Federal election 2025: Albo is having fun on the 2025 campaign and looks like a man on his way to victory

If the word to describe Anthony Albanese during the 2022 campaign was “tetchy,” in 2025 it is “confident.”

For a man who claims he has a “mountain to climb” to retain government, a harmless exchange with a group of students on Thursday provided an insight into his mindset.

As he urged his Treasurer to join what he thought might be the largest number of people in a selfie with an Australian Prime Minister, he told them, “It’s really unwise not to have the Treasurer in the shot, we might have some budget bids next year.”

It was a rare departure from what has been an otherwise surprisingly disciplined performance from the Member for Grayndler.

Gone is the snappy, brittle, angry, shouty Albo who alarmed his colleagues with his poor performance. This campaign, he is across his detail and bursting to answer niche questions, particularly if they pertain to a local infrastructure project he funded during his time as the federal minister.

But what is less obvious on-camera is that this is a man who is not just confident in approaching a make-or-break campaign but one who is relishing it.

Albanese is having fun.

During a press conference on Green Island off Cairns in the battleground far north Queensland seat of Leichhardt, he played a private game.

When he finished his opening remarks and handed over to his local candidate, he deliberately placed himself out of sight behind his candidate Matt Smith.

Smith, a former professional basketballer with the Cairns Taipans who stands 2.1 metres tall compared to Albanese’s 180 centimetres, is hoping to enter the Guinness World Records as the world’s tallest politician if he wins the seat on May 3.

While the disappearing act went unnoticed by the media, who were waiting to drill the Prime Minister about US President Donald Trump’s latest tariff missive, the PM at least humoured himself.

On the boat trip back from the resort island to Cairns, his good humour kept up. While many journalists and staff were battling sea sickness, an ebullient prime minister sat on the side of the jerking boat and crashed a Sky News reporter’s live cross to talk about “the vibe.”

Relaxed and smiling, he looked comfortable, wearing a white polo t-shirt, his personally customised Adidas trainers in green and white colours for his beloved Souths Rabbitohs NRL team and a Bunnies cap.

It was vintage, knockabout Albo in full force, although footy is not an indulgence he can enjoy, publicly for the time being.

“If I have fun, I get into trouble,” he told a Daily Telegraph forum in Blacktown in Western Sydney, after being asked if he planned to watch a blockbuster NRL game between the Bunnies and the Roosters that night early in the campaign.

It was a revealing moan. Fun, or looking like he enjoys that part of the job a little too much, has been a drag on Mr Albanese’s down-to-earth public persona.

This self-indulgence has been Albanese’s biggest risk, but it’s one he’s so far mostly avoided. Gone are the stories about being a houso kid from Camperdown, the absent dad and even references to his mother.

After a bruising put down by members of his own team about his tendency to crowd out government messages by constantly talking about his second shot at love and his dog featured in The Nightly, the prime minister has even stopped talking about curly-haired Toto.

Although that hasn’t stopped the Labor party from releasing a swag of “Albo 2025” merchandise, including Albo 2025 bandanas, Albo sports socks and even Albo mints — because everyone thinks of the PM when they need to freshen up, apparently.

But the overall discipline, including his decision to largely ditch liquor since the start of the year, has paid off and brought a fresh vigour to the prime minister and his team.

Ministerial confidantes like Finance Minister Katy Gallagher, Health Minister Mark Butler, Education Minister Jason Clare and Defence Minister Richard Marles have jumped on and off the Prime Minister’s campaign plane and regularly attend drinks events with journalists — although the brusque Penny Wong prefers to keep a distance.

His daily campaign agenda has a rhythm. It starts before or just after breakfast time, travelling media are bussed to an electorate where the Prime Minister will arrive at either a construction site for new houses, an Urgent Care Medicare Clinic or school or a childcare centre.

The PM is ushered in to meet strategically chosen people with whom he banters or chats to about their jobs in front of photographers and television crews wielding boom mics.

On Holy Thursday, it reached a farcical point. At local watering hole, The Paddo, in the Greens-held seat of Brisbane, he was whisked into a backroom to meet a group of university students who gushed to the Prime Minister and Treasurer about waiving their HECS debts.

Never mind that these students signed up to study in the full knowledge they’d be required to pay their fees, or that gross debt will reach $1.2 trillion dollars under Labor. The praise was so euphoric that even the Prime Minister joked to these carefully-selected Young Labor students that they could be made Labor party spokesman.

Outside that room were a group of women who were dying to meet the prime minister but didn’t even get a glimpse of him.

There was also 50-year–old Eddie Platt, a nurse who works in prisons and in intensive care at a Brisbane hospital, who voted Green in the seat of Ryan, which the LNP lost to the minor party last election.

This year, he is switching to Labor because of Anthony Albanese.

“I think he does deserve a majority because he hasn’t had any scandals, and he’s managed inflation,” he told The Nightly.

While Mr Platt didn’t get to meet the cocooned Prime Minister, he did meet Jim Chalmers. “I hope you’re the next prime minister,” he told the Treasurer.

“That’s my cue to go,” Chalmers quipped back.

Mr Albanese will certainly need to keep Mr Chalmers’ ambitions in check if he is to fight for a third term in 2028.

A majority win, no longer out of the question on May 3, would go some way to doing that.

But he would need to prove he can convert this rare bout of form into governing, something he has struggled to do since the defeat of the Voice referendum in late 2023.

Few expected the Prime Minister to rediscover an electioneering mojo that deserted him during that campaign and the 2022 election.

Expectations were that he’d crash and burn under sustained questioning every day, but so far this has not happened. And once it became clear that the battle-hardened Prime Minister survived the first week with no major mishaps, his confidence grew.

But some have been less surprised. Those close to the prime minister believe this election’s performance is a return to normal. They argue that 2022 was a COVID aberration.

Because of the pandemic lockdowns, in the two years prior to that election, Mr Albanese had had barely any practice fielding questions about any topic other than COVID.

So when two journalists asked him what the cash and unemployment rates were on day one of the 2022 campaign, he was unprepared. And it knocked his confidence. That slipped again after the defeat of the Voice.

But 2025 is a different stage with completely new sets. Donald Trump looms large, delighting Labor strategists who always knew the US President was ripe for exploiting domestically.

And the Opposition Leader appears to be a man who has turned up for the final act having not even bothered to read his lines, let alone learn them off by heart.

Peter Dutton’s laziness and sheer negligence has made him a ripe target. Labor has successfully managed to twin Mr Dutton to Trump as well as tap into the uncertainty about the global outlook to run a ferocious scare campaign.

And Mr Albanese retreats to the safest of electioneering spaces. His great strength is his unprompted public interactions, but his campaign routine is devoid of them, even though he clearly craves them.

He forced his team on day one to stop for a spontaneous visit to a gym on his way to his first official campaign visit to an Urgent Care Clinic in Peter Dutton’s outer Brisbane seat of Dickson.

It’s a visit he frequently mentions on the campaign trail.

And the genuine love of being with the public is no act. Arriving at his hotel in Darwin without his travelling media pack, he was ecstatic to see the NRL Parramatta Eels team sitting in the foyer, bounding over to them to chat. After checking in, he begged his local MP, Luke Gosling, to go for a walk with him, who obliged, even though no one walks in the middle of the day in searing heat in Darwin.

Instead of opting for privacy and room service, he will often be seen having breakfast in the public restaurant, eating with staff who will brief him on the day ahead.

It’s obvious that if it were up to Mr Albanese he would get out and about as much as he could, but the hotel lobby incident in Melbourne this week, whereby a far-right activist filmed himself berating the Prime Minister, showed that the risks of being so accessible are not just political, but very much related to his security.

Nevertheless, the orchestrated “pic facs” that prevent him from meeting people like Eddie Platt are the letdown of his campaign. While they are designed for the television news and increasingly social media output, they are fake and pointless in terms of revealing the Prime Minister’s connection with the public.

Once the pantomime is over, Mr Albanese will face the media.

He tries to take questions from most of the travelling journalists and his press conferences will last around 40 minutes or even longer. Pity the candidates and ministers who cannot escape, like Karen Wheatland, the Western Australian candidate for the outback seat of Durack, whose shoes split in the 39-degree heat at Rio Tinto’s iron-ore export facility, causing her feet to burn while the PM talked.

The Prime Minister’s messages are rehearsed and replayed. He will usually stand under a fluorescent light in a drab room, in front of green Medicare-branded banners that are ferried around the country by his staff, he will wave around his Medicare card and rave about Peter Dutton wanting to cut doctors’ appointments to pay for nuclear power stations.

It is, of course, bunkum. Mr Dutton has matched all of Labor’s major health policies and has never said that he would defund services to pay for power.

But facts don’t matter in a scare campaign. And Mr Dutton has done almost nothing to address the demolition job that Labor’s formidable machine has unleashed on him. The Coalition has relied heavily on calling Mr Albanese “a liar.”

“The Coalition has established an Albanese Live Lie Tracker,” Coalition spokesman Senator James Paterson told journalists after the ABC’s Leaders’ debate in Parramatta in Western Sydney on Wednesday night.

“Because there were more lies in the debate tonight on negative gearing and many other things.

It’s a dumb counterattack that’s unlikely to shift a vote. The public already thinks all politicians lie, something Senator Paterson appeared to concede when questioned by The Nightly.

“Regardless of whether it wins the election or not, I think it’s important to point out when the Prime Minister lies, because he’s done it so often, so many times in this campaign.”

If calling someone a liar in politics is known to be ineffectual, the reverse is true for scare campaigns – just ask Malcolm Turnbull. In the space of three weeks, Anthony Albanese has reversed the polls and is now in the lead.

It is a stunning turnaround.

“I’ve been underestimated from time to time,” he said on Thursday.

“But the truth is that it’s hard to win a second term.

“We’re trying to climb a mountain, we’re a few steps up that mountain but it’s a long way to get to the peak.”

Mr Albanese has not won the country with a grand vision or even earned a slam dunk second go on his record.

If he does get over the line, it will, unfortunately, be seen as a vindication of his mediocre first term, and spending-laden, timid offer for a second.

But he looks and acts like a man on his way to victory.