PAUL MURRAY: ALP spinning around after Anthony Albanese’s brain fart

Having shagged both the economy and the housing market, reaffirmed Labor’s de facto marriage to the Greens and gone on a speed-dating round with several Pacific nations, Anthony Albanese should be exhausted.

And yet he still had time to fit in a podcast with a woman who is clearly smarter than him, but camouflages it with raunchy sex-based banter. What a man.

However, we should still count our blessings that Australia doesn’t have a nuclear red button within the Prime Minister’s reach when China is firing missiles in our direction, which might require more judgment than Albanese has shown recently.

His brain-fart decision to engage in a game of “shag, marry, date” with alleged comedian Nikki Osborne peculiarly took some of the media pressure off Labor’s botched Budget and Albanese’s misplaced boasting about getting it through the Parliament with the assistance, as usual, of his partner of convenience on the Left, the unlovable Greens.

The Prime Minister told the NSW Labor conference last Sunday that criticism of the Budget was “barely coherent noise” — having been guilty of just that two days before on the lounge in the Lodge, sipping whisky and descending into the gutter with Osborne.

Sir Les Patterson might have thought twice about commenting on the Japanese Prime Minister’s “melons” as the Q&A really went, in the interviewer’s charming phraseology, “tits up.”

It has all come at the expense of now being widely regarded as Sleazy Albanese. Before that he was just Anthony Doolittle, vice-patron of the Voice. Not the TV one.

Tony Abbott brought tears to the eyes of the Left by simply munching on an onion. Scott Morrison did it by mangling a line about holding a hose.

But the moralising Marxists were unusually silent when Labor’s leader was barely holding his own while imagining sex with a national icon, apparently without considering whether she might want a say in the matter.

Someone checked. She doesn’t. Not even after a Rabbitohs game. And Kylie prefers the AFL anyway.

Will other women around Canberra now tremble at the very prospect of a South Sydney win? Because Sleazy Albanese might be in the doghouse for a while.

There’s a naughty temptation to fill this column with further coarse reflections on the Prime Minister’s deep dive into locker room humour, dangerously adopting his standards.

On the other hand, maybe this is where the argument should take place for a more complete understanding of what this incident really means.

About things like respect. Not just for women, but more widely for the institutions whose integrity he has been given the honour of upholding, if not improving.

The office of Prime Minister. The Parliament, where he rules the roost. The political party he heads, founded in decent, working-class values. And as a husband and father.

It would be easy to say that if Albanese didn’t have double standards, he wouldn’t have any. However, he was far from alone here.

The woman from the Left who once so desperately wanted his job that Albanese consigned her to the fringes of the government, Tanya Plibersek, has also come undone in this morality tale.

Plibersek was the first of the Labor Left women to be asked in the mainstream media about her leader’s behaviour. Her response was truly pathetic.

“If the prime minister is saying that he’s a fan of Kylie Minogue, I guess that puts him in a group of other Australians, including me . . . I’m a big fan of Kylie’s as well,” she told Natalie Barr during her regular Monday segment on Seven’s Sunrise program.

He wasn’t saying that. He was telling the nation he wanted to shag her. Plibersek must have known.

Albanese’s ribald comments from the interview the previous Friday had been in the news since Sunday and Plibersek’s Sunrise appearance is always about what is making political headlines. No chance she wasn’t fully briefed and expecting a question.

Even though she claimed not to have “listened to the whole of the podcast”, Plibersek decided she knew enough when asked if Albanese should apologise to offer this: “What I’d say on women’s equality . . . no government has been better for it, and no prime minister has been better at it.”

Just 40 minutes later, the Prime Minister’s office issued a statement apologising for the gross-out. In which Plibersek could see no wrong. So that’s a massive fail from her.

And if the PM’s minders kept the decision to apologise from Plibersek, it wouldn’t be the first time Albanese has thrown her under a bus. More disrespect. Two losers.

A day later, with the controversy in full bloom, the Albanese government’s acting Women’s Minister, WA’s Anne Aly, after making speech about female participation in public life, repeatedly declined to comment on her leader’s conduct.

What’s that Labor always says about the standard you walk past. So make that three.

Just as bad was the desperate attempt by Kooyong teal Monique Ryan to find some non-existent moral equivalence in Albanese’s behaviour.

Instead of just calling it out for what it was, she instead saw the need to raise a former Liberal PM, showing just how bitter and twisted her movement — now finally coming clean as a political party — is at its core.

“I think in the past when Scott Morrison has come out with equally embarrassing commentary, people have leapt on him and in a way that they perhaps haven’t done with the PM in the last 48 hours,” Ryan said.

“This sort of embarrassing, really cringey sort of engagement with social media commentators doesn’t reflect well on the Prime Minister, it doesn’t reflect well on our administration. And I would really like to see better from leaders on both sides in the future.”

Both sides? She still thinks there’s only two in national politics?

But wasn’t this about Albanese? It’s a shame that no one asked Ryan to cite examples of Morrison’s sexist comments that were directly comparable to Albanese’s. Because I can’t find any.

Conversely, Morrison is often accused of going too far the other way in the early days of the Brittany Higgins case for crass political reasons, instead of seeing it for what it really was.

Which took a long time to become established

Much has been said about the content of the podcast and Albanese’s willingness to answer questions best avoided. But it simply should never have happened.

Why would any decent Prime Minister willingly take part in something called Bush Deep involving someone with Osborne’s grubby track record?

Speaking of low standards, there’s been another classic example within Albanese’s purview which further questions the Prime Minister’s commitment to raising political standards.

Albanese has stood back while his fellow spearthrower from the Left, Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy, accused former prime minister Robert Menzies of being a nazi appeaser in the 1930s, claiming it as “a historical fact”.

Less than a month ago, silly Perth MP Patrick Gorman held up Menzies as a paragon of political virtue in a speech to Labor’s McKell Institute, dredging up this quote on the objectives of sound standards:

“To temper the frequently absurd asperities of political conflict by seeking to stir up only noble and humane emotions, since ignoble passions, so easily aroused, can in the nature of things produce only ignoble policies and unfair administration.”

But Conroy claimed — at the National Press Club of all places — that Menzies sought to appease Hitler as distinct from his successor, Labor’s John Curtin. Albanese later allowed him to double down unrestrained, stirring “ignoble passions” among those who knew the truth.

In a masterful smackdown this week, The Australian newspaper’s editor-at-large, Paul Kelly, showed that when Menzies as PM first announced troops would be sent to fight Hitler, Curtin opposed it.

“While Menzies prioritised imperial defence in the cause of defeating Adolf Hitler, Curtin was cautious and gave priority to the defence of Australia,” Kelly wrote. “Neither was an appeaser. Both government and Opposition were pledged to the war effort.”

Kelly then came to a potent conclusion which Albanese should take on board: “Menzies and Curtin were a cut above today’s mediocre political class. And the effort to promote Labor’s current national security credentials by denigrating Menzies in an 80-year-old time warp is beyond pathetic.”

Albanese is happy to dampen our crucial relationship with the US to the extent that the AUKUS deal is blowing in the wind, but wants credit for signing security pacts with tiny Pacific nations which one expert notes can’t even police their own fishing grounds.

When Chinese Premier Li Qiang referred to the visiting Albanese as a “handsome boy” in 2023, it was an intended slight. They already had his measure.

Australia needs a serious prime minister to face the very serious challenges that are emerging in our region.

This is where the jokes end: we haven’t got one.