THE FRONT DORE: Why Bill Shorten would make a better Prime Minister than Anthony Albanese

While workplaces are now awash with confusion over whether they are allowed to email staff out of hours, Australian voters are absolutely clear about exercising their right to disconnect. From Albo.

As much as he would like to, Anthony Albanese doesn’t get to write the headlines. Nor does he get a say in what journalists write about him. He does, however, decide what he talks to them about.

Albanese takes pride in running his little press conferences with an iron fist, holding firm to this quaint idea that as Prime Minister he is entitled to be insulting, abrasive, aggressive and abusive to his opponents in question time but journalists must remain polite and procedural in the presence of their dear leader.

Painfully, Albanese decides who in the press gallery asks questions and under what circumstances they get to ask them. It’s his thing. And incredibly he’s allowed to get away with it.

If he possessed any natural authority at all, or the slightest command of his words, or more than a passing knowledge of his Government’s policies, you’d admire the chutzpah.

But old matey is the captain of circumlocution: the use of many words when fewer would do, especially in a deliberate attempt to be vague and evasive, the Oxford dictionary says. Nailed it.

At the end of a week in which he stood before rural women, had a brain explosion, and mocked, in some weird arse, aborted, attempt at humour, the sheep farmers he’s ruining to win over inner-city voters, Albanese trundled up to Townsville to speak at a bush summit. If only irony could be dug up and exported.

Naturally, he did his usual stocktake while, briefly, on the ground. “This is my 34th visit to Queensland as the Prime Minister in two years. It’s my 14th to regional Queensland … and it’s enjoyable.” “You know, you get to go ‘this is an enjoyable engagement’. The Mount Isa rodeo. I think I was the first prime minister to go there.”

This is precisely why Albanese is so popular in Queensland. Obviously.

Back in Canberra, Albanese had earlier that week presided, at least in name, over massive changes to the National Disability Insurance Scheme, and garrotted the militant construction union, the CFMEU. Big stuff. Not to be outdone, Albanese’s favourite minister Tanya Plibersek also killed off a $1 billion gold mine in regional NSW, based on the claims of a random Indigenous auntie slash artist who apparently declared “the ancestors are saying they’ll be happy”. The actual, living, local Indigenous elders were not so happy. “We’ve never heard of this lady,” Roy Ah-See said, pulling the pin on the mine “made a mockery of our people’s culture”. The company behind the mine, Regis Resources, declared the project now dead, they couldn’t afford to do it. And would not proceed with it. To rethink the project, and start a new approval process, “could take between five and 10 years, with no certainty of a viable alternative being realised”.

Albanese apparently knows better than the bloke who owns the mine. He had a different view about the viability. “Well that’s not right. And indeed, the mining proposal that you talk about, the mine remains approved. There’s no blocking of that.”

The mine is not going ahead. But Circumlocution Charlie, content in his own ignorance, doesn’t get caught up in details, preferring to Albo-splain how good Labor is for the resources sector. Tailings dams hey. You can’t live with them, you can’t live without them.

As that was all going on, the Coalition focused on the Government’s inexplicable decision to hand out more visas basically than any other country in the world, mostly without proper checks, to thousands of Palestinians from Gaza, Labor spinners were calling around trying to convince the gullible in the press gallery that it was a dud strategy. Punters could care less about Gaza. It’s all about the economy, stupid. “Why Gaza visa attacks could backfire on the Coalition,” the headline read in one deeply serious newspaper. “A Labor minister told AFR Weekend not a single voter had raised the Palestinian visas issue with him during his time in the electorate on Friday and last weekend,” the story says. A backbencher says the visa issue “probably isn’t hurting the Government”. LOL. Nothing to see here, said the immigration official to the bishop.

So pretty chill after his “enjoyable engagement” and looking forward to a bit of time off over the weekend, Albanese sat down at the end of the week with a Queensland journo for a rib fillet and some carefully chosen red wine.

He doesn’t get to write the headlines, but he absolutely decides what he wants to talk about. And on this day, this particular week, the Prime Minister decided it was the perfect time, a few months out from his next marriage, to open up about his ex-missus. Again.

Shorten, taking a principled, but unpopular, stand to rein in NDIS’ unsustainably wayward costs, facing fierce resistance from a confused and concerned disability sector, was everything Albanese is not.

So as his Labor colleagues in the crime-riddled NT woke up on Sunday morning to a flogging, wiped from the electoral map in the Top End, Albanese’s medium 10/10, $40 pepper-sauce-soaked steak and his cheeky Barossa Valley shiraz turned into a front page blurb and a double-page spread in the Sunday papers, the biggest selling of the week, across four States: “I never thought I’d find love again.”

Albanese, enjoying the hospitality of Brisbane’s Sunday Mail, thought it was the moment to talk about his broken heart after the collapse of his marriage, almost six years ago.

“I was trying to understand what had happened with my relationship and it made me recognise that what I needed to do was not try to understand it, but accept it,” he said. “It happened, it was her decision, there was nothing I could do about it.”

Who knows, maybe they talked about a lot of things. Maybe he made another sheep joke while “munching on his rib fillet”.

Maybe the sad story of the end of a 30-year union was nothing more than a passing conversation that a wily old journo had latched onto later and turned into a front page, “Albo’s most personal interview”.

Curiously, he had told the exact story more than a year earlier, on FM radio in Melbourne, explaining how he was blindsided by his wife on New Year’s Day, of all days.

So that was Albo’s Sunday covered. Tennis anyone?

Bill Shorten, the man Albanese won the Labor leadership from after coughing up the un-loseable 2019 election, spent his Sunday morning on ABC’s Insiders. His colourful and confrontational performance teased that maybe, just maybe, voters, at least those in the Labor rank and file, perhaps do get it wrong after all.

Shorten, taking a principled, but unpopular, stand to rein in the scheme’s unsustainably wayward costs, facing fierce resistance from a confused and concerned disability sector, was everything Albanese is not.

Feisty but frank. Cynical yet sincere. Passionate but pragmatic. Realistic yet reassuring. Argumentative but not arrogant. Across the detail and perfectly precise and persuasive. Shorten was direct, eloquent, clear and convincing.

Shorten also did what Albanese struggles to do: he fronted up.

Tenacious as he is, no one genuinely believes Shorten can make a John Howard, “Lazarus with a triple bypass”, comeback.

He should.