In his first pitch to the public after getting the top job at the Australian Labor Party, Anthony Albanese has answered a question that nobody asked.
He’s vowed to hold the government to account but has said he won’t oppose Prime Minister Scott Morrison on every issue.
“I’m not Tony Abbott,” he said, according to The Daily Telegraph.
“People want solutions not arguments, they have conflict fatigue, some reforms require bipartisan support.”
Albanese has also said that he wants to reach out to voters who support his party but have felt like they couldn’t.
“I understand that it is a big mountain that we have to climb,” he said.
He also name-dropped former Labor Prime Ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, as Albanese said he’s spoken to them in the last week.
“Julia and Kevin remain very close friends of mine … I think both those governments will be recorded well by history, but because we weren’t long-term governments, some of the reforms put in place weren’t entrenched,” he said.
However, when Albanese was asked to clarify Labor’s stance on the future of the coal industry as well as Adani’s Carmicheal mine project in Queensland, he could not give a clear answer.
“We will go through in terms of our processes, all of those issues, but the truth is that the Adani coal mine has been approved at the federal level by the (Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act),” he said.
“Then there is the other issue with regard to Adani, and indeed to the whole issue of the Galilee Coal Basin, is the issue of the economics of it. The basic cost-benefit ratios.”
Resources Minister Matt Canavan called Mr Albanese’s speech a “Belgian breakfast café” as it was full of “waffles”.
Canavan also said that Albanese’s response to Adani has showed that Labor has “learnt nothing” from their shock election defeat.
“Mr Albanese couldn’t bring himself to say he supported the Adani project, and instead questioned its economics, the cost-benefit ratio of the project,” he said.
“Instead of providing assurances to the people of Queensland about their job security, all Mr Albanese and Mr Marles offered were weasel words.”
