17 hours Ago By Ross Gittins
Forgive me for being hard-headed while everyone’s feeling concerned and sympathetic towards those poor flooded Queenslanders and people on NSW’s northern rivers, but now’s the time to resolve to do something about it. As the rain eases, the rivers go down, the prime minister flies back to Canberra and the TV news tires of showing us one more rooftop in a sea of rushing water, the temptation is to leave the locals to their days and even months of getting things back to normal, while we go back to feeling sorry for ourselves over the cost of living and waiting impatiently until the federal election is out of the way, and we stop hearing the politicians’ endless bickering. Illustration by Simon Letch But speaking of politics, let’s start with Anthony Albanese.
He’s been forced to abandon his plan for an April 12 election because calling an election in the middle of a cyclone would have been a very bad look. “I have no intention of doing anything that distracts from what we need to do,” he told the ABC. “This is not a time for looking at politics.
My sole focus is not calling an election, my sole focus is on the needs of Australians – that is my sole focus.” Ah, what a nice bloke Albo is. Convinced? I’m not.
You don’t get to be as successful a politician as Albanese unless your sole focus is, always and everywhere, politics. It’s because his sole focus is politics that he knows now’s not the time to look political. “Election? Election? If I don’t make out I don’t care about the election at a time like this – I could lose it.
” One thing I’ve learnt from watching prime ministers is that, though they all make mistakes – buying a holiday beach house during a cost-of-living crisis, for instance – they never make the same mistake that helped bring down their predecessor. Anthony Albanese faces the media on Thursday as Cyclone Alfred bore down on the east coast. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen Every pollie knows Scott “I don’t hold a hose” Morrison’s greatest mistake was to persist with his Hawaii holiday during the Black Summer bushfires of 2019-20.
The ABC has helpfully dug up footage of people in the affected area refusing to shake Morrison’s hand after he turned up late. Now do you get why Albanese’s been doing so much glad-handing up in the cyclone area?.
