Never waste a crisis, comrade. But can Albonomics meet the moment?

April 5, 2026 — 5:00am

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It is widely agreed that the prime minister’s national address on Wednesday stole three minutes and 17 seconds of irreplaceable life from Australians who bothered to tune in. The format, conventionally used to make an announcement of national import, consisted of messages we’d already heard. But from the government’s perspective, the address wasn’t a waste of the prime minister’s platform at all. It was part of a sequence of signals paving the way for a budget framed by Albonomics.

It is the cruel habit of history to distribute crises arbitrarily. Consequently, many are frittered, while leaders who yearn for a nice juicy inflection point are condemned to govern in the grinding mediocrity of good times. Scott Morrison squibbed his opportunity to blast out rent-seeking in the name of COVID, while former treasurer Joe Hockey had a radical plan to overhaul the economy at a time when absolutely no one wanted change.

So who can blame Albanese and his strategist Paul Erickson if they saw the embers of a crisis and decided this was their opportunity to coax it into a moment of account?

The prime minister’s national prime-time address began that process. A national address signals that life as we know it is about to change significantly. The brief speech itself deployed the language of national sacrifice. Albanese’s ostensible message was “don’t panic”. But the subtext was that we should panic enough to be open to change.

The day after,........

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