“Leadership’s always been about two main things: imagination and courage.”
— Paul Keating
Bernard Keane is half right. In today’s Crikey, he despairs of our PM as “a political manager, a risk-averse executive who always plays the percentages.” Dead right, as far as it goes. But Keane, for all his nous, undercooks the grill. This isn’t one man’s failure of nerve. It’s a captured party’s moral collapse; decades of corporate capture and right-faction strangulation producing, at the hour of maximum crisis, a Clayton’s Prime Minister with added charisma bypass: the PM you have when you’re not having ScoMo.
Anthony Albanese has his rusted-on fans, to be fair, but Keane sees a manager who won’t lead. Or is it something worse: a party machine that can’t? Hollowed out by factional warlords, but plushly upholstered with lobby money, Labor under Albanese has flubbed the pub test with a ring-in; not some spectacular policy dud, (we’re spoilt for choice there from AUKUS to Caucus) but in outsourcing a nation’s compassion to the figurehead of a disgraced US-proxy state accused of war crimes. Nothing says we feel your grief as well as rolling out the red carpet for Israel’s mostly ceremonial, President, Isaac Herzog, down-under to dispense “great comfort” while pepper-spraying citizens who object to hosting the head of state of a country the UN has accused of genocide.
Albo’s Waterloo has arrived. It smells of horse shit, capsicum spray and moral bankruptcy.
Keane’s Half-Truth
Keane’s been charting Albanese’s shrinkage for over a year. January 2025, he wrote of a PM “managing but not governing, in charge but not in power, deciding but not leading.” The 2025 landslide; 94 seats, the most any party has ever won, changed nothing. If anything, it made things worse. A mandate the size of Uluru, and all Albo will do with it is manage the optics?
From the October 7 horrors through Gaza’s descent into catastrophe, through Trump’s second coming and America’s fascist lurch, Stephen Miller’s ICE goon squads, Albanese has shown all the panache of a Myer account manager.
Mutter “ceasefire” at regular intervals, avoid eye contact with the footage, and pray the polls hold. Paul Keating, who knows a thing or two about burning political capital, is damning: “Never before has a Labor government been so bereft of policy or policy ambition.”
And here’s where Keane is too kind.
“It’s not a lone manager’s failing; it’s the organisational afterlife of Farrellisation: the slow substitution of belief with briefing notes, strategy with message discipline, and politics as reputation management.
Roll Out the Farrell
To understand how Labor arrived at this wretched pass, meet Don Farrell; the Godfather, as Graham Richardson, no shrinking violet himself in the dark arts, once dubbed him. Senator for South Australia. Minister for Trade and Tourism. Special Minister of State. Deputy Leader of the Government in the Senate. And, more to the point, the supreme numbers man of Labor’s right faction.
Farrell’s CV is pure machine politics. SDA state secretary for fifteen years; the shopworkers’ union that has long been the right faction’s infantry division. Powerbroker enough in 2012 to knock Penny Wong, a sitting senior cabinet minister, off the top of the South Australian Senate ticket. (Albanese himself called it “gross self-indulgent rubbish” at the time. That was before Albanese needed Farrell’s numbers.) The Power Index listed him among Australia’s top ten political fixers. As a colleague puts it:
“He controls the pre-selection … of every MP in South Australia. If you want to get on, you get on with Don.”
A vineyard owner in the Clare Valley, against marriage equality until the wind shifted, master of electoral reform who couldn’t quite land it, Farrell is the chap whose factional machinery underwrites the Albo project. “Farrellisation” is not just the dominance of one man. It’s the triumph of a method: loyalty over principle, faction over conscience, the numbers over the narrative.
When Labor swaps spine for spreadsheet, that’s the Farrell factor at work. Not the full Farrell; we’d need a book for that, but enough to understand why this party, confronted with the greatest moral crisis of its generation, reaches not for Chifley’s light on the hill but for the focus group report, the lobbyist’s business card and the bizarrely inept invitation to Isaac Herzog.
“The Labor Party is not going to profit from having these proven unsuccessful people around who are frightened of their own shadow and won’t get out of bed in the morning unless they’ve had a focus group report to tell them which side of bed to get out.”
Keating is right on the money. Again. The Farrellised party doesn’t do vision. It does management.
The Bondi Trap
On December 14, 2025, an IS-inspired father and son open fire on a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach, killing fifteen people, including a ten-year-old girl and an eighty-seven-year-old Holocaust survivor. and wounding more than forty. It is Australia’s worst mass shooting since Port Arthur. A Syrian-Australian shopkeeper, Ahmed al-Ahmed, wrestles a shot-gun from one of the gunmen, an act of immense courage that briefly reminds us what the word “hero” actually means.
The grief was real. The political exploitation was instant. Albo had blood on his hands, they reckoned.
Opposition Leader Sussan Ley and the Coalition leftovers were in it like a rat up a drainpipe, weaponising fresh graves to paint Labor as soft on terror. The Coalition, itself reduced to 44 seats after the May landslide, its former leader having lost his own electorate, had one card left to play: force Labor to hug the hardest possible pro-Israel line, daring Albanese to refuse.
He didn’t refuse. He walked right in.
Our PM asks his Governor-General to formally invite her counterpart of sorts, another titular head of state, Israeli President Isaac Herzog. Of course, he’ll come with some baggage. The UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry found Isaac Herzog to have incited genocide by declaring all Palestinians, “an entire nation,” responsible for the October 7 attacks. The invitation is framed as solidarity with the Jewish community. It is received by much of the country as something else entirely.
The Herzog Debacle
Herzog arrives, February 9, for a four-day visit. Thousands upon thousands around the nation take to the streets in an impressively disciplined and united series of protest demonstrations. But it’s not the type of social cohesion, the federal government favours.
The NSW government, reaches for the Major Events Act — legislation designed for sporting events and cultural festival, declares Herzog’s visit a “major event,” and grants police expanded powers to restrict protest. When the Palestine Action Group challenge this in the Supreme Court, they lose.
Then came the streets. Thousands gather at Sydney’s Town Hall. Police use pepper spray and tear gas. At least 27 people are arrested. Video emerges of officers dispersing Muslims at prayer. Across the country; Melbourne, Brisbane, towns and regional centres, an estimated 50,000 or more turn out. The Palestine Action Group call it “a brutal police attack on a massive peaceful protest.” The progressive Jewish Council of Australia, in a full-page open letter signed by over a thousand Jewish Australians, says Herzog was “not welcome” and warn that hosting him “risks entrenching the dangerous and antisemitic conflation between Jewish identity and the actions of the Israeli state.”
Amnesty International nails it: “Welcoming President Herzog as an official guest undermines Australia’s commitment to accountability and justice.”
Albanese’s response? “Turn the temperature down.” The most vacuous three words in the Australian political lexicon since ScoMo’s “operational matters” or “on water.” Or the fatuous flatulence of the “Two State Solution”.
Clayton’s Labor: The Party You Have When You’re Not Having a Party
The Clayton’s metaphor is more than satirical decoration. It captures something structurally true about this Labor government. The form is there; the rhetoric of social democracy, the talk of fairness, the occasional progressive gesture. The substance is missing. What you’re drinking is corporate-capture cordial with a right-faction chaser.
Corporate capture isn’t abstract. It’s AUKUS zealotry funnelling hundreds of billions to American submarines while nurses can’t afford to live near their hospitals. It’s a party that talks about cost of living while its factional architecture is underwritten by the very corporate interests driving the gouging. It’s Albanese’s 2023 meetings with Arnold Bloch Leibler partners; the power-brokers of prestige and coin whose orbit Labor’s leaders increasingly inhabit.
The right faction seals the deal. Nominal lefties like Albanese and Wong? Sure. But policy bends rightward on security, borders, liberties. Palestine is reframed as a “national security” file. Dissent is recast as “importing foreign conflicts”; an old smear, recycled from the Balkan-brawl era, deployed to delegitimise citizens exercising their democratic right to object to genocide committed with the diplomatic cover of their own government.
This isn’t a vehicle for change. It’s a limousine for lobbyists.
The Wound That Won’t Heal
Keane is right that politics demands leaders who reflect majority values without ostracising dissent. Most Australians are appalled by what is happening in Gaza. The polls say it. The streets scream it. Yet Albo manages away: banalities for the base, banquets for the lobby.
The Bondi trap worked its dark magic; not toppling Labor electorally, not yet, for that you’d need an effective opposition, but exposing its soulless core. Corporate husk, factional right, and now the spectacle of pepper-spraying protesters to protect the visit of a leader accused of inciting genocide. This is Labor unmasked. A Clayton’s outfit unfit for moral crisis.
Albanese’s Waterloo isn’t electoral. It’s existential. Herzog’s visit crystallises the wound: a Prime Minister who’d rather host a figure the UN accuses of inciting genocide than lead his nation’s conscience against one. The real opposition now rises not from what’s left of the right — itself a study in internal bickering, disunity and dissension with the Nationals walking away from the Coalition agreement in January -and back again, but from the citizens, unions, Jewish dissenters, and independents refusing to accept “social cohesion” as code for complicity.
Paul Keating, whatever his own contradictions, understood that leadership means burning political capital for something that matters. “I always believed in burning up the government’s political capital,” he said, “not being Mr Safe Guy.”
Albanese is Mr Safe Guy. And this time, playing safe has cost him everything that matters.
Labor’s light didn’t flicker out in Gaza’s rubble. It was switched off, deliberately, by a machine that long ago replaced conviction with management.
Albo just paid the power bill.
Urban Wronski Writes 
Don’t disagree, but think it’s a symptom of consolidated RW MSM and ecosystem that targets and denigrates anyone centrist 24/7, while neglecting the rignt and its support for Netanyahu and Trump, Putin’s chums?
Further, such petty personal and/or leadership focus seems more about prepping people for polls and more agitprop vs the centre?
However, eg. like the RW MSM some indie outlets seem to be running high on emotion, but we are not being informed.
Trying to creating a narrative from minimal evidence about Rudd-Epstein (UK Starmer-Epstein), but nada on inner circles inc actual perps, US GOP allies, with clear links with both Israel and Russia…..
Either way with both Starmer and Albanese, if they yielded to RW MSM, Tories/LNP and centre left noise to resign, nothing would change, same attacks would continue?
Radical right libertarian trap with media follow compromised Anglosphere filters……
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I applaud this overdue comment on the the Feral Farrell.
Don’t forget he is also SA Premier Peter Malinauskas’ mentor and no doubt at the start and heart of Peter’s persecution of Randa Abdul-Fattah, Louise Adler and the Adelaide Writers Festival.
But Farrell’s most poisonous contribution so far has been his deliberate construction of faux and sinister ‘reforms’ to the federal electoral campaign finances laws – rushed through Parliament with collaboration from the Coalition.
These changes which will apply to the next federal electoral cycle, materially benefit all three ‘major’ parties while demolishing the ability of independents and smaller parties to fund raise, campaign and receive financial aid from tax payers.
It is to be sincerely hoped that both the current challenge to our own pernicious Victorian ‘reforms’, and the Zoe Daniel Rex Patrick constitutional challenge top the Farrell Farce in the High Court results in the overturning of these corrupt and dangerous ‘reforms’.
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Australia is in the pocket of Israeli/US duopoly interests, all because of Albo’s timorousness and lack of principle. The invitation to a bomb-graffiti artist, someone who declares every Palestinian man, woman and child to be responsible for whatever resistance comes Israel’s way, is devoid of any moral base. As you correctly say, it’s part of managerialism, and nothing like the leadership so many Australians are screaming for. I’ve never heard any of Albo/Wong/Marles utter the word ‘Nakba’, never heard them issue reminders of the long history of brutality by Israel since 1948. Or mention the fact that in 1949 Israel ‘unreservedly accepts the obligations of the UN Charter’. Its ongoing actions make it clear Israel has no intention of adhering to its obligations. Albo heads a lily-livered, wilfully blind government and Keating’s words perfectly sum this up. As do yours, Urban.
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I’m willing to go the mongrel on this Labor government when it seriously stuffs up, and I fully appreciate that Urban Wronsky is a master of scintillating rhetoric.
However, this Wronsky post sledging Albanese as our Clayton’s PM when we’re not having SoMo is hyperbolic almost to the point of being the mirror image of Skynews bloviating.
Some major areas of improvement are ones that matter to a lot of people (especially pensioners) such as establishing emergency clinics, significantly increasing the number of patients who can access bulk billing doctors and defying the powerful Chemists’ lobby on prescriptions. Lest we forget: the Coalition had incrementally degenerated bulk billing, and it’s no surprise that ScoMo’s now making big bucks as a lobbyist.
The Albanese government’s attempt to be evenhanded regarding the sensibilities of Australia’s religious sects might be doomed to failure, but at least it eschews the diabolical divisivenes which other politicians are persistently stoking.
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Hemingway13, You’re right to push back on tone, and I’ll own that: sometimes the “Clayton’s PM” jab is deliberately barbed. But it isn’t Sky-style bloviation to say a lot of people are disappointed — because on several big-ticket promises, the delivery has been partial, delayed, or contradicted by other decisions.
We can hold two ideas at once: credit where it’s due (Medicare / urgent care clinics / some cost-of-living relief), and a clear-eyed ledger of where Anthony Albanese’s government has not met the moment.
Here are a dozen concrete reasons people feel let down — grouped by the areas you mentioned.
Energy
1. The $275 power-bills promise hasn’t landed as promised, and even Labor figures have conceded it won’t be met in the clean way it was sold. 
2. The 82% renewables-by-2030 target looks shaky in multiple assessments — not because renewables are “bad”, but because the build-out pace and coordination aren’t matching the ambition. 
3. Transmission delays are now a reliability problem, raising the risk of shortages/blackouts in the mid-2020s, which is exactly when coal retirements and demand pressure bite hardest. 
4. Too much of the “relief” has been stop-gap architecture (caps/codes/rebates) rather than a structural reset that permanently breaks the pricing power of an energy market still shaped by gas and export dynamics. 
Environment and climate
5. Approving major coal mine expansions — whatever the legal disclaimers — is politically and morally at odds with “climate leadership”, and it’s been called out as such by climate advocates. 
6. The Safeguard Mechanism is still widely criticised as too offset-heavy and too weak to function as a genuine brake on industrial emissions growth. 
7. The government’s “Nature Positive”/new regulator package has looked stop-start and politically spooked, including legislation being effectively shelved at points — which is exactly what happens when the mining lobby leans in. 
8. Even with reforms now legislated, the long fight over whether federal environment laws should properly assess climate harm has left a sour impression: people expected a clean “climate trigger”, not policy workarounds. 
International diplomacy and credibility
9. On AUKUS, many voters hear “trust us” and see secrecy: there have been sustained calls for a more transparent inquiry and more democratic scrutiny. This government is even more secretive than the last.
10. Australia’s COP31 credibility has taken knocks — and not just from critics, but from the basic optics of fossil-fuel approvals while trying to sell ourselves as a climate host/leader. 
11. On Gaza/Israel–Palestine, the government has looked hesitant and politically reactive at key moments — voting one way one month, abstaining the next — which leaves almost everyone feeling alienated or managed. 
12. Even on recognition of Palestine (which many expected earlier), the language has been conditional and timeline-driven, which reads to supporters as delay — and to opponents as drift. 
My take on the new My Aged Care “reforms” is that many of us can expect to pay more, despite, as you suggest, thanking Labor Medicare being retained. (Malcolm Fraser wanted to abolish it, as you recall.)
But yes: I take your point about avoiding a mirror-image outrage style. But disappointment isn’t outrage — it’s a judgement about outcomes. If anything, the most pro-democracy thing we can do is this: applaud genuine improvements and refuse to pretend the big-ticket misses don’t exist.
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Too True, he was manager of Government business in the Gillard years. Back room boy thru and thru. Its where some people are the true leaders. Not up front trying to drive.
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The men-without-navels infesting the SussexSt Lubyanka (is there a Melbourne equiv?) learned the wrong lesson in 1975 and since then, like the Bourbons, have forgotten & learned nothing (of value to man or beast).
The following 8yrs were devoted to revisionism (some might say an irredentism for the Divine Right to Rule) to eradicate any trace of independent thought or reluctance to kow-tow – Peter Baldwin, anyone?
Until 1983, after the dreary Daze of Fraser & his keen young colt of a Treasurer (wot happened to him?), party branches had sufficient members and enthusiasm to door knock, talk to friends in the pub and family, neighbours or aquaintances of what might be possible.
After that fateful March election it became clear to the local party members that they were surplus to requirements because the unholy alliance between the ACTU & BigAr$ed end of town were comfortable with a government so deracinated that it thought neoliberalism & economic rationalism (if only it had been, rather than doctrinaire ReaganThatcherism) was a bit too pinko for comfort.
From having more paid-up members (individuals, NOT union placemen) than the other parties combined what now masquerades as ‘Labor’ began to shrink and local branches ceased to exist and is now a pale shadow and silent (very) rebuke to the class traitors now governing.
I could go on but what’s the point?
Those dead of soul see no challenge, politically, to their dominance but to be without hope is not a life worth living.
Those who once feared civil war now fear than there will not be one.
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Possibly one of your best commentaries on the ‘left half’ of ‘the duopoly’ (by about one pixel) the ALP under Albo. Liked the SDA stuff as well, one of Australia’s finest examples of a completely corporatised union, more intent on preventing an abortion than wage justice and a symbol of what a junior part of the ALP the ACTU has become. Space prevented you including the numerous ways the ALP has capitulated to the corporates in the pathetically derisive way govt agencies such as ASIC and ‘the NACC’ regulate the corporate sector. However, it was your portrayal of Albo, Minns and Co’s failure in the face of the pro-genocide lobby that nailed it! Despicable ‘bought’ people.
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