So, is your antidote to this, and don't be offended when I say this, is your antidote in some ways to be as boring as possible?
I think we're now the mainstream force in Australian politics, the middle of the road.
But you used to be the lefty like a man.
Bit of a first today. I'm off to the lodge where the Prime Minister of Australia, Anthony Albanese, has kindly offered to cook me lunch. In return, I'm making something I know is special to him from his childhood, wagon wheels. He grew up in the middle of Sydney in a council estate just next to the Western's biscuit factory. So, I'm hoping my version, two nutmeg scented biscuits sandwiched with melted marshmallow and raspberry jam, then covered in dark chocolate, will take him right back there. After 30 eventful years in politics, Anthony Albanese now lives at the lodge with a kitchen I've always wanted to visit.
Hello.
Hey, Annabelle. Great to see you. Welcome to the lodge.
I am so excited. Thank you for having me. And you've dressed up the dog.
The lodge kitchen. Here we are. Bit bigger than the kitchen in Marrickville, I must say.
Right. But I mean, do the staff get nervous that you're on the loose in here, unsupervised?
Usually on weekends, we're here by ourselves, which is fantastic, I've got to say.
So, what are you cooking here today? What can I expect?
Orecchiette with broccolini, anchovies, garlic, and chili. Of course, everything's better with garlic and chili.
Do you remember a few years ago you got totally dragged on social media because you posted a picture of your dinner?
I did. That was during COVID, right? It was a piece of steak and some corn and stuff. It was because the food was all separated, which says something about my character. So, it was a bit of steak, peas and corn. None of them touching. So, pasta dishes are different.
Okay. But like why do you like your food separate? Like is that a thing that...
It's because... you do. It's just because it makes you anxious when it's all mixed in.
No. No. But it's just organized.
I like to taste each individual.
Okay. I love because the comments on that post were total Aussie gold. So hilarious. And there's one guy who's like, 'One of those pieces is getting CLOSE TO THE STEAK, ELMO. REEL IT BACK.'
What was really funny was that I didn't see that there was anything about that plate. It was unusual.
I've got more to ask you about this, but first water.
Am I allowed to help here?
Here we go. I'm not going to be allowed to touch a single thing here, am I?
No. Relax. You're a guest. Just chill.
So, now we can chat while that's happening. I know you've planned this out.
Someone close to you, who I won't name, so let's just call her your wife, did say that it's quite hard to cook with you because you're constantly tidying and kind of clearing things away and also you just like to do it yourself.
Absolutely. This is cooking is something that I'm either doing or not doing. Not halfway.
Sensing some control issues here.
No, it's just growing up. No siblings, just me or mom. Mom doing something or me doing something. It's just what I'm comfortable with.
Everyone in Australia knows that you grew up in public housing with a single mom. But I don't know that everybody would know how often you were left like alone because she was in hospital from quite an early age.
Yeah, she was crippled up with rheumatoid arthritis. So would have long stints in hospital. There were some years where she was, I think, probably in hospital for longer than she was out. And when they changed her medication, it was quite physically difficult for her.
What are you doing at home in that time? I mean...
I'm running the household. I'm cooking. I'm doing her washing. I'm paying bills. I was a signature to her bank account. So it just meant that I had to be really well organized.
Did you ever feel at all kind of annoyed that fate had dealt you this hand where you had to be responsible for a whole lot more stuff than other kids your age had to be?
No, not really. Because it was just what was in front of you and you don't think about it. Later on I remember thinking I'd never been to Luna Park.
Yeah. You missed out on some things because you didn't have a father.
We didn't have a car. You needed a car to play cricket because the games were in different spots. So I played rugby league because it was at the same ground all the time. You could catch the bus there and was easier to do.
I'm fascinated by the fact that your mom over the course of most of your childhood told you that your dad was dead and had been killed in a car accident.
And just to do a quick recap, they met on a boat.
She got pregnant. He was engaged to somebody else in Italy. She came home going to have you put you up for adoption. The nun at the hospital brought me into her because she knew that my mom didn't want to give up her child.
And your mom was from a Catholic family. So...
Catholic family and everyone knew each other. So the story was going to be that my father had died in the car accident and she'd lost the child with the trauma. Neat. I get adopted out and none of that happens. She brought me home. But the first half of the story stuck. So she adopted my father's name, Alan. Yeah. I was about 14 when I was old enough. She told me, I'll never forget it was sitting around. Our whole kitchen was as big as this little space here. And she was really quite emotional. And she told me that my father was potentially alive. She wasn't sure. She wasn't in contact with him. My reaction was that I didn't need anything else. I had her. It was really traumatic for her and she was it's terrible that she was embarrassed. I mean, she did a fantastic job of raising a child by herself.
You know what's so interesting is even like you're telling this story, you haven't told it from your perspective. You've told it from her perspective.
Because it was about her. Love in a family is what matters. And families are complex. Relationships are complex.
What matters is love. And I had that in abundance.
Yeah. You were a pretty tight unit, weren't you?
Did you ever get in trouble with her?
Oh, yeah. Yeah. I was, funnily enough, I was naughty occasionally.
Yeah, that'll come as a shock to you. You guys used to knock off boxes of biscuits from the Western's factory. I know you and your scaly mates.
Oh, we did we did lots of stuff like that. But she often didn't find out. Strategy remaining two. I still to this day can't really eat wagon wheels because...
Because the kids would have boxes of them often given by the Western workers by the way. So was all good. It's a good biscuit, though.
Yeah. Is it? After all that time, if you've eaten 10 of them in a sit down as an 8-year-old.
Kind of puts you off a little bit.
Yeah, fair enough. No, fair enough. Not that I'm telling you what to... I'm going to get rid of this.
Okay. I'll sit here doing nothing.
Turn it back up a little bit. Little critters. But of course, consistent with my characteristics, I have to get every little bit out.
I see your neurodiversity. You need to do everything.
So, you know, do you ever I know you're super orderly. I'm today getting a glimpse of just how deep that goes. Do you ever catch yourself where you know organizing something or tidying something to a point where even you just think whoa just reel it back a bit there.
Yes, sometimes I do. What Jody pointed out to me very early on in our relationship when in Marrickville had vine leaves over a trellis when the leaves dropped and the fourth time in a day I would sweep up the leaves and she pointed out that this was a little bit crazy and I was like yeah so I cut it back to three times a day.
Is order a way of eliminating the chances of being taken by surprise by something?
Life's busy. And never do something tomorrow you can do today. Never do something this afternoon if you can do it in the morning.
But now you're in a job where you think you've got everything organized and you do can take it by surprise, right? And you wake up and Donald Trump's been busy on the whatever and you're like, 'Oh, there's a war. My day has just changed.' How do you deal with that when you like plans and predictability?
Well, you just have to deal with it as it is. And that's why doing things today rather than tomorrow or next week leaves you the space to then deal with emergencies because that happens in this job.
You used to have about five jobs at once. Stacking shelves Thursday night. Saturday night shift from 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m.
There was a board at Sydney Uni you could go for various odd jobs.
Oh, we had that one, too. So, was... need to do this. Hold. There it goes.
Wish we had smell vision. That smells incredible.
So, could you I mean by time...
Time for the pasta. Okay. Not arguing. Minute more.
So by this stage you were I mean you joined the ALP when you were about 11. You were involved in the Labour Party. You got to uni and you were politically active. You know you were in the socialist left. You were climbing clock towers. You were doing sit-ins and protests. And I remember reading this amazing story about how you were doing a student protest sit-in and it was you and like three trots and five anarchists and somebody's baby and you were protesting you know something at the university like what did you learn in that room about protest and how to do it and how to make change?
Learned that you've got to negotiate and at the time what had happened there was an occupation going on at Sydney University. There were people there who it became the protest became the end in itself so they didn't want to leave. Was at the time of the Wilderness Society had done the whole Franklin Dam thing and all that so it had to be consensus decision making which meant that nothing happened because they just it was an endless 24-hour meeting so what we did eventually was I got a whole lot of people to go in there at 6:00 a.m. in the morning, your labor mate, and just say and stack it basically and say we're going we're going and we went and otherwise they would have still been there.
Yum. Yeah. You feeling okay about those ingredients touching, mate?
Absolutely. No. No. Some things are meant to touch. Stir fries. Yeah. Pastas.
So stir-fries can touch. Pastas can touch.
Steak isn't meant to touch vegetables.
