Let’s not beat around the bush: the prime minister is a battler.
Yes, Anthony Albanese, who sat in the dark corner of his childhood home in government housing (Yuck!), tugging on his bootstraps so hard he tugged himself off all the way to Kirribilli.
If he were a battlebot — rumour is he’s part droideka — he’d have a big chainsaw and jerry-rigged flamethrower, tipping all the weaker battlebots (single mothers, the disabled, the unemployed, dregs et al.) into the open pits of eternal loserdom, where they belong. He’s done as much to his erstwhile tenant earlier this week, evicting him to sell the property (which isn’t a prerequisite, by the way).
That is his right as the only legit battler out there, and as seen in this week’s budget — devoid of any of those pesky handouts or housing solutions — it is a right the Labor Party staunchly preserves. For the ALP, like its leader, is made up of battlers: be they grinding their way through Sydney’s rough-and-tumble private schools, or our nation’s grittiest legal internships, or the brutal hardships of a youth spent toiling away as a political staffer. Indeed, today’s Labor is made up of bucolic hard-scrabblers who fight for the little man because they understand there’s no fate worse than being little (see: Bill Shorten).
Albanese and Labor know, as only those who have experienced such hardship could know, that there’s nothing as hard as being hard done by (with apologies to [JOKE REDACTED BY CRIKEY LEGAL TEAM]). Hard times call for hard men to get hard for those who are hard-up, and there’s no-one the ALP is as hard for than Australia’s most oppressed and maltreated caste: the humble landlord.
DISCLAIMER: I’m saying this as someone who owns 11 properties, which I nourish as eagerly as the black mould nourishing the respiratory illnesses of my whiny tenants. What else in this great nation is as laborsome, honourable, exhausting and dare I say ANZAC-like as renting out to a Chinese exchange student a room once used to store open boxes of rat poison for $850 a week (not including utilities)?
Us landlords are the most hard done by sorry sods in this sodding country, constantly having to manage the cruel and bitter expectations of our tenants — who I see as my children! — though they beat and batter us with requests for indulgences like “heating”, “water” and “less carbon monoxide”, as if we’re some sort of quick-dial Jehova able to conjure these things from thin air (Susan, if your apartment feels “thin”, listen to your body and lay down and sleep instead of emailing me every five minutes, okay?!?).
To be a landlord in Australia is to be vilified, villainised and vasectomised (at least in my experience) by cruel ungratefuls who would love nothing more than to see us lose an empty investment property just so they may scuttle in and claim it for their own, like some cannibalistic hermit crab.
But just as it looked like we landlords were on our last legs, the Australian Labor Party saved the day. At last, the representation we’ve been fighting for for decades! Unlike the Coalition (which is friendlier to land developers, big difference!), Labor understands that landlords are the only people tethering our nation’s fractured sense of community and togetherness… uh… together.
Here is a party that understands, instinctively, that the most honourable things one can aspire to be in Australia are: 1) landlord 2) AIPAC lobbyist and 3) American submarine. And that the most ignoble things one can be are 1) tenant, urgh! 2) human rights advocate and 3) war crime exposer. This is a government that knows, on a fundamental level, that property ownership has replaced actually working as an honest way of earning your lot in life.
Landlording is the new Labor. Hence why the “L” in “ALP” now stands for “Landlord” — an elegant and courageous change that Albanese and co have tacitly endorsed with this week’s budget and tenant eviction.
Oh and how the radical left (noted Trotskyite Alan Koehler, etc) like to prattle on about the dangers of a nation putting all its eggs in one basket re: real estate. Well, to them I say, that basket would be going for $789 a week 10 minutes down the road in Newtown, or we could sell it for double what we paid for it last March, so you should stop whining and be grateful that you get to be in the basket at all! Jeez-Louise!!!
But Albo le Battleur gets it! He gets us! He is one of us, gooble-gobble-gooble-gobble, and so forth. The first thing he did after announcing that beautiful budget (I’m spending that $300 subsidy on the complete JAG Bluray box set) was kick that ungrateful tenant of his to the curb. It was a message heard around Australia, loud and clear: we’re not gonna take it! The little man is fighting back!
Mr Albanese has made it clear through the courageous eviction of that no-good layabout that we’re not gonna take it anymore, and that if these people really were working class — were really true-blue battlers, like us — they would also be landlords, no?
They think otherwise, but I think the black mould has gone to their heads.
(P.S. Susan: I hope you’ve taken my advice and are lying down for this, but your weekly rent is increasing by $9. It’s only fair.)
