THE FRONT DORE: Anthony Albanese, we’re sorry, we were wrong about you, we have been too harsh and unfair

It’s time to finally fess up. In the two and a half years since he became PM, we’ve been wrong about Anthony Albanese.

We’ve been unreasonable. Unkind. Definitely unfair. We’ve been negative and naive. Pedantic and pitiless.

Too harsh. Too heartless. And far too nasty.

It’s hard to find anyone, including many in Labor, Cabinet ministers and junior staffers alike, who don’t agree: Albanese is an average bloke doing an average job.

He’s having a crack. But it’s evident, and every day since his election it has become more obvious, that we are asking far too much of one bloke. Albanese is doing his best. But like so many before him, he’s simply not up to it.

He’s not alone. Prime ministers a lot smarter, more qualified and more capable than Albanese have also failed to live up to the expectations of national leadership.

As a nation, we can’t in good conscience point the finger at Albanese. We only have ourselves to blame. We elected the guy without doing any character or competency checks. For most of us, his major asset was not being Scott Morrison.

Even after a couple of years leading Labor and a month-long election campaign, most of us had no idea who this bloke was, nor did we much care. He wasn’t the other bloke, and that’s all that mattered in the end.

If we looked hard enough, the warning signs were there. But who could be bothered?

Albanese is an ordinary Australian guy from a humble background.

He is a role model for every Australian kid born into and raised under the benefits of our generous welfare state.

Albanese, poor and imperfect but plucky and proud, made the most of what our lucky nation offers the less fortunate souls among us — a free home and a free education. He was propped up by the state and given every opportunity to succeed.

And he did.

Never mind the irony that having escaped the State-funded housing commission upbringing, at the pinnacle of his public career he gets to live in not one but two wholly taxpayer paid-for homes; one with a nice view and a great pool next door, and the other with a tennis court.

Albanese has traded his bus pass and student discount card for a limousine and a private jet.

Other than the opportunity afforded every kid lucky enough to grow up in the post-Whitlam 1970s and Eighties, Albanese, all on his own, converted an ordinary childhood into something special. One of the few in our country’s history to rise through the playground of political plodders to lead the nation. Prime Minister of Australia.

His shortcomings should have been obvious. While not disqualifying him from running the country, they should have been screaming at us, and given us all pause for thought. In hindsight, the pedantic, pedestrian leadership we are seeing today was predictable.

Albanese has spent his entire life in a tiny little world. Literally and metaphorically. University. Student politics. Left wing party activism. Factional games, power plays and petty personality preoccupations. He took those life lessons from his inner-city home to his inner-city university campus to his grotty little city office, the Sussex St headquarters of the NSW Labor Party.

He chose his tribe, and in turn the tribe chose him, handing the young Albanese lad the ultimate golden ticket — a prized safe seat in Federal Parliament. His life’s pulsing radius, formerly no more than 5km from a spot on Parramatta Road now stretched all the way down to Canberra. His circle of friends, his influences, acquaintances and advisers, has always remained small. His interests, likewise, narrow.

Is it any wonder then that his prime ministership will be defined by wonderfully obvious characteristics: average, uninspiring, unimaginative and underwhelming. It’s literally written there on his CV when he applied for the job.

And here we are judging him for doing exactly what he promised he would do. Shame on us.

Problem is, as it turns out, prime ministers have to make some big calls on some serious shit.

How is he meant to be across the whole shebang though? Give him a break. There’s the economy. And there’s housing and child care and aged care and health care and roads and interest rates and Coles and Woolies and the words to the Hawthorn theme song. Even the game itself is hard to follow — it’s nothing like rugby league. How is he expected to be across the Rabbitohs’ rap sheet and the rules of both codes? It’s a lot.

Albanese likes to keep it all pretty simple. Stick to the basics and everything will be OK. Don’t talk about any of the other stuff for too long and everyone will move on. Even PK and Karl.

For the rest of it, leave it to Penny and Katy. And let Jim do his thing. Keep him counting the numbers in the Budget, not the numbers in the party room.

We’ve seen terrorist supporters, in small numbers, take to our streets at various times over the past two decades since September 11 heralded the new era of Islamist jihadist terrorism against the West.

But we have never had a government and its prime minister so disinclined to respond, a government so comfortable in its own ignorance to prevaricate and allow an outrageous lie to percolate in our community in such a dangerous and disingenuous way.

Penny Wong thinks the troubles in the Middle East are caused by Israel and can be solved by Israel.

Our Foreign Minister, Albanese’s closest adviser, believes it is OK to treat a decent nation under existential assault from deathmongers to its south and its north as if it is the war criminal.

Hezbollah supporters freely marching through the streets of Sydney and Melbourne on the weekend carrying terrorist flags and promising to fulfil the death wish and destruction of a backward-thinking jihadist militia is a sickening indictment on Australian politics.

How have we allowed terrorist sympathisers to migrate to Australia?

It is as dark and dreadful a sight imaginable. Met with silence from Albanese only days after Wong’s abomination representing Australia at the United Nations, better known these days as the nations united against Israel. Wong again, as she has done countless times since the October 7 massacres, admonished the Jewish state for having the temerity, the gall, to defend itself against the vile beasts of Hamas and Hezbollah.

When the US version of October 7 went down, on September 11, 2001, Australia went to war. Now we have gone to water.

Hamas has sabotaged any chance of Palestinian statehood, intent instead on suppressing its people and destroying Israel, and Hezbollah has over decades insidiously ravaged the once proud and peaceful nation of Lebanon, turning the Christian-majority country into a land held hostage by Shia jihadists, puppets of crazed Iran leaders also determined to destroy its Jewish neighbours and spread its psychotic Islamist ideology.

We have been at war in the West against Islamist jihadists since 9/11. As the conflict has re-settled mostly in the Middle East, we have moved on, comfortable in our arrogance, but the enemy has not. The Albanese Government is happy to let this war now play out against the Jews the world over, as it is today. Not just against Israel.

The idiocy of too many Western leaders, including ours, is they think this isn’t our problem. If the disgraceful Adam Bandt leads the radical left in Australia, Penny Wong is the leader of the rest of the left. On this topic, she is outrageous in her hubristic, intellectual arrogance and moral superiority. Put simply, the left detests Israel and supports what they believe is the Palestinian resistance, a movement that has long been a front for a murderous anti-West Islamist terrorist cult.

Wong is exposed by her own words. She is the minister for “Yes, but Israel”.

“It is true that Hezbollah is a terrorist organisation, it is true that they have not been complying with UN Security Council resolutions BUT we see . . . Gaza . . . children killed . . . Israel . . . we have to find a different way . . .”

“Obviously Hezbollah is a terrorist organisation and we understand the security position Israel is in, HAVING SAID THAT we’ve seen so much violence in the Middle East. . . cycle of violence, the continued escalation, the continued retribution . . . that is why Australia and others . . . have called for a ceasefire . . . because we have seen so many people, so many people die.”

“I’ve said very clearly . . . we understand the circumstances of October 7, it was horrific BUT from day one we have said international humanitarian law matters, civilian lives matter, all lives have value.”

BUT. BUT. BUT.

What she and Albanese have failed to do is explain and contextualise to Australians, who are rightfully focused on other stuff closer to home, exactly what we are dealing with when it comes to Hamas and Hezbollah.

In doing so, they, and their insidious and uncompromisingly dishonest radical left fellow travellers, the Greens, have promoted a distorted worldview, damaged our international reputation and inspired hatred and division at home by confusing so many fair-minded Australians about what is right and what is wrong.

Albanese might be an ordinary bloke and an average Prime Minister, for which we can generally forgive him, but he will never be forgotten for appeasing terrorists and running an extraordinarily dangerous foreign policy.