Albanese’s team looks settled, for now. But that hasn’t stopped reshuffle chatter

September 11, 2026 — 5:00am

You have reached your maximum number of saved items.

Remove items from your saved list to add more.

As the halfway point of the Albanese government’s second term approaches, ambitious Labor MPs are starting to circle and plan for what most presume will be a third term.

No one expects the prime minister will step aside. Anthony Albanese’s personal standing in the polls is a drag on the government but, after winning 94 seats at the last election, he can still write his own ticket.

Nevertheless, his MPs are talking about who will move up and who will move on in the next iteration of the Albanese ministry and the broader caucus. At this point, the prime minister has pencilled in a reshuffle for early-to-mid 2027 at the earliest.

He has not yet given the matter serious thought, but the PM knows that reshuffles always create enemies so the later in the term they occur, the better. Understandably, he is expecting at least one or two resignations.

Labor came to government with one of the most experienced frontbenches in living memory. Many MPs had hung on for a second shot at a ministerial office after the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments committed political harakiri.

Even more so than the Hawke government, which had a handful of ministers who had served in the ministry of Gough Whitlam, Albanese benefited from having MPs who already had walked the blue carpet of the ministerial wing.

But that now means Albanese has a large number of ministers aged in their late 40s to their late 50s, and it’s all but inevitable that some will move on. And there is the next generation of Labor MPs, primarily those........

© The Age