The Albanese ascendancy

Ian Rogers

C'MON ALBO

Comment:    The swing is on and Anthony Albanese, a phenomenal person with deep experience at the highest levels of government, will make a brilliant prime minister.

Opinion polls, by and large, project the election of an Australian Labor majority government at tomorrow’s poll, an outcome with plenty of upside - combined with plenty of potential for aggravating downside – for Australia’s inefficient and oligopolistic banking industry.

If opinion polls aren’t your thing, then (this time, anyway) the betting markets are surely the more reliable forecast of the election result.

It’s the ascendancy of Anthony Albanese’s Labor Party that the banking industry needs to be getting their heads around. 

Albanese’s coddling of big business and even fossil fuels over the last three years is diplomatic and pragmatic as well as strategic; wise work for a fella with a clear-cut history of activism (and career progression) centred on the ALP’s (now dominant) left faction. 

Australia’s new, more populist ruling elite will have little time at all for the status quo, the cartel and the deep-rooted cynicism that is the legacy of the Australian financial industry.

Ken Hayne’s banking royal commission already seems an event from the dim past, but the most sophisticated of the ever-present bank bashers may find an attentive audience among elements of the new Labor caucus.

Anthony, the Reserve Bank is pretty much the only bank in Australia you can rely on.  But I digress.

I met Albo when I was 18 and he must have been 21, at the Australian Young Labor conference in Melbourne in 1985. Looking back, Anthony, oddly, did not stand out all that much that conference, one heavy with entertainers from the NSW right and philosopher kings from the left (which, needless to say, had the numbers).

Albanese soon made a commanding impression on the periodic, testy conference calls of the AYL National Executive, then punching on at a high tempo amidst the celebrated antics of the 1986 AYL conference in Sydney.

I count my association with Anthony Albanese as one of the most influential friendships in my life; Albo was an important mentor for me as a young adult.

My guess: the ALP will secure in the order of 90 seats in the new parliament, a comfortable majority and waltzing past any minority government nonsense under the thrall of the Teals, Greens, Katter and the like.