"Q: Why do so many people take an instant dislike to Bronwyn Bishop?

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A: It's because it saves time later on."

- Former foreign minister Gareth Evans' unkind (but fair) assessment of his Liberal nemesis.

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Readers, if you heartily dislike prime minister Anthony Albanese, is it that you at some point took an early, instant dislike to him or is it that your case for utterly disliking him evolved over years and months until one day it was too big, too vivid to deny?

Life is short and the days of our lives trickle away like sands through the hourglass and I have been taking far, far too long to be sure that I dislike Anthony Albanese.

With my naive, pro-Labor biases, one is always expecting Liberals to be obnoxiously, bronwynbishoply hard to like while always hanging on to the shy hope that a Labor leader will, one day, blossom into someone worthwhile, something Whitlamesque.

But over time one's expectations of anything noble from Albanese's prime ministership have ebbed and faded.

Now in recent days one feels oneself being nudged further in the direction of unhesitatingly disliking the man. There is a banal nastiness in what he has been snarling against the group of 34 once Isis-linked Australians marooned in Syria and hoping to come home to Australia.

The PM is insisting that his federal government will not repatriate them, lecturing that "As my mother used to say 'If you make your bed you must lie in it'."

"I have nothing but contempt for these people," he has snarled, expressing what may be a hybrid of what he really feels and of what he thinks most voting Australians want to hear him say. He, Albanese, is competing with Liberal leader Angus Taylor to show which of them hates the 34 wayward........

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