Man buys house. Big deal.

That’s the end-of-week take among some in the upper quarters of the Labor party on the prime minister’s decision to buy a clifftop house above Copacabana beach on the NSW central coast.

But the $4.3m price tag – and the timing, ahead of an election in which the accessibility and affordability of housing will be unavoidably central – prompted a very different initial reaction farther afield, inside the Labor party and out. And even some of his colleagues who argue the pile-on over the purchase is excessive and unfair concede it could cause him serious political damage.

In Labor’s optimists’ wing, they don’t think so. They’re buoyed up by the responses in focus groups, scheduled as an unrelated temperature check before news of the real estate purchase became public on Tuesday morning, and held on Thursday night.

The people in those groups in one part of Sydney were apparently not terribly bothered that Anthony Albanese and his fiancee, Jodie Haydon – who also has a job and earns a salary – were making their first joint financial commitment ahead of the matrimonial kind.

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That feedback has calmed the nerves among some Labor people who were dismayed, even alarmed, at Albanese’s decision to finalise a purchase – nice house, great location – without apparently considering how voters might see it.

But it won’t reassure everyone in that category.

Albanese makes his own decisions and it seems he didn’t share this one very widely in circles where political advice........

© The Guardian