Labor’s Anthony Albanese Is Not a Friend of Australia’s Left — And He Never Was
Anthony Albanese may be the first federal leader of the Australian Labor Party to hail from the Socialist Left. However, his track record in New South Wales shows that he rose to his current position by collaborating with the party’s right wing to crush genuine ALP socialists.
Labor and opposition leader Anthony Albanese arrives to deliver his budget reply speech at Parliament House on October 8, 2020, in Canberra, Australia. (Mick Tsikas-Pool / Getty)
In the wake of Bill Shorten’s defeat in the 2019 federal election, commentators speculated that the Australian Labor Party might be on the verge of its own “Miliband Moment.” Although a Corbyn-style left-wing takeover was not on the agenda, many still believed that the ALP was on the cusp of a leftward shift, and that the leadership of uninspiring machine men would soon be a thing of the past.
Nearly two years later, however, Labor has shifted to the right under the leadership of a seasoned apparatchik, Anthony Albanese.
Before rebranding himself as a cool dad MP for Sydney’s inner west electorate of Grayndler, Albanese cut his teeth in Labor’s ruthless New South Wales (NSW) Head Office. It’s a fairly typical origin story. But in one important respect, Albanese is different. Every federal ALP leader in living memory has been from the party’s right. By contrast, Albanese hails from what is referred to internally as the “hard” wing of the NSW Socialist Left faction.
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