When our chief political correspondent Anthony Galloway told me last week he had secured a sit-down interview with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, I was thrilled. For any publication, landing an interview with a prime minister is a huge deal. For a startup that launched less than nine months ago, it’s seismic.
The interview, which we ran today, was to discuss the government’s centrepiece Future Made in Australia policy, which is set to feature prominently in Jim Chalmers' budget address tomorrow night.
Whether you agree with it or not, Albanese’s decision to take a more interventionist stance in the economy — adopting a green-tinged industry policy and explicitly backing winners such as quantum computing startup PsiQuantum — is a genuine paradigm shift in Australian politics. Galloway grilled the PM on the blowback the policy has received from some economists (including his own Productivity Commissioner, Danielle Wood) and confirmed the initiatives announced so far have been heavily influenced by concerns over national security and China.
There is least one other reason why it’s great to land an interview like this: prime ministers simply don’t do them very often anymore. Certainly not to the extent they did in the Howard era and earlier. Partially, this reflects our changed media landscape and the advent of social media. It's also a sign of Albanese’s policy ambition: he now has a complex agenda to sell, the kind of agenda that can’t be easily articulated in soundbites.
