Albanese, the new Howard, is keeping Australia in the past

It was April 1998 when parliament’s youngest MP rose in the grievance debate one afternoon to declare “today my grievance is against the prime minister”. There followed more than 1,500 words of zingers about John Howard, ranging from his eyebrows to the Spice Girls to his pettiness, and his personal history.

Here is a man who lived at home until he was 32. You can imagine what he was like. Here were young Australians demonstrating against the Vietnam War, listening to the Doors, driving their tie-died kombi vans, and what was John Howard doing? He was at home with mum, wearing his shorts and long white socks, listening to Pat Boone albums and waiting for the Saturday night church dance.

The MP concluded that “Australians deserve a courageous leader … They do not deserve John Winston Howard and in time they will put him out to pasture.” The problem for the speaker was that that time would not come until 2007, by which time the young MP had become a Labor Left powerbroker.

Anthony Albanese’s spray at Howard summed up Labor’s 1990s attitude to the then PM — he was a man more at home in the 1950s than the looming 21st century, a weak leader, a relic of the Menzies era, worthy of mockery for his religion, his dagginess, his suburban banality.

But Labor MPs failed to realise how much better Howard understood the electorate than they did; how he’d exploit the fortunes of politics and global events far more skillfully than Labor could; how much freer Howard was in his political thinking than a Labor Party still recovering from the Hawke-Keating era and unclear about its direction.

Albanese now finds himself in the same position as Howard — if not the Howard of 1998, than that of 2001, after Howard’s second defeat of Kim Beazley cemented his dominance. Now it is the conservatives — and much of the media — who underestimated Albanese; who remain trapped in old ways of thinking; who don’t understand the electorate that just delivered this “weak” prime minister a massive majority.

Albanese has thus become what he once derided — and if DJ Albo was never a Pat Boone/church dance sort of guy, he at least had the kind of personal makeover that he mocked in Howard as “same stuff, different bucket”.

Young Albanese’s central charge against Howard, of holding Australia back, has resonance now, too. The government’s approval yesterday of the extension of climate criminal Woodside’s North West Shelf project — and its likely eventual connection to the vast “carbon bomb” project of tapping the carbon-laden Browse gas field — is the kind of decision Howard would have made in a heartbeat, and not left until after the election to limit the potential for damage from the Greens.

It perpetuates and expands Labor’s policy of taking limited action domestically to reduce emissions, primarily in the electricity generation sector, while dramatically expanding Australia’s exports of fossil fuels, such that we are the fourth biggest fossil fuel exporter on the planet and thus a key contributor to the climate crisis. Albanese offers the justification that exports of fossil fuels don’t count for Australia in global assessments of contributions to the crisis.

It’s the kind of line that Howard — who eventually would become known for his extraordinary casuistry in attempting to explain his way out of past statements — would be proud of. Albanese talks the talk of someone who sees Australia’s future in renewables, but walks the walk of just another politician controlled by fossil fuel interests, as if the rotten petro-state politics of Western Australia were now firmly installed in Canberra.

As with fossil fuels, there’s also a domestic/international distinction on the Palestinian genocide. Labor under Albanese is ready to take a slightly more pro-Palestinian stand in international fora than previous governments, although not to fulfil the party’s policy of recognising Palestine. Domestically, however, you’d barely know the Netanyahu government was engaged in atrocities and ethnic cleansing.

Allies Canada, the UK and France made life difficult last week for Albanese by threatening sanctions against Israel. Again, we had the Howard-like rhetoric. On Monday, Albanese tried to bullshit his way through the issue, claiming the Starmer-Carney-Macron statement was “a statement by members of the G7”. It was nothing of the sort.

Yesterday he changed tack when asked again and said “we follow our own path and Australia determines our own foreign policy”. And “the circumstances in which it’s determined”, he might have added. He then demanded a journalist, who was asking him about sanctions, tell him what sanctions the reporter was suggesting. It was bullshit and bluster to cover the fact that Australia continues to stand by offering only platitudes as Palestinians are slaughtered and forcibly displaced.

Meanwhile, of course, Australia under Albanese remains signed up to AUKUS despite regular evidence that the promised Virginia-class submarines will never be delivered. During the election campaign, the US Navy told a congressional committee of serious delays and cost overruns with its new class of submarine, which shares key components and workforce with the Virginia class.

It’s not quite Weapons of Mass Destruction-level denialism and deception over AUKUS, but it will potentially inflict far greater damage on Australia’s defence credibility than the Iraq debacle under Howard did.

Not that any of this will hamper Albanese, who commands the political landscape in a way unseen in a quarter-century. He may hold Australia back, but his hold on power is now vastly stronger — that of a Man of Steel.