Albo plays masterclass while Opposition forfeits

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at his National Press Club address, 10 June 2025.

Albo’s performance was a masterclass in polished rhetoric, delivered with the unflappable confidence of a man who knows he’s playing on an empty field. But as I sat there, nursing a glass of red and a growing sense of unease, it wasn’t the Prime Minister’s aplomb that struck me… It was the deafening silence of the Opposition, whose absence of vinegar is fast becoming a national scandal.

Albo stood at the podium with the air of a leader who has assumed political inevitability. He spoke of economic stability, renewable energy investments, and a recalibrated foreign policy. All of these were set somewhere in the future, grand promises that deserved to be dissected with surgical precision by a competent opposition.

Alexandra Marshall had this to say in the Unfiltered newsletter:

Michael de Percy had the pleasure (misfortune?) of witnessing the Prime Minister speaking live at the National Press Club this afternoon. By the sounds of it, the most disappointing part of the ordeal was how polished Albanese’s propaganda has become. Weaving narratives that outrage democracy and picking apart capitalism comes to him as naturally as breathing. Worse, the Opposition is nowhere to be seen – disarmed by disunity and too confused about what they should be opposing to actually oppose.

Terry Barnes followed up the next day in the Morning Double Shot newsletter:

Talking of identity crises, from his National Press Club appearance yesterday, PM Anthony Albanese thinks he’s in another country altogether, one in which he and Labor won a huge mandate on 3 May. The reality is Albanese had no positive mandate, illustrated by several campaign Newspolls finding a strong majority of voters thought he didn’t deserve re-election. He won only because the Opposition failed to show up for the policy fight, and Left preferences boosted a pathetic Labor primary vote. Michael de Percy attended the Press Club to endure Albanese’s vapid speech of one-sentence paragraphs with its vacuous claims about Labor and the electorate, and gives his verdict.

My latest report from the National Press Club for The Spectator Australia, Albo plays masterclass while Opposition forfeits.

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