Albanese made a terrible mistake. But for Taylor, it’s worse

August 15, 2026 — 5:00am

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Anthony Albanese was foolish enough to do it, Angus Taylor was dumb enough to pursue it, and Australia is missing the larger point.

Melons. It’s a teachable moment.

Albanese first. He is usually so careful to be prime ministerial, with the occasional well-rehearsed manifestation as DJ Albo. He makes a virtue of his careful and methodical approach to government. He prizes stability. He reminds his caucus regularly of his ambition to lead a “long-term Labor government”.

And he almost got away with his melons offence. The initial wave of outrage passed after he apologised for another element of the same episode of the proudly moronic Bush Deep podcast. He issued his unreserved apology for saying that he’d like to “shag” and marry Kylie Minogue in the event that his marriage failed. That was five weeks ago.

The obvious lesson is that he should not have demeaned his wife, his marriage and women generally. But should he have agreed to take part in the podcast at all? The clue is in the Bush Deep podcast’s self-promotion – that it “asks the questions no one else would dare”. If it asks the questions no one else would dare, should the prime minister supply the answers that no other prime minister would dare?

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He’s justified it by saying he needs to communicate with a wide range of audiences. But, even on this excuse, it fails. Despite weeks of political scrutiny and public debate, the podcast had been viewed on YouTube by 84,000 people by Friday afternoon, hardly a big hit.

So how did “melons” come to dominate Australian politics more than a month later? In the podcast, the host asks Albanese to name the “most crap” gift he’d been given on an overseas visit. He nominated a “pretty strange” gift, a melon from the prime minister of Japan. The crown melon is a customary Japanese gift, prized for its perfection. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi was celebrating the fact that the melon had been permitted to enter the Australian market just this year.

The host, a comedian, then outsmarted Albanese by........

© The Sydney Morning Herald