Traditionally when the Australian Labor Party (ALP) gets serious about winning elections, it looks to the grownups in the right wing of the party to provide the leadership that will appeal to the centre of Australian politics.

Unfortunately, it seems this time around, things are different, as Australia now has its first Prime Minister to come from the left of the Labor Party.

Even former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, believe it or not, was from the right, as was Bob Hawke, Paul Keating, Kim Beazley, Mark Latham, Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard (who moved from the left to the right) and Bill Shorten.

It was only after Shorten muffed the unlosable election in 2019 with his mad tax and spend policies, that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese came from nowhere to be elected leader in an unopposed ballot.

From there he staggered over the line two years ago in what should have been a landslide victory.  But the punters were suspicious of this ex student radical who had long marched to the drum beat of left wing progressive socialist ideals who suddenly claimed to represent the centre of politics.

Albanese’s election win left Australia with Labor’s first Prime Minister who hails not just from the left, but the hard left of the ALP.

So, who is ‘Albo’ and what baggage does he bring to the cabinet table?

What does the old Jewish proverb say, ‘give me the boy and I will give you the man’.

Albanese was born to a single mother, growing up in a housing estate in the outskirts of Sydney during the 60s and 70s, before joining the Labor Party as a teenager in 1979.

No doubt he was influenced by the radical years of Whitlam and the dismissal before watching the return of the Liberal conservatives in 1975.

Former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser would have been an anathema to Albanese as he was everything he was not.

Born in the hay day of Victoria’s rural squattocracy, growing up during the wool boom years, attending Geelong Grammar, Melbourne University and then Oxford.

From one extreme to the other.  Fraser as a university student studied the born to rule subjects of PPE, (politics, philosophy and economics) the traditional stepping stone of the English elite which took them from the country estate to Eaton to Oxford to Parliament.

Albanese on the other hand, when he was at university, focused his efforts on the dismal science of economics in that bastion of left thinking, Sydney University.

Not that he recalls much of it, as he was lampooned during the last election of not knowing what the cash rate of the central bank was, despite repeatedly claiming he had been an economics advisor to the Keating government.  He was not!

But what he was, was a pure product of the ALP’s left wing political machine, starting with his time in student politics.

At the time Albo led a group within Young Labor that was aligned with the left faction’s hard left, which maintained “links with broader left-wing groups, such as the Communist Party of Australia, People for Nuclear Disarmament and the African National Congress”.

No doubt if he was a student today he would be joining with the idiots at Sydney University chanting ‘from the river to the sea’ in support of the Hamas regime.

In fact it is quite alarming when you look back over his past track record.

Back in 1991, when Albo was then Assistant General Secretary of the ALP, he conducted an interview with the Communist Party’s official paper, the Tribune.

Revealing his hard left credentials, he talked about class and ‘comrades who struggled before us’ to put left-wing policies into action.

‘The main reason for joining the ALP is that it is a trade-union based party. If you believe in some form of class politics then that is a very important link,’ he said.

By then our current Prime Minister was no longer a student, rather he was near the top of the trade union movement, and he was busy banging on about class war.

But he was not alone.

It seems there were two other key members of the current cabinet who were also heavily involved in student politics and today are both proud members of the ALP’s left faction. Penny Wong and Murray Watt.

Which brings me to my concern that this is who we are dealing with, a PM and his left leaning senior colleagues who are all steeped in class warfare.

And what better foe to battle than their perception of the landed aristocracy represented no doubt in Albos mind by the graziers, no doubt with images of Malcolm Fraser front and centre of his mind.

Only problem is the last of the wool barons mostly went broke with the end of the reserve price scheme in the 1990s.

Fraser himself had to sell his homestead ‘Nareen’ to pay debts racked up by the fallout of the 1997 financial collapse, having punted on investing in Lloyds.

Not that understanding the risk that comes with either farming or investing capital would have featured in Albo’s economic studies. University of Sydney economics was more interested in redistributing people’s capital than creating it.

But why let common sense, facts and history get in the way of ideology. 

Certainly, the current crop of activist university students running around chanting about Gaza are not letting historical facts get in the way of emotion. So why should we expect Albo, Watt and Wong to have moved much from their student days?

In their mind, sheep farmers must be graziers and graziers are enemies of the people.

Even better if the enemy live a long way away, all bottled up in a safe conservative electorates in Western Australia, far from the swinging inner city marginals they need to win to stay in power.

So what better way to put the squattocracy in their place than by ending the live sheep trade? Even better if it hurts another enemy of the left, Israel.

I might be drawing a long bow, but like the river flows to the sea and the boy maketh the man, there are many ways to make war on your class enemies.