Opinion by Rob Harris | SMH

For a prime minister who has spent his adult life inside the machinery of parliament, Anthony Albanese knows precisely how political brushfires start, and how they spread, which is why his sudden insistence that the widening expenses saga has nothing to do with him has left even some of his own colleagues blinking.

In nearly 30 years in parliament, Albanese has managed to be relatively teflon when it comes to expenses. He’s a durable and instinctive political operator. 

But he’s always been enthusiastic about entitlements — one made plain over years of public disclosures showing his enthusiastic uptake of hospitality, VIP tickets and taxpayer-funded travel that frequently coincided with Australia’s marquee sporting and cultural events. It’s all on the record; it’s all been reported. And it’s all why his attempt to distance himself from the current mess rings so hollow.

“I’m not the finance minister,” he bristled in response to a question in Canberra on Thursday, as though the rules governing the conduct of his ministers – indeed, the conduct of his government – sit in some sealed vault opened only by other hands. It is a line that might live longer than he hopes, dangerously close to becoming his own “I don’t hold a hose”: a semantic escape hatch that sounds clever in the moment and foolish in every moment thereafter.

What grates most is not the defence itself but the pretence behind it. Albanese, more than almost anyone in Parliament House, knows how these systems work. As Leader of the House and manager of opposition business, he and his old counterpart Christopher Pyne mastered the dark art of truce-making over entitlement blow-ups – two veterans who recognised that mutually assured destruction was the likely outcome of going nuclear on travel scandals. He knows these issues are never just about the rules. They’re about perceptions, instincts and the willingness to read the room.

And right now, the prime minister is reading it badly. What’s striking is not that Albanese instinctively shields his ministers – he has always been tribal to the marrow – but his unflinching defence of a system that has allowed senior officeholders to rack up more than $660,000 in family travel since his government took office is quite another. The public can get past blind loyalty. They don’t forgive indifference.

By insisting he has no role in setting, reviewing or influencing entitlements for senior ministers – those who serve at his pleasure – Albanese risks looking not just evasive but curiously detached. This, from a leader who prides himself on being plugged into the public mood and grounded in everyday experience, feels more like a retreat into process than a demonstration of judgment.

Liberal senator James Paterson, who clearly gets under the PM’s skin, says the scandal now cuts to the heart of Albanese’s leadership.

“If the prime minister wanted to change the rules, he can do so,” Paterson said. “But ... today, he was full of excuses about how he wasn’t the finance minister, just as he has been full of excuses all week that he didn’t personally book the minister’s flight with the flight agency, and therefore he couldn’t be responsible, even though he is responsible for approving all international ministerial travel.”

In this instance, it’s not mere combativeness. For the first time, the issue is drifting perilously close to Albanese personally – his standards, his consistency and his willingness to apply the same scrutiny to his own side that he once demanded of others. He bought into the saga when he admitted he approved Wells’ plane fares to New York.

Albanese wants the week remembered for Labor’s world-first crackdown on social media. With one eye on his legacy, he even told reporters they’d be writing about it in books on his leadership one day. But instead, it is perilously close to being remembered for a prime minister who treated a festering expenses controversy as though it were someone else’s inbox.

Albanese doesn’t need to hold a hose. But he does need to extinguish a narrative he once understood better than almost anyone: that nothing corrodes trust faster than a leader appearing blind to excess in his own ranks.




Albanese is getting close to his ‘I don’t hold a hose’ moment