. Yet it’s not an isolated incident. The narrative of State leaders seizing the initiative while the PM plays it safe, has become a recurring motif in federal politics of late, from crisis management to policy rollouts.”
This is the death by a thousand cuts: not one fatal blow, but a steady drip of missteps, compromises, and missed opportunities. All capably played up by a Murdoch-led media. Travel rorts, stacked appointments, and the Tasmanian Stadium madness aren’t isolated gaffes. They’re symptoms of a government so focused on avoiding risk that it forgets to claim credit; or even defend itself.
The Environmental Own Goal: Climate Diplomacy as Surrender
Labor’s signature climate reform, the reworked Safeguard Mechanism, was billed as a cap on emissions from Australia’s biggest polluters. In practice, critics argue it functions more as a work-around than a brake. Facilities can expand emissions while complying on paper, relying on carbon offsets and accounting mechanisms rather than deep, on-site cuts.
The scheme has been dogged by controversy over low-integrity offsets, including so-called “avoided deforestation” projects where no credible deforestation threat existed, and carbon credits linked to mine-site rehabilitation that critics say should never have qualified at all.
Independent researchers and environmental law groups contend that, taken together, these design features allow new coal and gas projects to proceed under the pretence of a cap, effectively green-lighting fossil fuel expansion while maintaining the appearance of climate restraint.
Even within Labor, MPs acknowledge that compromises struck with mining and gas lobbies have drained the government’s credibility. This isn’t climate leadership. It’s carbon diplomacy of the old school. To anyone expecting strong environmental protections, the Safeguard Mechanism feels like a betrayal dressed up in bureaucratic finery; a replay of the politics that cost Rudd and Gillard their moral high ground a decade ago.
The message to voters is clear:
- The planet can wait.
- The donors can’t.
- The status quo will do.
Welfare and the Digital Workhouse: Polishing the Architecture of Cruelty
Labor promised to end the cruelty of the Coalition years, to shut down the “digital workhouse” of punitive compliance systems that stripped dignity from those already doing it tough. Yet despite the Robodebt Royal Commission and endless talk of compassion, the core system grinds on. Recipients still report fortnightly earnings through faceless portals. They still are forced to walk a tightrope over the poverty line. They still live on payments that barely keep the lights on.
A government that claims to have learned from Robodebt’s failures has merely polished the same architecture that enabled them. The language has changed. The lived experience has not. It’s hard to see how this squares with Labor’s professed moral mission; or how it escapes the charge of governing by focus group, not conviction. You may change the minister, but the machinery beneath them barely shifts. Departments restructure, language softens, reporting lines change, yet the culture that enabled Robodebt; risk-averse, compliance-obsessed, insulated from consequence, remains stubbornly intact.
Defence Drift and the AUKUS Mirage: Billions for a Maybe
Nowhere is the gulf between rhetoric and reality wider than in defence. AUKUS is the most audacious wager any Australian government has ever placed on a technological future it neither controls nor is likely to live to see. Hundreds of billions have been pledged for nuclear submarines that will not arrive for decades and which, if they do, risk arriving obsolete, overtaken by unmanned systems, ubiquitous surveillance, and rapid advances in undersea detection.
Within defence circles, the project is increasingly derided as strategic theatre: a grand, expensive performance of alliance fealty that conceals the hollowing out of local capability. While ministers chant “sovereign capability,” shipyards remain bare, skilled workforces are wafer-thin, and costs climb with a stubborn indifference to arithmetic or accountability. This is not strategy so much as symbolism mistaken for strength, scale confused with power, and loyalty substituted for thought.
If this is deterrence, it is deterrence by press release: loud, brittle, and addressed less to adversaries than to editors, allies, and the anxious political class at home. AUKUS does not so much defend Australia as rehearse its dependence, outsourcing sovereignty in the hope that faith, money, and patience will one day be mistaken for capability.
The Structural Bind: Governing in a Rigged System
To blame Albanese alone is to ignore the architecture of his predicament. He governs in an environment where money, message discipline, and media amplification now flow overwhelmingly from the right. The modern outrage industry; talk back, tabloid, and online, is funded and networked in ways that were unthinkable even five years ago. Groups like Advance operate with campaign professionalism that matches, and in some respects outstrips, political parties themselves. Their narratives go from meme to headline to ministerial talking point in a day.
Labor’s communications machine, by comparison, looks analogue.
But structural constraints don’t absolve Labor of responsibility. The party still governs like a tenant, not an owner. It still fears scaring business, upsetting donors, or provoking the Murdoch front pages. And in trying to be the sensible centre, it risks becoming the static middle; busy holding the fort while the world outside demands transformation. Tightening expense allowances won’t fix anything.
A Party Too Small for Its Moment
So, is Albo in trouble? Inevitably. But not only because a hostile press or a cynical opposition have decided so. The deeper problem is that Labor’s exhaustion is showing. The policy muddle on climate, welfare, and defence suggests not so much corruption or arrogance as an exhausted pragmatism. And that, in a nation crying out for change, might be the most dangerous weakness of all.
Albanese’s personal decency, his work ethic, and his authenticity are rarely doubted. The trouble is, those virtues can’t substitute for vision. The question now is whether he’ll use the power he has; or let the thousand cuts bleed him dry.
In Part Two, we’ll explore how Labor might break the cycle—if it’s willing to risk the fight.
Urban Wronski Writes 