CAMERON MILNER: Anthony Albanese’s Qantas flight upgrade excuses won’t fly with voters

It’s been well known that Anthony Albanese booked his flights himself, even as a minister.

While it was regarded as a bit odd by colleagues, we now know why, with former Australian Financial Review columnist Joe Aston revealing that Alan Joyce was always there with a pre-authorised upgrade for the Prime Minister.

Albanese can’t hide behind the excuse that all upgrades were declared when in fact he knew every time he pressed confirmed on the Qantas Red E-deal seat in cattle class he’d automatically get an upgrade to first class.

This is in a totally different ballpark than the Taylor Swift tickets, grand final freebies and free lunches.

Sure they were all freebies, but he didn’t know at the time of ordering he’d accrue an automatic benefit like he did when booking with the then-Qantas CEO Joyce directly.

Albo knew a benefit would accrue every time and that’s the moral hazard Joyce willingly allowed the minister for transport and the shadow minister for transport to partake.

It’s clear no other Labor minister got this much benefit. Upgrades for them were considerably more random, but not Albo’s.

Voters should question every decision made that benefitted Qantas.

These include denying competition in our skies by locking out investors or criticism of airports that wanted to expand to provide more gates for planes other than Qantas planes.

For Albo getting 1A was like shooting fish in a barrel.

It’s not about whether Albo declared the stacks of upgrades. That’s the evidence of the moral hazard, but it’s not his absolution.

Albanese has a very carefully curated boy-from-poverty-who-made-it-to-PM narrative.

That veneer and image unravelled badly when he bought a $4.3 million clifftop retirement home and was shown to be just another rent lord when he evicted his tenant to make a super profit on the Dulwich duplex.

Now Albo seems to be guided by a misguided vision of himself as a latter-day Robin Hood living by the moral code of “If you are a poor boy, it’s OK to rob the rich”.

Albanese would have voters believe that 28 years of being in Parliament brings judgment and experience, but instead Albanese looks like he has been wallowing in the freebies all while sucking down hard on the teat of the taxpayer.

Federal Parliament’s internal cafeteria where staff and MPs mingle is called the Trough for a reason.

Parliament for so many MPs is like an all-you-can-eat buffet, replete with a John Cleese waiter and a bucket. One senior Labor Senator once described Parliament House to me as Temptation Island for ugly people.

Even our sober Treasurer has told of nights at Parliament where he’d be “cutting a bit loose socially’”

They say power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Albo has seen off the challengers from within his caucus. He couldn’t care less how many Greens or Teals he gets to govern with as long as he’s still Prime Minister.

Unless voters turf him out at the next election, Albanese will have spent three decades and almost half his adult life on the biggest bender of taxpayer money and corporate largesse.

It’s never about whether it’s been declared. It’s that he should never have accepted the Qantas automatic upgrades in the first place.

Albanese seems oblivious to just how bad this is. It’s Aloof Albo at best, but voters will just see it as more Arrogant Albo.

And after years and years of accepting Qantas upgrades and countless decisions and non-decisions that could’ve benefitted Qantas, what made Albanese finally wake up to the conflict and stop?

Getting his own plane, Toto One.

No longer requiring the upgrades, Albo’s sense of entitlement didn’t stop there. He hit Joyce up for a Chairman’s Club membership for his son Nathan. Now Nathan is I’m sure a remarkable 23-year-old, but he only got the membership because his daddy asked and his daddy was the PM.

In the fine tradition of the Albanese family, Chairman’s Lounge gets you free flight upgrades too!

Albanese is doing his best version of “keep calm and carry on”, and his moral indignation about how any of this is a problem just horrifies Labor voters and rank-and-file members alike.

Queensland Labor lost a vital week of campaigning due to Albo and his frontbench defending the indefensible of him buying a $4.3m retirement home.

But this one has a stench of scandal to it.

Albo’s defence that declaration alone absolves the moral hazard he willingly entered into just doesn’t fly.

He’s got serious questions to answer.

Voters can’t simply be fobbed off with the equivalent of “Your flight has been delayed due to the late arrival of your inbound aircraft”.

Albanese we now know wasn’t waiting for a late gift to be bestowed. Instead he knew that as he booked a flight himself with his personal travel agent, the Qantas CEO, he was going to get first-class even as he accepted the fare conditions for cattle class.

And that is the fundamental problem for Albo.