Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese’s budget reply speech had just about enough zingers to keep the true believers excited, and just barely enough policy.
A tired budget week ended with a tired budget reply. Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese’s speech, delivered before a yawning chamber on Thursday night, was peppered with enough zingers to keep the true believers in the public gallery excited, and just barely enough policy to lay the groundwork for a small-target election strategy that may be Labor’s only choice.
Albanese began, as he often does, with a nod to his origin story — growing up in a council house in Sydney’s Camperdown (a suburb now too gentrified for such a story to work) with a single mother. The story is important because it marks Albo as authentic, gives him a connection to the traditional blue-collar base of a party increasingly dominated by middle class, privately-educated technocrats.
What followed was a series of soundbites that could’ve been pinched from any Labor speech or interview over the last eight years — “delivering for working families”, “investing in Australia’s future”, “no one left behind”.
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