It’s weird to me that the bloke who undertook to build a national environmental protection agency for all Australians on the eve of the last federal election just blew it all up. Labor was so close – this close! – to securing a deal with the Greens to establish Environment Protection Australia and a new data body called Environment Information Australia. And then, bam, Anthony Albanese kiboshed the whole deal.

In the words of one insider, “He wets the bed so easily and regularly. It seems like we were on the brink of securing it all – we had secured it all. And he’s just gone, ‘Nope’.”

Illustration: Dionne Gain Credit:

Reminds me of another notorious and now former prime minister, Tony Abbott: “Nope, nope, nope.”

Now Anthony Albanese is giving me Christopher Pyne vibes. “I was the negotiator.” I negotiate. At least that’s what he told the ABC’s Sarah Ferguson on Thursday night when he bluntly erased everyone else’s work on getting Labor’s “nature positive” deal done. But it definitely wasn’t Albanese doing the vast bulk of the negotiation. It was his younger, smarter, factional sibling Tanya Plibersek. But PMs will PM. Swoop in for five minutes and then take credit.

We may never know if Albanese killed the deal in his brief conversation with West Australian Premier Roger Cook: “I don’t give all the details of my private discussions with premiers.”

Yes, this is our weak-kneed PM. But perhaps he scored two key wins this week. One, he thinks he’s bought time, space and miners in the west. Two, once again, he has undermined Plibersek, his environment minister, a once and (who knows?) future rival.

It’s........

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