Man buys house. Big deal.
That’s the end-of-week take among some in the upper quarters of the Labor party on the prime minister’s decision to buy a clifftop house above Copacabana beach on the NSW central coast.
But the $4.3m price tag – and the timing, ahead of an election in which the accessibility and affordability of housing will be unavoidably central – prompted a very different initial reaction farther afield, inside the Labor party and out. And even some of his colleagues who argue the pile-on over the purchase is excessive and unfair concede it could cause him serious political damage.
In Labor’s optimists’ wing, they don’t think so. They’re buoyed by the responses in focus groups, scheduled as an unrelated temperature check before news of the real estate purchase became public on Tuesday morning, and held on Thursday night.
The people in those groups in one part of Sydney were apparently not terribly bothered that Anthony Albanese and his fiancee, Jodie Haydon – who also has a job and earns a salary – were making their first joint financial commitment ahead of the matrimonial kind.
That feedback will calm the nerves among some Labor people who were dismayed, even alarmed, at Albanese’s decision to finalise a purchase – nice house, great location – without apparently considering how voters might see it.
But it won’t reassure everyone in that category.
Albanese makes his own decisions and it seems he didn’t share this one very widely in circles where political advice might be found. That has raised renewed questions about whose advice he seeks and whose he takes and whether there should be a bit more of both.
He has made it known to colleagues since the media storm hit that he believes he and his partner should be able to make a significant life decision without being subjected to an onslaught not inflicted on others who have more significant investments or who don’t declare them in as much detail as he.
When it comes to the parliamentary registers of members’ and senators’ interests, he makes a reasonable point. The rules are loose to say the least. Declarations are not always timely and very often not detailed. Family trusts, holding companies and other financial arrangements are used to keep significant details from public view.
For example, Peter Dutton has declared he owns a family farm and an investment property and lists an investment property for his wife. There is also a family trust but details of what is in that, and its quantum value, are unavailable. It’s notable that Dutton limited his commentary on the Copacabana house purchase this week to veiled retirement innuendo, clothed in good wishes for a happy betrothed couple planning their future together.
The point has been made in the days since Tuesday that past Labor prime ministers have been able to invest in pricey real estate while in office and there wasn’t nearly the same horrified media reaction. But time and circumstance are always relevant in politics. And politics isn’t always fair.
Albanese’s initial response was to remind people that he grew up in public housing and knows what it’s like to struggle. But that’s already well known and somehow didn’t seem like the best answer to the first round of questions.
The problem for Albanese is that buying the house now may, indeed, create an impression that he’s planning for retirement or is distracted by personal matters. Both the treasurer, Jim Chalmers, and Albanese himself volunteered when asked publicly about the house purchase on Thursday that the prime minister was “focused” on easing Australians’ housing pressures. That suggests they’re well aware of that political risk.
If the house purchase is one of the few things that cuts through, even in a benign way, for a public increasingly uninterested in politics, there’s a risk it might reinforce other negative sentiment about Albanese if people start forming a view that his judgment is off.
And there’s an underlying problem that’s largely not of his making, and is a lot bigger than the house he has bought.
It’s that he is prime minister at a time of deep crisis for many Australians – not just a bad patch of high prices that will pass, but a moment of terrible realisation that the kind of life they have taken for granted may not be available any more.
For all the good feedback the government is getting about its moves to challenge the big supermarket chains on their pricing practices and financial institutions on hidden fees, that’s only a fraction of what is behind this dawning reality.
It’s also about not being able to see how coming generations will ever be able to afford to buy a home, or even to rent one in the suburbs in which they’d like to live. It’s about the cost of insurance – health, house, medical – and maybe just having to forgo it altogether.
It’s about the price of university degrees, whether those astronomical fees can ever be repaid and whether, on that basis, it’s worth pursuing tertiary study at all. And it’s about the crazy weather patterns, the evidence of the climate crisis, and the implications of that for energy choices and lifestyles and livelihoods.
All of this creates an acute sense of intergenerational insecurity. The falling birthrate is a fair sign that something is seriously affecting Australians’ confidence in the future.
This is the underlying sentiment with which Albanese contends, heading towards the end of the prime ministerial term. And this is the atmosphere in which he has exercised his perfect right, as an Australian who has worked and saved and is getting married, to buy somewhere near family with ocean views.
Maybe those Thursday night Sydney focus groups will prove representative of wider sentiment across the country. Maybe the prevailing view will, indeed, be: man buys house, big deal.
But what lies beneath all the public attention – whether that attention is fair or not – is an unease much more profound than just whether or not the PM and his fiancee should be allowed to buy a nice house in a great location.
Karen Middleton is Guardian Australia’s political editor
