Albo preaches to the wizened and wide-eyed
Under glittering disco balls, Labor’s great white hope is fighting Tories.
“I say this to Tony Abbott,” Anthony Albanese is saying.
“I’ve met your cabinet members. And I’m not sure that Peter Dutton speaks.”
The Kings in South Adelaide fills with laughter – variously cheerful, sad and angry.
Albo waits for the laughter to die down, a consummate performer.
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“I have met him and seen him across the chamber, day after day after day.
“I’ve met my counterpart Warren Truss. Haven’t had much to do with him, only got one question in the last four years.
“This is not a cabinet based on merit. This is the old club doing what they do.”
I’ve arrived late to Albo’s South Australian pitch for the Labor leadership on Monday night. I find myself at the back of a packed room – mercifully right by the bar. Albo’s already speaking, guarded on either side by a couple of bright studio lights. Their white heat gives a bright glow to faces of those gathered closest to Albo, including Port Adelaide Member Mark Butler. It bounces off the two disco balls that hang from the roof low over his head.
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At the back, I find myself significantly less illuminated. Albo’s tones only haltingly waft their way back to us – and are often obscured by the regular fits of spontaneous clapping. Former State Infrastructure Minister Pat Conlon is standing next to me, looking a little bored (“He’s an old friend,” Conlon says when asked if he’ll be voting for Albo). Mike Rann’s former adviser – and sometime InDaily contributor – Jill Bottrall is at the bar stirring her drink, gazing into the middle distance, listening.
“What Labor believes is pretty simple,” Albo says.
“The same as what working families believe. Working families sit around and they think about how their kids will get a better education, how to get access to healthcare, how they have a job which is secure with decent working conditions.
“And what they want for the next generation is higher living standards than they’ve enjoyed: is a better more sustainable environment than they enjoy; is a sense of community and a sense of belonging. And that is something that Labor must argue for in a very clear way and and draw that distinction between our values and the values of our opponents.”
The big hope – bigger even than Albo, perhaps – is that the contest will reinvigorate the base. A little taste of democracy to bring the faithful, the idealistic back to branch meetings, which are now often the province of the old and rusted-on or the careerist and power-hungry.
There are hopeful signs. Among the party elders and the staffers in suits are a few people who look, well, normal (and, of course, one lad in a red “WHAT WOULD GOUGH DO” jumper). About half-way through Albo’s speech, three young teenagers enter the pub, eyes open wide. None of them look old enough to be at uni – certainly too young to be proper Young Labor apparatchiks. Older hands spot them and quickly usher them forward through the crowd.
If this contest can bring a bit of new, wide-eyed optimistic blood to the party, then it has been a success.
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