I know why Albo really missed the AFL grand final – and the political headache he may just have avoided: PVO

Albo’s no-show 

Albo has finally discovered a sporting occasion he is happy to miss. The PM skipped yesterday’s AFL grand final, with the excuse that he only arrived home from overseas that very morning. The game, of course, was played in the afternoon.

For a politician whose enthusiasm for a camera, a sporting crowd and corporate hospitality rarely requires encouragement, the timing is remarkably convenient.

Especially given that his taxpayer-funded Commonwealth plane includes its own bedroom with ensuite, giving Albo ample opportunity to spruce himself up before seeing his favourite pop music icon (plus the footy).

Kylie Minogue provided the pre-game entertainment, and therein lies the real reason behind Albo’s no-show.

Yes, the same Kylie he dragged into that disgraceful podcast discussion about who he would like to ‘shag’. The internationally successful Australian woman whose achievements somehow became an opportunity for the PM to demonstrate the conversational sophistication of an adolescent. 

And let’s not forget in the same podcast he discussed the melons given to him by Japan’s first female PM, replete with hand gestures mimicking breasts.

Ironically, Albo’s overseas trip that gave him the excuse to avoid the MCG yesterday included collecting an award as a good ‘global citizen’.

Now consider the television pictures his attendance could have produced.

Albo enthusiastically applauding Kylie would have invited an immediate replay of his remarks. Attending the game yet being conspicuously absent during her performance, downing canapés behind the frosted glass of his corporate hospitality, would have invited questions about why he ‘snubbed’ Kylie’s pre-game show.

Missing the entire occasion neatly avoided both.

An education for the Opposition 

The Opposition recently unveiled its plans, if elected, to reform how our children are taught. It wants them to learn more history, but perhaps the Coalition needs to first be reminded of some of its own failed history.

Shadow Education spokesman, Julian Leeser, is promising to rewrite the national curriculum, impose stronger classroom discipline, with less screen time and greater emphasis on the foundations of Western culture.

Some of what they want to do makes sense. But before we get bogged down in another argument about flags and identity, there is a question the Coalition needs to answer: What the hell was it doing when it was in government?

The Liberals and Nationals held federal office for almost nine years between 2013 and 2022. Before that, interrupted by a mere six years during the Rudd-Gillard period, John Howard governed for nearly 12 years.

I’m no mathematical savant, but roughly 20 years in power across the 26 years that preceded Anthony Albanese’s election is a reasonable amount of time to have shaped Australia’s education system. Unless the Coalition dropped the ball during that time?

The Liberals and Nationals haven’t exactly been political outsiders powerless to influence the country’s direction over the last quarter of a century. Which, by the way, is precisely why they are suffering at the hands of One Nation.

They’ve had many chances. 

Yet listen to the latest diagnosis of what’s wrong within our schools, and you could imagine the Coalition had spent its time peering helplessly through the school gates.

Leeser describes declining academic performance, disengaged boys, disrupted classrooms and teacher shortages, despite ever-increasing expenditure. These are serious concerns to be sure. But describing them as longstanding failures makes the Coalition’s own record the real issue here.

Children who began primary school when Tony Abbott became PM in 2013 were in secondary school by the time Scott Morrison lost office in 2022. For much of their education, the federal government belonged to the party now offering to rescue them from the poor results.

Ironic, isn’t it? It gets richer when you realise Leeser spent much of his pre-parliamentary career advising the federal Liberal Party on policy – first as an adviser within the Howard government, before heading up the Liberal Party’s official think tank, The Menzies Research Centre. During that time he produced precisely zero policy proposals on how to improve teaching within our schools.

I don’t object to a political party developing better policies. Opposition is supposed to be a period of reflection and renewal. What I object to is renewal without the reflection: the implication that identifying an enduring problem somehow absolves you of responsibility for having presided over it in the first place.

To be fair to Leeser, that’s far from entirely on him personally. But it’s certainly a Coalition failure given their time in office this millennium versus Labor.

As education minister, Christopher Pyne commissioned a national curriculum review in 2014. Arguments about balance, educational basics and Australia’s cultural inheritance were already familiar then. This isn’t new territory for the Coalition.

More awkwardly, education ministers endorsed version nine of the Australian Curriculum on April 1, 2022. Morrison was still prime minister at the time. His government approved the revised framework the Coalition is now railing against just weeks before losing the election.

Was it inadequate? Were the reforms badly implemented? Or has the diagnosis changed, and if so, why?

Any of those answers would be more useful than another promise to just start again.

There is an obvious qualification here too. State and territory governments run public schools, and the Commonwealth can’t simply dictate everything that happens in a classroom. National curriculum changes require negotiations between the Commonwealth and the states.

But federalism is a condition of governing Australia, not an excuse that expires when a party enters opposition. Leeser knows that, because as head of the MRC he did produce research on fixing the federation.

The constitutional arrangements haven’t suddenly become more accommodating because the Liberals desperately need another policy announcement. Which is why the Liberal government Malcolm Turnbull led shouldn’t have junked the tax and federation white papers.

That was our moment to reform sectors like education, but it was lost, on the Coalition’s watch.

Nor should scrutiny of the Coalition’s woeful record be used as an excuse to dismiss the substance of Leeser’s proposals out of hand.

Teachers deserve support in maintaining orderly classrooms. Students can’t learn effectively amid persistent disruptions. Making it easier for capable graduates and experienced professionals to enter teaching is worth examining, provided competence is maintained, of course.

So is whether schools are using screens because they improve learning or because technology has become a substitute for thinking about teaching.

There is also a legitimate debate about curriculum overload. Removing Indigenous history, sustainability and engagement with Asia as cross-curriculum priorities isn’t necessarily the same as removing those subjects from education. Leeser explicitly proposes retaining Indigenous history in dedicated topics.

That distinction deserves an honest hearing. Students should learn about Indigenous Australia, the British inheritance and the country’s multicultural development. Arguing about how to organise that teaching is not, of itself, an assault on any of these areas.

Other elements of what the Coalition want to do warrant more scepticism. A flag doesn’t teach a child to read. Veterans may make excellent teachers, but military service is no substitute for teaching ability, and classroom management requires more than an appreciation of delivering discipline.

Which brings us back to the missing explanation as to why we should believe that the Coalition can deliver now what it so comprehensively failed to deliver previously.

With Pauline Hanson challenging the established parties, the Liberals are trying to convince disillusioned voters that they have rediscovered their convictions. National pride, Western culture and discipline all fit rather neatly into that effort.

But there is a reason voters currently prefer an insurgent party to an established one promising to do, next time, what it should have done last time. The established party has a record against which its assurances can be tested, and it’s not a good one.

Labor shouldn’t mistake this for vindication either, by the way. Its own ministers must answer for educational outcomes and the effectiveness of their reforms. The Coalition’s failures don’t make the existing system satisfactory.

After all, Labor has already been in power for four and a half years since Albo was first elected. Enough time to start fixing the mess in Australian education that it inherited.

Instead, it just keeps getting worse.