Anthony Albanese’s problem this week wasn’t merely that he answered a grubby question about Kylie Minogue. Nor was it volunteering that he and his wife go at it like rabbits after Rabbitohs victories, as classless as the PM’s reveal was.
The real problem was that he was sitting on a couch at The Lodge, sipping whisky with a comic alter ego, waiting to be asked inappropriate questions. PMs don’t accidentally wander into these formats.
Every appearance is a choice, every audience a calculation. The real question isn’t what Albo said on Nikki Osborne’s Bush Deep podcast, it’s what his advisers thought they were delivering by putting him there in the first place.
Asked to play ‘shag, marry, date’ with Kylie Minogue, Nicole Kidman and Rhonda Burchmore, Albo initially gave the only survivable answer for a newlywed PM: ‘I’ve just got married. I’m only six months in.’
Had he stopped there, the trap would have snapped shut on empty air. But he didn’t.
Pressed to imagine his marriage going ‘tits up’, Albo nominated Minogue for ‘all of the above’. Then came the banter about him and his wife ‘bonking like rabbits’, contingent on the Rabbitohs’ win-loss record. Then a bizarre tangent about the Japanese Prime Minister and a gift of melons, replete with classy hand gestures.
It cemented the impression of a political leader who has traded the dignity of his office for cheap clicks.
By Monday morning, Albo had issued an ‘unequivocal’ apology, only via a short written statement mind you.
Albo’s lewd podcast interview cemented the impression of a political leader who has traded the dignity of his office for cheap clicks
PMs don’t accidentally wander into these formats. Every appearance is a choice, every audience a calculation. And so it was with Nikki Osborne’s podcast
It was necessary, but more importantly, it was revealing. The Prime Minister’s office knew instantly this hadn’t landed as larrikin charm, as they hoped. It had landed firmly in the gutter instead.
Yet the true failure lies in the strategy that produced the classless performance.
After Labor’s election victory, national secretary Paul Erickson reportedly declared the new rules of politics: don’t be boring, be authentic, and hunt for fragmented audiences.
It isn’t terrible advice, but if this is Authentic Albo plenty of voters might think twice about throwing their support behind him again.
Voters have abandoned the nightly news for TikTok, YouTube, podcasts and creator feeds. Younger voters especially. Albo has expanded his media diet accordingly, leaning heavily into influencers as a way to bypass the press gallery.
It’s a modern version of John Howard’s use of talkback radio in the late 1990s, albeit with a much more crass edge.
The fact that Albo’s lurch towards influencers and the like is a strategy means that Labor can’t pretend these trainwrecks are random. A PM’s team vets the host, the tone, the audience and the risk, then shuffles the boss onto such formats.
Osborne’s audience is overwhelmingly male, up to 91 per cent on YouTube apparently. So Labor was targeting men who are online, politically disengaged and suspicious of traditional media.
That is a demographic the PM desperately needs to win back, as One Nation surges amongst voters who feel economically squeezed, locked out of housing and culturally condescended to.
Financial influencer Natasha Etschmann tripped up the PM with a straightforward question about capital gains tax in May
But reaching disenfranchised men isn’t the same as pantomiming a cartoon version of masculinity. Being relatable is different to acting juvenile.
Labor wanted larrikin Albo but it got locker room Albo instead: a man trying so hard to prove he’s still one of the boys that he forgot the stature of the office he holds.
The irony is that Labor built a content creator strategy to avoid being carved up by journalists, only to discover influencers carry knives too.
We saw the same hubris during the post-Budget sell. The government tried to sell the Budget with an influencer push designed to make Labor look modern and accessible.
Instead, financial influencer Natasha Etschmann, better known as Tash Invests, asked a glaringly obvious question about why the government’s capital gains tax changes applied to all assets rather than just residential property.
Denied the usual comfort of controlled talking points, Albo delivered a rambling explanation that immediately became the story, because it highlighted that he really didn’t know what he was talking about. And Etschmann had been granted just minutes with the PM.
Meanwhile, the Bush Deep appearance was engineered for people who don’t watch political interview programs and don’t read long-form political analysis. But the clip didn’t stay quarantined from the rest of us.
It spilled into the national arena, where Albo was no longer judged as a podcast guest, but as the Prime Minister of Australia talking about women, sex and the melons of foreign female leaders.
A Prime Minister can be human, funny and plain-spoken. But he still needs to show judgment, the one asset no media strategy can artificially generate.
The harder Albo tries not to be boring, the more desperate the performance looks. The more he chases supposedly soft audiences, the more it exposes him to unforced errors that harder interviews might actually have disciplined out of the 30 year parliamentary veteran.
Erickson warned that boring politicians struggle to be heard, but the lesson from this debacle is that for a Prime Minister being boring is often just the dignity of doing the job properly.
