Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Katharine Murphy, Quarterly Essay/Black Inc., $24.95.
Award-winning journalist Katharine Murphy offers a new portrait of Anthony Albanese.
“Taking the party leadership was both a beginning and an ending. Insurgency was done. New skills were required … Albanese knew how to recruit people to a cause and to get them to a similar place. He’d been doing that since his teens. But to win, he had to learn to listen, to trust his team and to lead, understanding that sometimes leadership involves holding back rather than imagining it’s all on you.”
Lone Wolf, sees a prime minister in the making, and a nation on the move.
After the polls closed on 21 May 2022, the “result was more than the unremarkable transfer of power from blue to red. It was an electoral earthquake.”
She reveals a leader who has always had to think three steps ahead, who was an insurgent for much of his professional life, but had to learn to listen and devise “strategies of inclusivity” to win the 2022 election.
Drawing on interviews with Albanese, Bandt, Penny Wong, Jim Chalmers, Mark Butler, Katy Gallagher, Simon Holmes à Court, Zoe Daniel and more, Murphy’s brilliant essay draws out the meaning of an eventful political year. She offers a telling character study of the prime minister, investigates the success of the teals and the Greens and looks to the challenges of the future.
In this insightful, persuasive essay, Murphy offers a profile of Anthony Albanese in motion — a piece about character, the balance of forces and the mood of the nation.
