Albanese is riding high right now. That means the hits are just around the corner |
It was just half an hour yet somehow it captured the political year like a photograph.
Login or signup to continue reading
It came on the final scheduled sitting day for 2025 and its message was as strident as it was simple: Labor united, ascendant. Coalition divided, in disarray.
Of course, images can be deceptive and in politics, fortunes do change, so if you looked closer, it was also a kind of warning.
Let me set the scene.
The clock had ticked over to 2:00pm and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was on his feet at the despatch box, his mood buoyant. It had been a year in which he had helmed Labor's emphatic re-election in proportions rarely seen in Australian politics.
His stock soaring, Albanese held the attention of a full House of Representatives and all three of the public galleries. Only the pews set aside for journalists up behind Speaker, Milton Dick, were partially empty.
The atmosphere made for a startling contrast with the subdued air not 30 minutes before, where the biggest name in the National Party in two decades, Barnaby Joyce, had snagged a fleeting "90-second address" slot to quit the party he'd led and which had made him deputy prime minister.
Delivered then to a sparsely populated chamber, Joyce's sullenness was manifest as he registered an internal vote of no-confidence in mainstream conservatism.
Downbeat and dejected, it felt like a right-wing bookend to the rejection by moderate Australians in May.
Back in question time, Albanese warmed to his theme: "The once great parties of the Liberal Party and the National Party are reduced," he chortled.
"They've gone from being either the party of government or the party of alternative government to Play School, while the person who was deputy prime minister when they committed to net zero is outside doing a press conference, reporting his defection........