Katina Curtis: Even all the way in WA, Anthony Albanese can’t shake the feeling he’s being stalked

The Steel Blue wolf might have been on Anthony Albanese’s boots, but it was the big bad wolf on his mind. As he stood in the dirt of a Collie worksite on Sunday, the Prime Minister mentioned Opposition Leader Peter Dutton by name — unprompted — four times in under three minutes. Energy Minister Chris Bowen followed suit with five name checks, and other frontbenchers raised the spectre in their own press conferences the next morning. Dutton’s coming after your GST, Dutton wants to dump nuclear power on Collie, Dutton wants to destroy jobs. As the visit to the west continued for a few more days, Albanese eased up on the bogy man tactics and switched focus to what his Government was actually doing. It was a relief to his strategists. The Government has been too driven by the Opposition’s agenda for their liking. Ministers aren’t talking enough about what they’re doing or hammering home Labor’s big-picture plan for the future so voters know what the choice will be. This is a problem, maybe best illustrated by the fact satirical outlet The Shovel ran a headline this week: “Albanese ‘pretty sure’ Opposition not controlling agenda, but will check with Peter Dutton before confirming”. In some ways, it doesn’t matter right now. The election is still months off, there are State polls to get through first and what little brain space people have for politics is being occupied by the American soap opera. But having national attention dragged onto what may or may not be asked in the census in 2026 or the minutiae of how security checks are done for visas means that voters worried about the cost of living think the Government isn’t worried about the same. You can see that in the polls. Industry Minister Ed Husic thinks the Opposition just isn’t taking WA seriously and insists voters will compare the offerings and mark them down. “You cannot simply have a Coalition that doesn’t do its work until the last minute, that is cramming its homework right till the eve of the election and then trying to work out whether or not its policies will stack up, either financially or practically,” he said. Albanese knows it’s not enough to just point and say, well the other guy would be so much worse. He has to give voters a reason to stick with Labor amid the worrying times best described as “you know, all that”. And he especially has to give WA voters that reason. After his visit to Collie’s big battery construction site, Albanese spent the next few days talking jobs with AUKUS, schools funding, training, and outlining Labor’s plans. There was a huge amount of public activity to keep Perth’s journalists busy crossing the city and, like a duck, also a lot of action going on under the water. One backbencher had visits from the Deputy Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, Education Minister, Early Education Minister and Employment Minister — none of which were widely publicised at the time but all of which translated to people met and photos taken for social media where locals would take notice. Plus there were a string of the all-important dinners with the titans of industry, vital both for taking the temperature of WA and passing the hat around to raise funds for the election campaign. Albanese travelled more widely across Perth than on previous visits, from Rocko to Bullwinkel and down to Collie, but it was difficult to pin down an overarching narrative beyond a Morrisonian “how great is WA” vibe. The theme, apparently, was jobs. He spelled this out in his final press conference, standing on the balcony of the Darlington community hall yesterday morning: jobs in clean energy, jobs in defence industry, jobs in social housing construction, training to get better jobs. “Throughout my visit to WA a theme has been job creation, because we know that that is what Labor governments do. We want good, secure jobs,” he said. “It’s all been focused on our economy because it’s a strong economy that then enables you to as well have the social reform that we want assisting our youngest Australians through the early education system or our oldest Australians through aged care.” If you have to explicitly spell out your theme then your messaging might need a rethink. Meanwhile, his big bad wolf Dutton was standing in suburban Melbourne wondering out loud whether the Prime Minister was planning to stop mining.