MARK RILEY: Mr Clifftop Mansion Anthony Albanese needs to stop making himself the story

There is something about Labor prime ministers buying swanky homes in office.

Bob Hawke snapped up a harbourside mansion in Sydney’s Northbridge for himself and then-wife Hazel in 1991.

He paid $1.23 million. That was a fair sum in those days.

And he did it slap-bang in the middle of Australia’s worst recession since the Great Depression.

But there was very little controversy about that at the time.

Hawke bought the house for his retirement. It came sooner than he expected.

He lost the prime ministership to Paul Keating a few months later.

Keating stepped over him into the leadership and soon after stepped over him on the property ladder as well.

In mid-1994, Keating splashed $2.2m with then-wife Annita to buy St Kevin’s, an 1882 mansion in the salubrious Sydney suburb of Woollahra.

Again, there was very little controversy.

Keating was a known aesthete. The Queen Anne-style residence seemed a natural home for his French clocks and antique furniture.

And now, in the teeth of a housing and cost-of-living crisis, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has spent $4.3m on an oceanfront property in the NSW Central Coast suburb of Copacabana.

There is great controversy about this.

The political world has a much lower tolerance for such matters than it once did.

All those criticising Albanese, though, first acknowledge that the Prime Minister has done nothing wrong.

He is perfectly entitled to buy and sell houses.

It’s also broadly acknowledged that buying one on the Central Coast makes sense.

His fiancée, Jodie Haydon, grew up there. Three generations of Haydons still live there.

Albanese says he bought the house so they could live near the Haydons once he decided to leave politics or the people or his party made that decision for him.

All fine. All valid. All logical.

The problem is the timing and the optics.

This is a Prime Minister buying a big house dripping into the ocean in the run-up to an election in which one of the key issues will be the inability of average and, particularly, young Australians to buy a home at all.

Remember Malcolm Turnbull refusing to leave his $50m-plus waterfront home and move across Sydney Harbour to the prime minister’s official residence at Kirribilli?

Tony Abbott’s former chief of staff Peta Credlin dubbed him “Mr Harbourside Mansion”.

It branded him an elitist. It stuck.

Liberal MPs are now saying Albanese’s purchase will brand him as out of touch.

They say it is as impolitic as Scott Morrison’s Hawaiian holiday during the Black Summer bushfires.

Other Liberals say it is the worst decision since Abbott knighted Prince Philip.

They are taking great delight in these putdowns while ignoring the obvious paradox that the most offensive sledge they can muster is to compare him with two of their own contemporary leaders.

Those decisions by Morrison and Abbott exhibited woeful judgment.

Albanese’s actions aren’t up to that level — or down, as the case may be.

But they could become as damaging in the short term. They feed into Opposition attacks on a Prime Minister they claim is increasingly disconnected from the lived reality of average families.

That is not a battle Albanese wants to fight as he navigates the crucial final months of his first term and begins the important task of setting out a second term agenda.

Just like last week’s brain snap in the Parliament when he accused shadow treasurer Angus Taylor of having Tourette’s, this controversy has swamped the Government’s main messaging for several days.

Albanese now seems trapped in a self-perpetuating cycle of clumsy or ill-timed actions filling the space that should be occupied by agenda-setting announcements.

His senior colleagues, though, are not losing faith in him. At least, not yet.

They forgive him his Tourette’s error, noting that he corrected himself almost immediately.

And they understand and support his right to buy whatever marital home he desires, within reason.

But they privately concede they want him to stop making himself the story.

The Canberra bureaucracy is in overdrive working up policy options for the December Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook, an expected early Budget in March and an election in May.

It is vital that the Government’s messaging is clear and crisp and unadulterated by the noise from unnecessary own goals.

Senior ministers are hoping the Prime Minister’s actions will ensure the story of the day during this critical period will be about those policies and not about him.