Anthony Albanese
Also Known As Anthony Norman Albanese
Education
- Economics - University of Sydney
- - St Joseph's Primary School
- - St Mary's Cathedral College
Anthony Norman Albanese is an Australian politician serving as the 31st and current prime minister of Australia since 2022. He has been leader of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) since 2019 and the member of parliament (MP) for Grayndler since 1996. Albanese previously was the 15th deputy prime minister under the second Kevin Rudd government in 2013; he held various ministerial positions in the governments of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard from 2007 to 2013.
Albanese was born in Sydney to an Italian father and an Irish-Australian mother who raised him as a single parent. He attended St Mary's Cathedral College before going on to the University of Sydney to study economics. He joined the Labor Party as a student, and before entering Parliament worked as a party official and research officer. Albanese was elected to the House of Representatives at the 1996 election, winning the seat of Grayndler in New South Wales. He was first appointed to the shadow cabinet in 2001 by Simon Crean and went on to serve in a number of roles, eventually becoming Manager of Opposition Business in 2006. After Labor's victory in the 2007 election, Albanese was appointed Leader of the House, and was also made Minister for Regional Development and Local Government and Minister for Infrastructure and Transport. In the subsequent leadership tensions between Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard from 2010 to 2013, Albanese was publicly critical of the conduct of both, calling for party unity. After supporting Rudd in the final leadership ballot between the two in June 2013, Albanese was elected the deputy leader of the Labor Party and sworn in as deputy prime minister the following day, a position he held for less than three months, as Labor was defeated at the 2013 election.
After Rudd resigned the leadership and retired from politics, Albanese stood against Bill Shorten in the ensuing leadership election, the first to include party members in addition to MPs. Although Albanese won a large majority of the membership, Shorten won more heavily among Labor MPs and won the contest; Shorten subsequently appointed Albanese to his Shadow Cabinet. After Labor's surprise defeat in the 2019 election, Shorten resigned as leader, with Albanese becoming the only person nominated in the leadership election to replace him; he was subsequently elected unopposed as leader of the Labor Party, becoming Leader of the Opposition.
In the 2022 election, Albanese led his party to a decisive victory against Scott Morrison's Liberal-National Coalition. Albanese is the first Italian-Australian to become prime minister, the first Australian prime minister to have a non-Anglo-Celtic surname, and is the last of the 16 Australian prime ministers who have served under Queen Elizabeth II. He was sworn in on 23 May 2022, alongside four senior frontbench colleagues. Albanese's first acts as prime minister included updating Australia's climate targets in an effort to reach carbon neutrality by 2050, and supporting an increase to the national minimum wage. His government legislated a national anti-corruption commission, and made major changes to Australian labour law. In foreign policy, Albanese pledged further logistical support to Ukraine to assist with the Russo-Ukrainian war, has attempted to strengthen relations in the Pacific region, and held a high-level meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping, ending a diplomatic freeze between Australia and China.
In 2000, Albanese married Carmel Tebbutt, a future Deputy Premier of New South Wales.They had met in Young Labor during the late 1980s, and have one son together. The two separated in January 2019. In June 2020, it was reported that Albanese was in a relationship with Jodie Haydon. Albanese said they had met at a dinner event in Melbourne a year after his separation from Tebbutt. Albanese is the first divorcé to be appointed prime minister.
Albanese describes himself as "half-Italian and half-Irish" and a "non-practising Catholic". He is also a music fan who, not long after becoming prime minister, attended a Gang of Youths concert at the Enmore Theatre and previously intervened as transport minister to save a Dolly Parton tour from bureaucratic red tape. In 2013, he co-hosted a pre-election special of music program Rage and his song selection included the Pixies, the Pogues, the Smiths, the Triffids, PJ Harvey, Nirvana, Hunters & Collectors and Joy Division.
As a lifelong supporter of the South Sydney Rabbitohs rugby league club, he was a board member of the club from 1999 to 2002 and influential in the fight to have the club readmitted to the National Rugby League (NRL) competition. During October 2009, The Sydney Morning Herald reported that Albanese had opposed an attempt to appoint the former Liberal prime minister John Howard to a senior position in the NRL. Albanese stated he had phoned the NRL chief executive, David Gallop, as well as other league officials, to advise them against the idea. He then implored officials at Souths to help stop the suggestion from gaining momentum. In 2013, he was made a life member of the club.
Albanese was injured in a side collision while driving in Marrickville, New South Wales, on 8 January 2021. He underwent treatment at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital and was reportedly "injured externally and internally and had suffered considerable shock in the immediate aftermath of the impact". The other driver was a 17-year-old who received a ticket for negligent driving. Emergency workers told Albanese that if the teen's car had hit just 30 centimetres either side of where it did, Albanese "would almost certainly have been killed". Shortly following this accident, Albanese lost over 18 kilograms (39 pounds) by cutting out carbohydrates and reducing his alcohol intake, in an effort to be "match fit" for his election campaign.
Albanese won preselection for the seat. The campaign was a difficult one, with aircraft noise a big political issue following the opening of the third runway at Sydney Airport, and the newly established No Aircraft Noise party (NAN) having polled strongly in the local area at the 1995 New South Wales election. Veteran political pundit Malcolm Mackerras predicted NAN would win the seat. However, NAN's candidate finished third, with less than 14% of the vote. Despite suffering a six-point swing against Labor, Albanese was elected with a comfortable 16-point margin.
In his maiden speech to the House of Representatives, he spoke about the building of a third runway at Sydney Airport, aircraft noise and the need to build a second airport to service Sydney, as well as his support for funding public infrastructure in general, multiculturalism, native title, the social wage and childcare. He concluded by saying, "For myself, I will be satisfied if I can be remembered as someone who will stand up for the interests of my electorate, for working-class people, for the labour movement, and for our progressive advancement as a nation into the next century."
In his first year in Parliament he continued this theme, speaking in favour of the Northern Territory's euthanasia legislation, the rights of the Indigenous community in the Hindmarsh Island bridge controversy, and entitlement to superannuation for same-sex couples.
This latter issue became a cause to which he was particularly dedicated. In 1998 he unsuccessfully moved a private member's bill that would have given same-sex couples the same rights to superannuation as de facto heterosexual couples. Over the next nine years, he tried three more times without success, until the election of the Rudd Government in 2007 saw the legislation passed. Albanese subsequently turned his attention to campaigning for same-sex marriage.
Early Life
Albanese was born on 2 March 1963 at St Margaret's Hospital in the Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst. He is the son of Carlo Albanese and Maryanne Ellery. His mother was an Australian of Irish descent, while his Italian father was from Barletta in Apulia. The Italian surname Albanese is in reference to the Arbëreshë people, ethnic Albanians indigenous to the part of southern Italy where Albanese's father came from. His parents met in March 1962 on a voyage from Sydney to Southampton, England, on the Sitmar Line's TSS Fairsky, where his father worked as a steward, but did not continue their relationship afterwards, going their separate ways.Coincidentally, the Fairsky was also the ship on which Albanese's future parliamentary colleague Julia Gillard and her family migrated to South Australia from the United Kingdom in 1966.
Growing up, Albanese was told that his father had died in a car accident; he did not meet his father, who was in fact still alive, until 2009, tracking him down initially with the assistance of John Faulkner, Carnival Australia's CEO Ann Sherry (the parent company of P&O, which acquired the Sitmar Line in 1988) and maritime historian Rob Henderson, and then later the Australian Embassy in Italy and ambassador Amanda Vanstone. He made contact with his father in 2009, visiting him a number of times in Italy, and he took his family there as well. His father died in 2014. He subsequently discovered that he had two half-siblings. During the Australian parliamentary eligibility crisis of 2017, it was noted that, although birth to an Italian father would ordinarily confer citizenship by descent, Albanese had no father recorded on his birth certificate and thus meets the parliamentary eligibility requirements of section 44 of the constitution.
Albanese's maternal grandfather George Ellery ran a printing business on William Street in Darlinghurst. He provided printing services to the ALP.
Albanese grew up with his mother and maternal grandparents in a Sydney City Council home in the Inner West suburb of Camperdown, opposite the Camperdown Children's Hospital. His grandfather died in 1970, and the following year his mother married James Williamson. He was given his stepfather's surname, but the marriage lasted only 10 weeks, as Williamson proved to be an abusive alcoholic. Albanese's mother worked part-time as a cleaner but suffered from chronic rheumatoid arthritis, with the family surviving on her disability pension and his grandmother's age pension.
Albanese attended St Joseph's Primary School in Camperdown and then St Mary's Cathedral College. After finishing school, he worked for the Commonwealth Bank for two years before studying economics at the University of Sydney. There, he became involved in student politics and was elected to the Students' Representative Council. It was also there where he started his rise as a key player in the ALP's Labor Left.During his time in student politics, Albanese led a group within Young Labor that was aligned with the left faction's Hard Left, which maintained "links with broader left-wing groups, such as the Communist Party of Australia, People for Nuclear Disarmament and the African National Congress".
Albanese's mother died in 2002
Career
- Prime Minister of Australia - Australian politician
