Sons of Toil, Part II: The Steward’s Son

Anthony Norman Albanese was born into a community that believed in the compact: endure, petition, defer, and trust that the institution would eventually deliver. He rose through that community, wore its colours, spoke its language, and built, with quiet purposefulness, an $8.8 million property portfolio. The compact, it turns out, was not a philosophy of mutual obligation but a ladder. You keep one foot on the rung below and one hand reaching for the one above. The theological term for this arrangement is the great chain of being, a medieval conception in which hierarchy was ordained by God and every link owed duty to the links beneath it. That reciprocal obligation was its social promise. Albanese retained the hierarchy and dissolved the obligation. The dockyard term for what remained, in the Mediterranean ports where his father’s ship once called, is sauve qui peut. Every man for himself. The steward’s son learned it early and practised it without interruption for the rest of his life.

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Australia, 2022 onwards

Anthony Norman Albanese crossed Parramatta Road the way other people cross a street: with the calm and conviction of someone who has rehearsed the gesture for television. He came from Macmahon Street, a housing commission island ringed by depots and Rabbitohs fanaticism and the peculiar click-clack of Catholic rosary beads, black as anthracite and polished to a gloss by the unrelenting petitions of the poor but faithful, addressed to a Lord of infinite grace, mercy, and inscrutable wisdom. It was a community built on a compact: endure, petition, defer, and trust that the institution, whether divine or political, would eventually deliver. He was, as the campaign line put it, “a son of a single mum.” It was a neat, humanising truth. It was also an opening line with longer ambitions.

Maryanne Ellery knitted that opening line into a narrative because she had to. She named her boy Anthony after a dead cousin whose name already lived on a motel on the Pacific Highway; she gave him Norman for a brother of the dead child; she told him, for fourteen years, a story about a steward on a ship called the Fairsky and a tragic car wreck. The ship and the steward were true. The rest was not. The domestic fiction did its work: it made a life legible, respectable, electable.

Legibility is a political skill. So is invisibility. Albanese learned both. He joined Labor at fifteen, worked for Tom Uren, took Grayndler in 1996, waited, tried, failed, waited again, became unremarkable enough to be irresistible. He slimmed down, changed his spectacles, adopted “small target” as a governing aesthetic: say little, avoid detail, be a pliant surface for others to project steadiness upon. The tactic was surgical; it won an election.

It had been designed to win. After the 2019 loss, two architects of the neoliberal centre, Craig Emerson, former economic adviser to Bob Hawke, and Jay Weatherill, former South Australian Premier, reviewed the wreckage and produced their prescription: strip the agenda, minimise the surface area, commit explicitly to leaving negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions untouched. The Emerson-Weatherill review did not create the small target. It specified it, costed it, and handed it to a man who happened to own an $8.8 million property portfolio and had excellent personal reasons to find the prescription congenial. The minders dissolved the obligation. The candidate retained the hierarchy. Between them, they built the construction that crossed Parramatta Road and called itself Labor.

The victory speech was exactly the sort of line that journalists like to clip: “a son of a single mum who grew up in public housing can stand before you tonight as Australia’s prime minister.” The cameras drank it up. The man who spoke that sentence was also, by a conservative tally, the owner of an $8.8 million property portfolio.

There is a special kind of cognitive dissonance in being both origin story and accumulator. It is not dishonesty so much as therapeutic amnesia. You become the story you tell yourself until you can no longer hear the gap between sentence and life.

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Here is what the boy from the housing estate acquired, set down in the order of acquisition.

Marrickville, 1990: a two-bedroom semi for $146,000. In those days Marrickville was, as the local real estate commentary puts it, so rough you would not stop there for fuel. Albanese stayed the course. A second Marrickville property in 2006 for $960,000, renovated, now rented at $1,350 a week and worth $2.6 million, mortgage free. A Dulwich Hill townhouse bought in 2015 for $1.175 million, sold in late 2024 for $1.75 million, the $575,000 profit qualifying for the fifty per cent capital gains tax discount that Labor had described, in 2019, as a housing affordability problem requiring urgent reform. A Canberra apartment bought in 1996 for $162,000, sold in 2022 for $660,000. And finally, purchased with his fiancee Jodie Haydon in October 2024, a clifftop home at Copacabana on the New South Wales Central Coast: four bedrooms, three bathrooms, timber-lined cathedral ceilings, Commonwealth Bank mortgage, $4.3 million.

Timber-lined cathedral ceilings. Across Parramatta Road from the Housing Commission flat.

The small target, it turns out, had been quietly acquiring with the purposefulness of a man who loves an asset class.

He had also, on 9 April 2025, three weeks before the federal election, been asked by a journalist whether he could rule out changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions. “Yes,” he replied. “How hard is it? For the 50th time.”

In May 2026, the budget announced changes to both. Asked on ABC radio whether this constituted a broken promise, the Prime Minister said: “Government is about making the right decisions for the right reasons for the times that you are in.”

The young people of Camperdown, paying $650 a week to share a terrace two streets from his mother’s old flat, were left to draw their own conclusions about whose times, and whose right reasons, were under discussion.

The rentier class had conclusions of its own. When the May 2026 budget finally introduced changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax, the Real Estate Institute, the Housing Industry Association, the Property Council, and the Master Builders Association declared catastrophe. What they did not explain was why forty years of the existing arrangements had produced a housing market in which only fourteen per cent of median-income households can afford the median-priced home, rents have risen forty-three per cent in five years, a Sydney two-bedroom apartment costs $680 a week, and saving a twenty per cent deposit takes eleven years on an average wage. The arrangements had worked magnificently. They had worked for the people who already owned property.

The reforms themselves, when examined, were a masterpiece of prospective timidity. All existing investments: untouched. Every current negatively-geared property: protected. All capital gains accrued to date: still eligible for the fifty per cent discount. The changes applied only to new purchases of established housing after budget night, from July 2027. The $12.3 billion annual tax concession to landlords, larger than the combined federal spend on social housing, homelessness, and rent assistance, remained substantially intact. The screaming of the rentier class, in other words, was about the inconvenience of a slightly smaller future, not the loss of a present. It was, in that sense, entirely in keeping with the tradition of people who had confused their privileges with their rights and their windfalls with their deserts.

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Now to the enigma at the centre of this biography, the relationship that makes the Iran decision not merely a policy contradiction but a specific, personal betrayal.

Tom Uren had been a Japanese prisoner of war. He had worked on the Burma-Thailand railway. He had stood outside Nagasaki when the second atomic bomb fell and watched what force actually did to human bodies when it was given sufficient resources and political permission. He came out of that experience with a bone-deep conviction that resorting to force was not a way to resolve differences between nations. This was not pacifism in the abstract. It was knowledge, carried in the body, of what the alternative looked like.

He was also one of the great urban reform voices in Australian Labor, Whitlam’s Minister for Urban and Regional Development, a man who believed that the shape of cities was a social justice question and that public housing was not a concession to the poor but an expression of what a decent society owed its members. Uren had described the American atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as crimes against humanity and spent the rest of his political life campaigning for nuclear disarmament. Albanese worked for him for five years and, at Uren’s state funeral in 2015, delivered the eulogy: “I grew up without a dad, but not without a father. Tom Uren was my father figure. He was my mentor. He was my friend.”

What did Uren see in the boy from Macmahon Street? Probably what every political mentor sees: his own younger self, arriving with the right origins and the right hunger and the right factional credentials. A Hard Left pedigree, links to People for Nuclear Disarmament, the ANC, the peace movement. An economics degree obtained on the free tuition that Whitlam had created and that Uren had helped to sustain. A talent for patience and the machinery of power.

The political mentor’s great occupational hazard is that he mistakes the resemblance for the substance.

In March 2026, with the US-Israeli strikes on Iran entering their third week, Prime Minister Albanese endorsed the campaign and dispatched a command warplane, missiles, and troops. He did so in a joint statement that spoke of standing with “the brave people of Iran in their struggle against oppression,” simultaneously supporting the campaign that was conducting that struggle on their behalf and from above. This is a formulation that requires not cynicism but something more disquieting: the genuine inability to notice the distance between one sentence and the next.

We stand with the brave people of Iran. We are helping to bomb them. In the contemporary Labor formulation these are not contradictions. They are sequential sentences in the same press release.

The man who had worked for the former prisoner who had stood outside Nagasaki endorsed the bombing. The man whose mentor had seen what force cost, in his own body, on a railway built by men worked to death in a tropical jungle, announced that he was standing with the brave people of a country he was helping to attack.

In 1914, the Labor leader Andrew Fisher pledged support for Britain to the “last man and last shilling.” The carnage that followed produced, eventually, a counter-tradition: a Labor movement that periodically asked whether the last man and the last shilling might be better spent. That tradition was not murdered. It simply became unavailable, the way a word becomes unavailable when enough people stop using it.

The Shoppies completed the picture. The SDA, the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association, is the most conservative organised force in Australian Labor: Catholic, historically opposed to same-sex marriage, LGBTQ rights, and abortion rights, aligned with management against workers on the retail floor. Its members are the grandchildren of Macmahon Street. They still make the compact. They still petition the institution. The institution still dispenses its grace on its own inscrutable terms, which in recent budgets have included the fifty per cent capital gains tax discount. Albanese had come up through the Hard Left. By the time he was governing, the Shoppies were part of the coalition he needed. The man who had worked for the former POW who stood outside Nagasaki was making his arrangements with a union whose primary political function has been to keep the ALP’s social conservatism carefully tended.

This is not hypocrisy as vice. It is hypocrisy as technique. It licenses a peculiar public psychology: voters may continue to cherish the origin story while the origin story, the suburb, the public housing, the disability pension, becomes a brand to be curated. The brand is not the same thing as the cause. But it does the work that causes once did: it comforts, it sells, it persuades.

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Peter Sarstedt once asked: where do you go to, my lovely, when you are alone in your bed?

In Albanese’s case the answer is probably: the same place he always went. The small target is not a political strategy adopted for the duration of a campaign. It is what a man becomes when he has spent twenty-five years wanting the job more than he wants anything the job is for. By the time you get there, the want has consumed the purpose. What remains is the want, wearing the vocabulary of the purpose, and unable, in the timber-lined cathedral ceilings at Copacabana, to tell the difference.

The small target, finally unobserved, reveals not a monster and not a fraud but something sadder: the absence of anything behind the display. A man who learned to want the position so efficiently that he forgot, somewhere on the long climb from Macmahon Street, to want anything it was for.

The TSS Fairsky was scrapped in Taiwan in 1988. Names, and ships, and people decompose in their own time. On the Pacific Highway at Halfway Creek, Anthony’s Motel endures as a roadside reliquary for a four-year-old boy who rounded a bend in 1959 and did not come back. In Camperdown, the children who played on Macmahon Street cannot afford the suburb they grew up in.

According to the Foodbank Hunger Report 2025, one in three Australian households, 3.5 million of them, experienced food insecurity in the past twelve months. Forty-eight per cent of renting households could not reliably put food on the table. Nearly seven in ten single-parent households are now food insecure. Behind those numbers are families skipping meals so children can eat, and workers going hungry to pay the rent. The rent that flows, in many cases, to portfolios held by people who have confused their windfalls with their deserts.

He is still called Albo. His friends still say “Alban-eez,” like bolognese. His mother, who stretched a disability pension across the gap between survival and not, who sat a boy down at the kitchen table at fourteen and rewrote the story of his life, would have been proud. Whether she would have understood the cathedral ceilings, the asset class, the warplanes over the Strait of Hormuz: that is a question this narrator does not answer, because this narrator already knows, and the knowing is the grief, and the grief is the point.

That, in the end, is the political art he practised: to seat the landlord and the tenant at the same table, and to look up from the getting and spending long enough to assure the tenant that the plate on the other side is merely temporarily empty.

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