Albanese and the low-key 'royal wedding'

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Anthony Albanese has capped off a stellar political year with a personal triumph, tying the knot with his partner Jodie Hayden in a pretty low-key, highly secretive affair at The Lodge, which is the Prime Minister's official residence in Canberra.

It's hard to imagine a more fairytale ending to the political year for the Prime Minister. Just think about it.
A thumping election win, a successful week in Parliament, and then his very own wedding.

So he might be at his zenith, but what are the challenges ahead? Welcome to Politics Now.

Hi, I'm Patricia Carvallis. And I'm Jacob Greber.
How was your weekend, Jacob? Any weddings? Yeah, it was very quiet, but I mean, I was thinking about what it could have been if I'd only followed the,

one of my favourite movies. What was it called? The Wedding Crashes, you know, with Vince Vaughan and I forget who the other guy was.
Look, this wedding was the worst kept secret in Canberra.

Like, I've known about it for a couple of weeks, and just to be clear. did try to pursue getting the story out there for the public.
I think it's important that that's on the record.

But, and I think this has been now highly reported, was warned off in a very, very particularly intense way that there are some significant security concerns if it was to be reported.

And I think there were judgments made about whether it was

newsworthy enough, if you like, or in the public interest enough to create a absolute cluster for the Australian Federal Police that would have had to change all strategies and invest all sorts of resources into that wedding.

Having said that, I want to put on the record that I think it is in the public interest that we know and I'll explain why, Jacob.

It was at the lodge. The lodge is government property.
It's yours and mine. It's everyone's.
So that makes it interesting. It is the Prime Minister.
That makes it interesting.

But with that said, and I want to throw it to you, we also knew he was getting married by the end of the year. He said that on the record.
He's been pretty transparent about all of that.

I think in the public interest is also not costing taxpayers extra money by, you know, salacious stories that just mean that there's bolstering of resources for what is, as my partner put it, his right to be happy.

His right to be happy. What did you make of it? Like at the end of what has been a huge political year, I mean, you've got to say, it's a happy day for a guy,

finally become the prime minister with a thumping victory and then marry a woman who he loves the company of.

I don't think anyone can begrudge him that day. I don't think anyone would feel that he shouldn't have done it the way he's done it or that somehow

he's abusing his position as Prime Minister. You can't time these things when you fall in love with someone and then you want to marry them.

And so he's going to be Prime Minister for a while, it looks like, anyway,

prima facie. So he's picked a time at the end of the year.
I hear what you're saying about the sort of nash, the interest test on it.

And I think for journalists, we'll always struggle with these kinds of stories.

People were aware of it coming up.

There was a lot of nervousness from the Prime Minister's people that it was going to get out and then potentially cancelled. And I think it's a function.
You mentioned the cost of...

So really what it was, I think there's about 40 people there in the gardens. That's a pretty modest wedding, really.

I think it's more 80, isn't it? I read 40. All right, maybe

between 40 and 80. It really doesn't matter.

We can agree that both is modest. It's not a big fat Greek wedding.
It's not 200 people. It's not, you know, goes for four days like some weddings do.

It was a pretty crisp sort of looking thing.

And that meant that they could keep the security about it at a certain level. They didn't need an army of...

federal police, which might have been the case if it had got out.

They were concerned enough about the security security issue of people wanting to disrupt it. So, look, there's a definite cost point on all of that.

I mean, ultimately, you know, they're humans and they wanted to have that day and they did it the way they wanted to do it. And they've paid for everything.
That's right.

We're told they've paid for everything. I don't know if that actually also goes to the security, whether they would have had to pay for that.
I suspect not. I suspect not.

And I will argue that that's fair enough because if you become the prime minister,

that security follows what you do. And that is, I think, reasonable.

You know, it it might be a privilege other people don't have, but hello, I will also add, being the prime minister means that things happen to you that don't happen to ordinary people.

So as a result of that office, there are things that are happening to you that aren't happening to others. In terms of the timing, okay, I'm sorry, we're not a romance podcast.

So we're not just about like love. I'm just, I don't mean for people to think I'm unromantic, but this is a political podcast.
And the politics is this.

He has chosen the best time, Jacob, to have this wedding. He's had a top political year.
There is not any sort of immediate looming crisis.

I mean, there's crisis, there's always a crisis, but you know what I mean.

It hasn't sort of taken the oxygen from something that's going to be problematic for the government. It's done and dusted now.
Again, as you say, it's not ostentatious.

I mean, look how different our country is. Imagine if Trump, you know, renewed his vows with Melania.
Do you think it would be like that? I don't think so.

He would have flattened half of Parliament House to put a new

ballroom in order. Absolutely, right? So it says something about our country, too, that it was so modest.

I'm not quite sure what you're saying about the timing issue.

I mean, I know you can organise weddings pretty quick. In fact,

my wife and I did one in six weeks, and it annoyed a lot of people. But because we were traveling, we did it very fast.
Can a prime minister do that?

What I'm suggesting is, did he not organise this months, many months in advance?

And yeah, a lot of good stuff's happened for him in terms of politics, in terms of policy, big trip to America, Indonesian security deal, environmental law reform, tick, tick, tick.

But he might have also just had a really bad year and then still wanted a wedding to cheer himself up at the end of it. Yeah, very true, very true.
But that didn't happen.

I mean, he won a big election this year and had one of the most successful political weeks last week.

It's important to say, though, that it was a successful political week, but success breeds success. And I want to make this argument to you because I've thought about it a lot.

There were two pieces of news I wrote about in my comment piece, which were not good. One is that we're not going to meet our 2035 emissions reduction target.
The other is the 3.8% inflation rate.

Now, the fact that those

two stories didn't sort of get ahead of steam and become a derailment for the government says a lot about the government's confidence, the government's very

super sharp ability to manage politics like it never was able to in the past, to really flood the zone and dominate the agenda with its deal on the environment, which became the bigger story.

I mean, if you think about it, it kind of, those things are big on their own, Jacob, and really they survive them. So well.
Like, there is something going on.

Don't you think it's a bit of the confidence play that sometimes these things, they're not drowning in these stories?

There's kind of, there's negative halos and positive halos in politics, isn't there? When someone's having a bad run,

because

it's always the case that there is negative and positive news on any given day for any politician. But when you're in a bad place.

Everyone focuses on, oh, and here's another bad thing that just happened to the same person who's already in trouble. And it reinforces the narrative that they're in a spiral.
It's a negative halo.

Albo's at the moment living in this in this sort of

this sweet spot where it's all going his way or it seems to all be going his way. He is racking up the wins but it means people discount the bit that's discordant to that.
And you're absolutely right.

The emissions target, I don't think that was as big a deal really to me personally. I think the fact that it's 42 versus 43 is immaterial.

And we're talking about the 2030 target. That's time.
And the 2035 target is, as you just said, it's ultimately the point of a target is to make people go, oh, we're actually falling short of that.

So there has to now be a policy response. And that's going to be a question for 2026.
What is Chris Bowen doing to reach that 2035 target? We'll have to wait and see.

There should be pressure on him to explain how that's going to work. So park that.
And you're absolutely right on inflation.

We can talk about that later if you like. That is a diabolical problem for the government.
It's getting

that's the real storm cloud on the horizon for what was otherwise, you know, a very nice wedding day. It was a very nice wedding day.
Apparently, you know, it didn't rain in Canberra. That's lovely.

Rained in the morning and then it didn't, yeah, and then it cleared up. All right.
Yeah, it was, yeah, not too hot. Good day.
Good day. Good day for a wedding.
Toto

played a good role.

Something about a tutu? Carrying the ring?

Yeah, ring bearer. There we go.

Lara has helped us out. Thank you.
And a tutu, yeah. And I mean, like, it's important to sort of explore, would we humiliate our dogs in this way?

And I suppose the answer for me is absolutely, absolutely, I would.

Well, I could try, but I doubt it'd be successful.

He's got a mind of his own. Look, I just want to get into, like, I'm jumping around a bit, but that's the fun of this sort of discursive kind of approach we take to Mondays.

Susan Lee, I noticed she didn't jump in and say anything, you know, negative or anything about the wedding.

This at the same time as I received text messages from liberals who were like, hmm, interesting that it's at the lodge. You know, like, why is it at the lodge? Right.

All off the record, not putting their names to it. Now, I'm imagining she also received those text messages, Jacob.

And, you know, she could have been tempted to kind of, you know, make some sort of gratuitous point. She didn't.
I feel like it wasn't.

Didn't she even say she thought it was appropriate? Or she said something about it was appropriate that it was at the lodge? I think she might have even said that.

Yeah, and that goes to security, right? Like securing another venue was going to be harder, apparently, whatever.

I mean, he could have done it at Kiribilli, couldn't he? I think that's the more interesting thing. Why did this Prime Minister do it in Canberra?

As if he was going to have harborside mansion comments made. No way.
Can you imagine?

There you go. So

there's the sort of wrinkle in all of this. He chose boring old Canberra.

That's his story, though. That's his story.
You know, we love Canberra. Jodie and I love living in Canberra.
And that's not an accident.

One is he's a traditionalist and he does like to talk about those things. He's your lefty kind of Tory fighter who is the biggest traditionalist.

That's why some Labor people believe he's kind of their Howard,

likes the rules, a sort of

future of the institution and the parliament. He's very institutionalised and he's not afraid to admit it.

Canberra, because it's our daggy capital, no offence. Offence taken.
Offence taken, Pico.

As a long-term resident and a frequent flyer, I can tell you that that's part of its charm. It's not fancy pants.
It's the Bush Capital. And the optics of that are just better for him in this country.

They're just better. Home of polar fleece and daggy tracksuit pants.
And those weird moths. So he's got away with that.
And I can't see much trouble for him.

And I think they're really breathing a sigh of relief. But what's next? Okay.
What's next? Because that matters. We mentioned inflation.

It is really the ticking time bomb again, right? Like what to do to rein it in. And then this little thing called my FO.

Now, Maifo is the mid-year economic forecast, right? So it's like a very mini budget. And when I say very mini, it's very deliberate.
They don't want...

They don't kind of want it to be too big, but they have to report on how things are going. But they also have to make some key decisions, Jacob.
And some of them are really politically fraught, right?

It's going to be a big question as to how much of it we see in this myEFO.

The Treasurer has downplayed expectations that it's going to be a big mini-budget thing with a lot of new announcements, a lot of new money. There's been bits and bobs already,

including I think $50 million for the ABC and children's production. So there's little things like that starting to pop up.
They'll be accounted for in the MyEFO.

They're downplaying its significance. They're saying it's really an accounting measure, and the main game is next May when the budget is due.

So they're giving themselves that room.

There may be a sense, perhaps,

in the early part of the year that they could have used MyEFO to take some actions to counteract inflation, whether that's more energy bill relief or some other approach. Well,

that'll be a debate that'll fold out. in the next few months.

It is clear, and I think we talked about this last week, PK, that they are looking to departments to find savings. There was a bit of sophistry around: was it going to be an across-the-board 5% cut?

No, but the original reporting, and we'd have to credit an old colleague of mine, John Keogh at the AFR, he said it was up to 5%.

That's very different to 5% across the board. And the government hasn't denied that latter version.

So, there is a bit of a sort of sense of winter coming in terms of the budget, in terms of how much the government is spending in its departments.

And the government is, you know, you think about how much, how big the government is in the economy, if it's not growing at the same pace that it might have, or even some parts of it are contracting, that will have an effect on the economy.

There are many economists who say it should be happening so that those price pressures come down.

That's not how Jim Chalmers sees the world. He doesn't believe that's right.

He rails against that idea of austerity and that you end up hurting people's jobs for this for this sort of ideological goal of bringing inflation down.

Now, the problem with that is inflation affects everybody, but it affects the poorest people the most. So it will be a political problem coming,

especially if those monthly numbers, and we now have

proper monthly data, used to just be every three months, if they stay high,

that will be a drumbeat of unpleasantness for the government. And also people know it.

You don't need the statistician to tell you that price pressures haven't come off. You can see it every time you go shopping.
I don't know.

It's a real tough backdrop, I think, for the first part of the year. And there's another tough piece of news that the government now has to deal with.
AEMO, that's the energy market operator.

We're recording this on a Monday. They've warned that the energy grid is not prepared for the closure of the Araring.
I said it. Did I say it right? Well, it sounded pretty good to me.

I always get nervous on air about saying it. And, you know, this is a pod, so I just tried it that's the plant it's a coal plant in the hunter valley broadly and it's set for the end of 2027

and they say aemo that australians could expect widespread blackouts if the closure goes ahead now wow okay that is not happy or useful

political news for the government again. Susan Lee's jumped on it.
You'd expect her to, especially now that they're anti-net zero, all for coal.

I'm sorry, but that's how they are kind of pitching themselves. She's been saying this proves that their energy ideas are better, that Australians are going to face blackouts.

You can see the sort of scare campaign around all of this.

But the broader point, which is factual, like I'm not going to buy into people's scare campaigns, but there is a factual element here, which is that this speaks to the energy transition, the problems with it, because there are real problems with it.

Blackouts and costs are huge problems. And the government

has to have answers on this, right? So, this is a New South Wales government and national government problem. Yeah,

I mean, it is a many, many decades-old coal-fired power station. I don't know off the top of my head, but it must be getting 30, 40 years into its life now.

They're holding it together with gaffer tape, pretty much.

It's costing hundreds of millions of dollars to extend its life, and they're trying to sweat that coal-fired power station as long as they can.

I think AEMO's issue is not so much with the fact that it's going to close,

it's to do with, so at the same time, there's been this great success with all the rooftop solar, four million homes,

and that power comes on during a sunny day more than can be used sometimes, and then it disappears again,

as is its nature. So he was talking about something, and you're going to love this, PK.

the need for more synchronous condensers,

which is energy nerd speak for keeping the grid stable. And he's saying we need to speed up installation of those.

I would not know what one of those looked like if it ran me over on the road, but apparently they are the solution and we need more of them.

So it's just you were so right when you said the complexity of this transition continues to challenge the policymaking outfits. It challenges the markets.

It challenges households and businesses who are bearing these upfront costs. And it was always going to be a thing that was up and down quite often.

Even if we were to just replace Araring with a brand new coal-fire power station, it would cost lots and lots of money. It certainly would.
Look, this week is Senate Estimates.

That's when there's a lot of grilling of public servants and ministers that are senators that are appearing.

You know, there'll be lots of cross-examination in relation to things like Australia's emissions reductions. Also,

the bomb is going to be appearing. You'll recall they spent a lot of money updating their website, which was a epic fail.
So there'll be lots of stories this week.

Like politics actually be quite busy, but more on the organisational front, if you want to call it that, like, you know, the administration of things.

And at the same time, what I didn't mention after talking about Wedding Gate is that the Prime Minister is on his honeymoon for five days. So there is an acting Prime Minister, which is Richard Miles.

The Prime Minister officially going on leave from today. He actually did have a pre-honeymoon too.

So, you know, book ending with the sandwich bit, the salami being the actual wedding.

And I'm sure he will honour the promise he made or the demand he made also of his caucus, Jacob, which was don't get complacent over summer. And there's a reason he said that to his caucus.

He doesn't want them to think about the sort of opinion polls and the 94 seats and think, I'm going to put my feet up, live my best life, not try too hard and allow a sort of shift in politics because he remembers those dark days of 2023.

You remember that year? It was ugly for the government. Only what was it? All that time ago, 12 months ago? And it went on into 2024.
I shouldn't pretend it was just 2023.

Because of my column today, I've received text messages from labor frontbenchers who say, yeah, that was such a dark time.

Never want to go back to that time, you know, because they are at a high point. But there's one thing that we can be sure of, Jacob, and that's political gravity.

I mean, how long can they stay at this popularity with all of these looming problems we've identified? And we're not identifying them like to be naysayers. They're real things.

They are happening, you know, like we have real challenging, wicked problems that the government will have to deal with.

And you can't imagine that the public is going to be sort of relaxed about those things as next year goes into full throttle, right? No, I think that, you know,

the joy and misery of politics is that nothing sort of stays the same forever. I mean, some of the topics feel like they're interminable.
I mean, we're still talking about climate policy.

We have been for 30 years, and we probably will for another 30 years. But the way politics

favours leaders, the way it favors people who want to try and build their momentum, that's changing all the time. I mean,

and we'll have a seat. You know, a lot of it depends, again, on the other side, the way the coalition manages its problems, the way it deals with the setback of May this year,

the way it deals with its leadership. Does it give Susan Lee enough time to perhaps recover from the lows in the polls, which are at their lowest ever, you know, for the Liberal Party?

Does she get a budget reply speech next year, or is she already moved on by then, or does she have longer?

I note the, you know, one of the national papers did a very, very large piece on Andrew Hastie and

him quoting St. Crispin's from what is it, Henry V.
You know, it's all rah-rah stuff. So rah-rah, I love it.
Rah-rah stuff. So he's on the march

proverbially.

So we'll see. But you would have to say, from where we were 12 months ago, it is an extraordinary turnaround for the government.
And I've heard many liberals say that to me as well.

They're actually kind of stunned by it about what a good year he's had.

You know, the fair-minded ones will acknowledge that. They will.
But can I say my own analysis is

you make your own luck as well. And credit, you know,

where credit's due, he is a shrewd and savvy political operator. And so some of politics has to be about luck.
He's had a lot of luck that the coalition are eating themselves.

That's lucky for him, right? But he's also made his own luck. He's very good at negotiating things, even getting through the environment laws.
That is the way he frames things does work for him.

I actually think those environment laws are a much bigger deal for a number of reasons. They show yet again that

he had an opportunity to do them a year ago, and he didn't because it wasn't right. The setting wasn't right.
He was politically weak, actually, when you look back a year ago.

He's now politically strong, and he's done them

in his terms on his timetable. He's also spent a bit of his political capital to do it.

Make no mistake, there will be a backlash from some farmers, very concerned when they woke up on Thursday, for the first time in 20 plus years since these laws have existed, they are now subject to the same laws as someone building a wind farm or building a mine or any other project.

They are now subject to federal environmental protection laws. And that's come kind of out of nowhere.

I would argue partly the coalition could have done a deal with the government to stop that from happening.

So there might be a backlash there back to the LNP, but politics is usually, there's not a lot of subtlety in it. So I suspect, you know, Labor will get some heat for that.
Let's see.

It's, but he hasn't, he's stared that down, if you like. He has spent some political capital to do something big.

And I think that might,

that hasn't really been recognised yet. There's a lot of complaints that he doesn't do enough with his political capital.

Actually, I think the environmental laws are actually a sign that he is is starting to spend some of it. Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more, Jacob.

I want to disagree with you just because, you know, it's more sparky, but you are correct. Yeah, he has.
And it was smart to do it by the end of the year. Like, I really do understand

the sort of argument for scrutiny and let the committee report and the sort of nerdy side of me agrees.

But the pragmatic side of me, which is probably the dominant side of me, thinks, well, it's savvy to get it done by the end of the year. You know, push through, get stuff done.

Do not waste your chance when you are in government and when you have this kind of authority. Use it.
And that's what they've done. Well, that's it for politics now for today.

Jacob, we get to hang out tomorrow.

In IRL, I believe. Yeah, in IRL.
We are going to talk all things weddings and beyond in the Politics Now, the party room live show tomorrow night. It's at the Canberra Theatre.

So that's Tuesday and it's going to be lots of fun. Tickets are going fast.
Frank Kelly is back in all her glory on stage as well. So is Jacob.
See you there, Jacob. Can't wait.