“This is the bloke whose transparent honesty and decency could restore our country’s good name after the marketeer has dragged it through the mud,” writes ROBERT MACKLIN, in praise of Anthony Albanese. 

EVERYBODY’S unhappy with Albo.

“​He’s not cutting through,” they say. “He doesn’t have charisma. He shouldn’t be always saying ‘me too’ when Scott Morrison raises fears of China or increases the power of the intelligence agencies. It’s time for a new leader!”

​I must admit that at times I have been among them. I’ve developed such a distaste (to put it mildly) for Scott Morrison that I’ve become like the spoiled brat in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” crying: “I want it, and I want it now!”

​But our system gives the PM the huge advantage of timing the election to give himself the best political advantage. It doesn’t always work out, but for a marketeer like Morrison it’s manna from electoral heaven. And since he’s the national leader with a puppy-dog entourage, he gets to make “news” and set the agenda while Anthony Albanese follows with second “grabs” and doesn’t look at all like a leader.

​But here’s the thing: do we really want one of those LEADERS like Morrison or Trump or Boris Johnson, or others like the murderous Vladimir Putin or Brazil’s Bolsonaro or Turkey’s Erdogan or Israel’s Netanyahu? How about Kim Jong-un, Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi or take your pick of the Eastern bloc places ending in STAN.

Did Angela Merkel look like a LEADER before she became Germany’s Chancellor, or even afterward when she quietly got things done and transformed her country in the eyes of the world. That’s from when they had a LEADER called Adolf Hitler.

​Are we really falling into that hateful trap? Have we lost that larrikin Australian way of the swaggie, refusing a lift in the grazier’s Rolls with: “Nah, you can open your own bloody gates?” Or the basic national canon we used to cherish called the “fair go”. Are we now so desperate for a LEADER that we’ve become the sheep that used to support us on their fleecy backs?

​Albo is not a LEADER in that sense. But among all the flak from columnists and the PM’s puppy dogs, we have heard not a single squark from Labor’s frontbench. Indeed, rather than stick around as a thorn in his mate’s side, Joel Fitzgibbon quietly walked away from a long career in parliament itself.

I like to think that’s because they know that Albo’s the kind of leader who works with a team; that his heart’s in the right place; that he might even turn out to be the Ben Chifley of our time, someone who naturally respects women, who listens when they speak, who’s not obsessed with filling some psychological vacuum from childhood like a Malcolm Turnbull or a Bill Shorten, and will occupy The Lodge, not as a personal victory but as a privilege bestowed.

​This is a bloke who won 60 per cent of the party’s rank and file over Shorten’s 40, who knew the factions had made the wrong choice but took it on the chin. 

His only failing, in my view, is that he’s allowed himself to be “advised” by some of the same geniuses that “advised” Julia Gillard and hid her natural humanity, who “advised” Bill Shorten with his all-too-clever zingers that made him even more phoney than he really was.

Albo has a set of values that shone through when he was Infrastructure Minister in the last Labor government. Compare that with the blatant pork barrelling of the Morrison gang. 

This is the bloke whose transparent honesty and decency could restore our country’s good name after the marketeer has dragged it through the mud.

And best of all, he has a delicious sense of humour. That’s the kind of Australian leader I reckon we need right now.

robert@robertmacklin.com