There is a running theme among Anthony Albanese’s missteps. His latest, appearing in an interview on Hobart radio to dismiss calls for a royal commission into femicide and violence against women follows the pattern – the Prime Minister gets frustrated when the public’s agenda is broader than his own.

This has followed him into government. Albanese has spent his entire adult life in politics. He’s learnt to keep a lid on the emotional responses that previously caused him personal grief, and to put a primacy on stability and steadiness above all else.

The lessons of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd era and how quickly that came undone were compounded by the 2019 Labor election loss.

The pandemic changed how he approached politics. In those early months of uncertainty, Labor under Albanese became about finding consensus and presenting, as much as possible, a united front. Albanese is particularly proud of that period and often uses it as an example when contrasting with the opposition’s approach to things he sees as important to the nation, such as foreign relations.

In 2021 he was involved in a car crash where he believed he was going to die. Post 2021, Albanese shed weight, changed his lifestyle, and refocused his ambition. His drive? Changing the country. And he truly wants to do that. But he also truly believes that to be successful, it has to be incremental. Slow, steady, stable.

The problem is, we are not in slow, steady or stable times. Albanese’s middle-of-the-road approach, as Labor morphs into........

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