Around May last year, a veteran political strategist suggested to me that the Albanese government’s apparent strategy of avoiding fights carried a risk. If a crisis suddenly arrived, and the defining purpose of the government had not been cemented in the public mind by policy battle, its response to that crisis could do the job for it.
A crisis can be short or long, but is usually marked by a short initial period of blazing intensity in which the government is on display: the early days of the pandemic, say, or the worst bushfire days.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese needs to decide whether he wants us to think of him as bold or cautious.Credit: Chris Hopkins
What we both missed at the time was that the Albanese government’s crisis was already upon it – and the reason we didn’t understand this was because the cost-of-living “crisis” was so different from those other crises. Inflation had, by then, already........