Albanese looks revived in the heat as he resets his election pitch

It’s north of 40 degrees Celsius. The humidity is thick.

Even beneath a tree at Lake Nash — one of the nation’s (and perhaps even the world’s) biggest continuous cattle stations, a few dozen kilometres from the NT border — the heat feels oppressive.

For mal-adapted cool-climate southerners such as this correspondent, it’s like someone wrapped a scalding wet sleeping bag over your head.

Every minute in the open feels like an hour. You think you can handle it, but there’s just a touch of panic at the thought of having no nearby access to an air-conditioned refuge.

But the prime minister is revelling in it. Running an early January hot lap of the north, taking in Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia.

Dashing from town to town, doorstop to doorstop, media interview to media interview.

Proof perhaps that summer is his best season.

Certainly, the man himself seems to be revived after a tough 2024 that ended with a polling slump that has Labor strategists nervous about the coming election campaign.

He has shed the pallor, the hard-etched look of stress that comes to everyone in the job.

While he has still got a lot of heavy political baggage — cost-of-living crises are indifferent incumbency killers — this week’s northern exposure has given him a lift.

He has shone a light on Peter Dutton’s absence and filled the traditional summer media void with his own messages.

Warm welcome in places rarely travelled by PMs

While some critics mutter that he is doing it out of desperation, talking to Australians during their summer repose when they have more time to consider what he’s saying, is not the worst idea.

At Kununurra’s “Kimberley Grande” bar — the only pub in town that’s open in what is currently the tourism off-season across the Top End — crowds of locals surround Albanese for a yarn.

The mood is warm. Polite. They don’t vote Labor much in these parts, but they also don’t get to see sitting prime ministers all that often either. And for a PM looking for a way to keep his majority, such scenes are not nothing.

This week’s biggest splash was announcing $7.2 billion for upgrades to the Bruce Highway and more money for infrastructure and housing in the NT and WA’s north.

Every night, TV news has beamed in images of the PM out and about. Looking at road projects, mustering cattle, and inland dams.

The locations he’s chosen to launch his unofficial re-election campaign are not natural Labor habitat. Some, like Kununurra and Mount Isa are tiger country, politically speaking.

But by going there, Albanese is keen to demonstrate he’s thinking about the whole country. Not just heartland suburban electorates.

There is unlikely to be much of a local dividend, in terms of seats won, but it sends a broader signal: Dutton isn’t here, but I am.

There’s no doubt last year ended poorly for the Albanese government. Ministers were over it. Faces drawn. Despite finishing the parliamentary year on a high with a flurry of legislative success, there was a palpable sense of weariness.

Doubts were expressed about Albanese’s salesmanship. Public and private polls showed he had a net negative rating worse than Dutton’s.

Any thought that the mid-year budget update — delivered just before Christmas — might turn the mood were dashed in a flood of negative headlines about deficits and spending.

Albanese shrugs off those fears.

“We will win a majority,” he tells ABC news. The party is united, he insists, like never before.

Are there any threats to your leadership, he’s asked in his first sit-down TV interview of the year, sweltering under that cattleman’s tree.

“Not at all,” he says. “I’ve been in the parliament for a while now. I have never seen a political party as united, as cohesive and as determined as the Australian Labor Party is going into 2025.”

The PM is keeping his plans for when the election will be called close to his chest.

And after nearly five days with the PM and his team, there’s no overwhelming sense that it’s imminent.

For one thing, Albanese has a close and hopeful eye on whether the Reserve Bank will begin a long-awaited interest rate cutting cycle in mid-February. It would be a game changer. For him, and long-suffering households.

And he told the ABC on Wednesday that he still has legislation to pass when parliament is scheduled to return early next month.

Production tax credits for the mining industry to boost production of critical minerals and rare earths is at the top of his list.

But if he does decide it’s worth dashing to the polls early, he’s already laid the groundwork to hit the ground running.

This week’s campaign is all about showing his own side that he’s — in the words of one inside observer — “willing to do things a little differently to shake this ‘sleepwalking into oblivion’ narrative”.

It’s been about road-testing what will be Labor’s central selling points. Investments in infrastructure like the 1,600-kilometre Bruce Highway, cheaper access to Medicare, and more potential cost-of-living relief in the form of energy rebates.

Unlike Dutton, he says, Labor has a big agenda to set the country up for the future, with a big emphasis on the green energy transformation, critical minerals developments and boosting manufacturing.

Futureproofing

At the same time, the Albanese government has been quietly planting the foundations of an economic revolution, one that will see the creation — Labor hopes — of a new political constituency that can offset losses from some of its traditional blue-collar union base, particularly in the construction sector.

Built around the “care economy”, Labor is seeking to expand aged care and childcare and continue its support of the NDIS.

All have huge social dividends, and significant budget costs.

But less appreciated is that they would also expand Labor’s natural political constituency.

While hiring more public servants tends to grow Labor-friendly numbers in places like Canberra and the major cities, the new growth is in a workforce that looks after the disabled, the young and the old that is distributed across every suburb and town around the nation.

And unlike Dutton’s nuclear energy plan, which Albanese gleefully notes will mean — according to the Coalition’s own analysis — that the country will have a significantly smaller economy by 2050 than otherwise forecast, Labor’s plans are having an immediate impact.

“I think if we get this decade right, we can set Australia up for the many decades ahead,” Albanese tells the ABC.

The prime minister will likely take the foot off the accelerator over the next few days but is preparing to deliver a major address at the National Press Club ahead of Australia Day.

This week of flights, mini-shuttles, doorstops overlooking iconic northern settings — Mt Isa’s Glencore Mine on one day, Kununurra’s Ord River scheme the next — has the look and feel of an election campaign.

Part of it is about getting his own team into gear for the long fight ahead.

And to set up a contrast with Dutton, whom the prime minister repeatedly taunted this week for not being match fit, for shunning press conferences in front of the Canberra press gallery and avoiding challenging media outlets.

On the prime minster’s plane this week, alongside the ABC, the only other reporters to make the trip were from News Ltd’s The Australian and state tabloids, as well as Kerry Stokes’s The West Australian.

Some senior figures inside Labor regard those outlets as the party’s primary opposition, likely to cause them more damage than the opposition leader himself.

Interestingly the PM still invites those organisations onto his plane, keenly aware how they link to a broader constituency beyond Labor’s base.

Dutton’s media strategy over the past year has tended to stay on safer ground.

And he’s been willing to publicly attack media outlets he regards as hostile, including the ABC and Sydney Morning Herald, and cut them from early access to big announcements, opting to stick with more allied outlets.

“I’ve taken more questions off the Canberra press gallery here in Mount Isa this morning than Peter Dutton has taken off the Canberra press gallery in the last six months of last year,” Albanese said on Wednesday, during a stop in the iconic mining town.

Dutton is unlikely to remain quiet this January for long and is reportedly planning a rally in Melbourne at the weekend.

But for now, Albanese has a hot head start on the biggest political contest of the year.