Built on sand
Issue 64: One melon, then two, then the AFP
In early July, Anthony Albanese was asked on a podcast to name the strangest gift he’d been given as Prime Minister. He said a melon. Innocuous enough. In May, Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi brought him a crown melon: hand-wrapped, grown one to a vine, about $270, and in Japan a considered act of respect. He said it was a strange gift – to the uninitiated – but it turned out to be quite good.
If he’d stopped there, we still might be struggling to think of what to talk about this week. Fortunate for us, and deeply unfortunate for the office of the PM, he kept going.
The host, comedian Nikki Osborne saw blood in the water and took her opportunity: “How did she get them through customs?”, “Did she just come in looking like Pamela Anderson?”, Osborn posited. The Prime Minister of Australia went along with her. “She brought two,” he said, hands somewhere around his chest. “And they were beautiful.”
Six seconds was all it took (well, if you don’t count the separate Kylie Minogue gaff). A bloke on a comedy podcast trying to keep up with a comedian and misjudging it. Naff, in the precise Australian sense: not sinister or a scandal, just a bit off. It’s the kind of thing you wince at when your uncle says it.
You can see the poor media person’s half-baked plan behind the booking: it’s a turbulent time for Albo in the court of public opinion, so let’s get him on a comedy podcast, loosen the tie, let him be a bit of a larrikin and remind everyone of the good ol’ Hawkey Labor days.
The place was Perth, 1983. Bob Hawke was soaked in champagne, resplendent in an America’s Cup jacket, declaring that any boss who sacked a worker for not turning up that day was a bum. Glorious. The country cracked a tinnie with him; after all, the man loved a drink. Everyone suspected he was a philanderer, and when that turned out to be true it made Hazel Hawke a household saint and sold a great many copies of Blanche d’Alpuget’s books. None of it dented The Silver Bodgie. The electorate had bought that exact bloke on purpose: larrikin outside, ferocious intellect underneath. When Hawke did something Hawke-ish the nation (most of it anyway) was enraptured.
Sure, it was a very different time, but that goodwill bank took 30 years to build. You cannot rent it for an afternoon on a podcast. Albanese went looking for it in somebody else’s format and found out, live, that he doesn’t have it.
More to our point, all this would still be a nothing story if he’d simply said so. One line, the next morning: that was a naff thing to say, apologies to Prime Minister Takaichi, moving on. Cost? An uncomfortable afternoon and a paragraph on page two.
Instead, in July, Japan’s embassy wrote to Canberra about the whole business: “sensationalised reporting in the Australian media”, no “ill intention”, no action to be taken. Takaichi separately wrote thanking Australia for its friendship after the recent earthquake. Tokyo wanted it gone, on the sound reasoning that anything Japan said out loud would only feed it here. And there it sat, until this week, when that correspondence turned up in The Australian and on 7NEWS, and then spread like wildfire.
Since then the Prime Minister has told Question Time “I reject the assertion in the question”. His office has put out that the claim that he mimicked Takaichi’s body is “incorrect”. Penny Wong has explained he didn’t mean the comments to be taken the way they’ve been taken. The Coalition has referred the leak to the Australian Federal Police. Michaelia Cash and Clare O’Neil have fought over whether that’s a fair use of police time, Tony Abbott has called it “unbelievably crass”, and Pauline Hanson of all bloody people has been afforded a chance to take the moral high ground by demanding the transcript be tabled.
An ally’s private correspondence is on the front page, somebody in Canberra is now potentially a person of interest and a good chunk of a sitting week of Federal Parliament has gone on a hand gesture. All because a PM didn’t quite have the judgement in the moment to shut down a reference to breasts for the risk of looking a little bit like a neg, and then doubly down by refusing to acknowledge it was in poor taste.
As the Financial Review’s Ronald Mizen pointed out this morning, Albo had a few wins this week including revealing a $2.5 billion bailout package for the Tomago aluminium smelter in NSW, striking a deal with the Coalition to get his News Bargaining Incentive legislation passed, and getting closer to a deal to revive his stalled gambling ads legislation. But all that has been completely overshadowed by a melon.
The melons saga has now sucked in the Foreign Minister, the PM’s office, the Parliament, the AFP and the private mail of a foreign government - and it could be hosed down with two words: “I apologise”. Each thing Albo throws at the fire to smother it turns into fuel.
And the note from Tokyo didn’t even do the job it was leaked to do. It would be crushing evidence, if Japan had been the one asking. Nobody in Penrith was up at 3.00am worrying about foreign policy. The question being asked at home was smaller and much harder to answer: what’s our Prime Minister like when he thinks he’s among mates?
None of this started with a melon, not really. Last year Albo and his partner Jodie Haydon bought a $4.3 million cliff-top place at Copacabana on the NSW Central Coast – four bedrooms, ocean views, cathedral ceilings – in the middle of a housing affordability crisis his own government keeps promising to fix. Yes, he’s entitled to buy a house, but he’s also the bloke asking a generation of renters to hang in there, while dropping lines like “We’re trying to help Australians buy their first home not their third or fourth”.
The Copacabana house storm ran hot for a fortnight and then left the news cycle. Ask around now and people will swear they’ve forgotten it. They haven’t. They’ve filed it.
Earlier this year Albo was asked to sum up Grace Tame in one word and he went with “difficult”. Tame, child sexual abuse survivor, former Australian of the Year, a woman whose entire public life is built on declining to be agreeable when the truth is ugly, replied that “difficult” is the misogynist’s code for a woman who won’t comply. The PM apologised for that one. On its own, a bad afternoon. Filed next to a melon gag and a $4.3 million house, it stops looking like an afternoon.
Over summer Albo didn’t go to the funerals of the Bondi victims. His office explained he was waiting to be invited, out of respect, so as not to intrude. NSW Premier Chris Minns went to most of them – services, vigils and shiva – and got a standing ovation at the memorial while the mention of Albanese drew boos. Maybe waiting for the invitation was the careful instinct of a man who knew he’d already lost that room. No one has ever built a leadership brand on the technically correct RSVP. You build it by walking in the door.
On a more earnest note, judging by commentary across socials, all of this has served to remind the public of the thing that has actually cost the party votes: a Federal Budget so badly sold the Government still hasn’t climbed out of the funk. A melon is a joke. A budget is not. They go in the same file anyway, because that file is labelled “Albanese” and there’s very little else in it.
Try this. Finish the sentence: “Anthony Albanese stands for ______.”
Coming up with the answer is harder than it should be for a man who’s held the top job since May 2022. It wasn’t always hard. There was a good, warm, likeable brand called Albo. The kid from council housing in Camperdown, single mum on the invalid pension, the inner-west boy who loves Australian music and used to turn up to gigs.
We, most of us anyway, really really wanted to back Albo. When he copped a bit of flack for lining up at an Inner West bahn mi store, we stood up for Albo for doing just about the most Inner West thing you can do at 1.00pm other than order a Guinness at The Vic. The goodwill then was specific, warm and – best of all – true. But he never banked it. The music barely rates a mention now. The backstory gets wheeled out for a doorstop and wheeled back into storage. Every stray act rushes into that vacuum to define him instead: let people get confused about what you stand for and they will build a version of you out of your offcuts. It’s the classic “if you don’t write your own story someone will write it for you” adage, now featuring a blonde woman in khakis and an air of distaste.
Malcolm Turnbull: whether you respect him or resent the silk-tongued harbourside barrister, you always knew which one you were doing. Julia Gillard: her misogyny speech fixed her public image in a single afternoon more definitively than her whole prime ministerial term. Pauline Hanson: a brand is so unwavering that whatever you make of her (and around the SKMG table that ranges from “NO” to “ABSOLUTELY NOT”) there is not a single person voting One Nation who is confused about what they’re buying. Lest we forget Kevin ‘07 who walked into the Lodge with a fully formed character and fluent Mandarin.
The brands of those politicians didn’t, or don’t, wobble when a bad clip lands, because the electorate signed the contract going in. Every Albanese stumble arrives fresh, every time, as a brand-new fact about the man and an erosion of the sort of character we hoped we were getting but see increasingly less evidence of.
A previous version of Albo gets that melon question, tells a story about the first time somebody explained crown melons to him, says something warm about the first woman ever to run Japan and passes a witty remark to the host reminding her that not every melon reference has to be about a woman’s body. That bloke had a goodwill bank.
Pity the Albo who let that goodwill bank run dry, turned to a podcast to reframe a brand built on sand and still can’t admit it was a bad judgement call. The vacuum that exists until that acknowledgement comes is sucking away more than Albo’s reputation: one melon, then two, then a diplomatic cable, a police referral, mentions in Federal Parliament and resurfaced disdain for that big black dog Labor can’t seem to shake (the budget). That’s the going rate for not saying sorry. I tell ya what, Hawkey would’ve copped it on the chin and got on with the job days ago.
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Neil
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Andrew
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