Comment

Paul Bongiorno
Anthony Albanese and Jodie Haydon’s backyard wedding

Anthony Albanese’s official honeymoon ends this weekend, but his honeymoon with the electorate is continuing, according to the latest opinion polls, boosted by his opponents’ disarray and the government’s significant wins since the May election.

Albanese has successfully kept the balance between China and the United States, Australia’s biggest trading partner and its most important strategic ally respectively. He has also succeeded in passing the biggest environmental reforms in three decades.

There are still difficulties, however. The national accounts released midweek were a timely reminder that the government faces real challenges with cost of living, equality, inflation, productivity, housing and fiscal consolidation.

This last task pits spending against relief for struggling households, and in political terms will be a hard sell when the treasurer – as is almost certain – ends the energy bill support he extended as an election sweetener.

Some in Labor worry that the prime minister’s successes are making him overconfident, but Albanese rejects this out of hand. At his end-of-year drinks at the Lodge he stressed that he took nothing for granted and how privileged he was to hold the top job. He said he would continue to “work his backside off” for the Australian people.

Three days later, he demonstrated an awareness of how important it is not to flaunt his privileges. The prime minister had what a Canberra florist was told was a backyard wedding for “Marie and Matthew”. The only thing extravagant about the celebration was the lengths to which Albanese and Jodie Haydon went to keep it quiet.

There were only around 40 guests, none of them A-listers or billionaires. His most senior ministers were told not to come to the event in Commonwealth cars, with the Prime Minister’s Office, after the event, revealing the couple footed the bill for everything except the venue.

An attempt by Sky News on Sunday morning to beat up an issue fell flat. Opposition Leader Sussan Ley was asked if she was “okay with it being held at the Lodge”. She was reminded “many Australians have to pay for a venue”. It was a curious construct, given that would not apply to other Australians who similarly held their wedding in their own backyard.

Ley, perhaps aware of her widely criticised gaffes questioning Kevin Rudd’s ambassadorship to Washington and then condemning Albanese for wearing a Joy Division T-shirt, steered well clear.

Ley curtly answered that she was “okay with it being at the Lodge”. As were Murdoch’s tabloids around the country, all giving favourable and extensive coverage to “the power of love” on their Sunday front pages.

The Sunday Telegraph got it right when it framed its coverage as “The politics of a ‘small target’ wedding”.

Albanese was acutely aware of politics and perception as he planned the wedding, especially with cost of living showing up as a key determinative factor at the May election and a continuing struggle for millions of voters.

There is another aspect to it all and that is Labor’s complete dominance politically. The 94-seat majority is unprecedented for a second-term government, let alone a Labor one. No one can doubt Labor was the “preferred” government for an overwhelming majority at the election. Polling analyst Kevin Bonham says even on a first-past-the-post basis, Labor led in 86 seats and would have had a comfortable majority. He estimates preferences flowed at just over 60 per cent to the party’s candidates.

Bonham says the average of the latest batch of published opinion polls is 56-44 per cent the government’s way. That represents an improvement in Labor’s two-party preferred vote since its massive landslide win.

Rather than going nowhere, Sussan Ley’s opposition is actually going backwards, bleeding support to One Nation on its right, despite messy attempts to establish its conservative credentials by abandoning the net zero target and flagging an assault on immigration numbers.

There are fears among Liberal moderates that the net zero decision could be Ley’s version of Peter Dutton’s brain explosion in not supporting Labor’s “top-up” tax cuts and promising to repeal them.

The 2025 Australian Election Study, conducted by the Australian National University and Griffith University, was released, with devastating but not unexpected effect for the Coalition.

Paul Kelly in The Australian summed it up as our political culture changing in fundamental ways. Voters are “dealigning” themselves from the main parties, “yet the country overall is moving to the left”, which means Labor wins office through the preference system. Kelly says unless the centre-right understands this, it cannot recover.

Ley has been running around the country brandishing a pamphlet that she says is her plan to bring energy costs down. It is a bullet-point wish list that crumbles under scrutiny and ignores the vast proportion of voters who take climate change seriously and support renewables.

Ley’s glib claim that the “botched” renewables rollout is responsible for high electricity prices simply does not stack up, as analysis by the Clean Energy Investor Group demonstrates. The group represents ownership of 76 power stations with a combined portfolio valued about $38 billion.

It produced analysis that revealed power prices would have been 22 per cent higher last year without the impact of grid-scale solar and wind lowering wholesale prices. That works out to a saving of $417 a year for the average household.

An ABC fact check said that while many Australians are struggling to pay their power bills, the culprits are not renewable energy sources.

About 39 per cent of domestic bill charges go to network costs, which include the infrastructure needed to bring energy to homes. The ABC reports “only a tiny proportion” of these costs are currently used to pay for the transmission of renewable energy.

Another 40 per cent of those bills is due to the war in Ukraine and the rising cost of coal and gas. As coal-fired power stations become less reliable, this has forced the use of other forms of energy, including gas, which has tripled in cost over the past decade.

On Wednesday, Treasurer Jim Chalmers took great comfort from the national accounts finding the economy grew by 0.4 per cent in the September quarter – below market expectations – a 2.1 per cent expansion over the year.

“In annual terms,” Chalmers said, “this was the fastest growth in two years.” He also pointed to the strongest growth in private investment in almost five years.

Careful to recognise “people are still under the pump”, Chalmers cited the latest assessment from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which said the Australian economy would “grow faster than any major advanced economy for the next two years”.

Economist Stephen Koukoulas says the latest gross domestic product figures are disappointing, but not everyone is doing it tough. The value of dwellings, for those lucky enough to own one, was up $317 billion in the September quarter, to be close to an astonishing $12 trillion. This is a substantial wealth effect often lost in the cost-of-living debate.

What is happening – and this surely is an amber light for the government, as former economics professor and current assistant minister for productivity Andrew Leigh warns – is growing inequality. Leigh says we are at most a generation away from the American-style inequality that created the grievance fuelling Donald Trump’s ascendancy.

Writing in the latest Quarterly Essay, The Good Fight, Sean Kelly notes Albanese wants to put “kindness” at the centre of the national project and to convince Australians that Labor values best describe the country. Kelly says to put that into practice would involve a radical shift away from the Howard years, which rewarded the asset accumulators with multibillion-dollar tax concessions and left poorer Australians to “aspire”.

Under the cautious Albanese, Kelly notes, you simply can’t raise an issue like an inheritance tax, which exists in many comparable countries. “You simply cannot say that government funding for private schools should be cancelled or even substantially reduced.”

Kelly says “private provision of care services – in childcare, in aged care, in disabilities care – has gone horribly awry”, yet “a genuine alternative seems impossible to canvass”.

This is where smaller parties willing to raise these issues and more are being increasingly rewarded at the ballot box.

Kelly concedes that incrementalism may gradually bring the sort of reforms that utopian Labor dreamers of the past pursued. Yet even this minimalism needs firmer leadership that is prepared to risk something to deliver a fairer Australia.

The environment reforms that ended the parliamentary year suggest Albanese’s Labor is not afraid to confront vested interests and a hostile media, nor to deal with the Greens to achieve genuine progress.

That would give us all a honeymoon.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on December 5, 2025 as "Marie and Matthew’s backyard wedding".

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