Anecdotally it's hard to find people willing to speak warmly of the prime minister, even among Labor diehards. ( ABC News: Matt Roberts )
There's a telling moment in The Tony Blair Story, a three-part political documentary currently on ABC iview. For political junkies, it is a must-watch.
Blair's early years in the 1990s as UK prime minister were a whirlwind of change and political wins: he granted the Bank of England independence, ushered in devolution in Wales and Scotland, began work on the eventually successful Northern Ireland peace process, and spearheaded the West's intervention in Kosovo.
The documentary portrays the latter as being the moment when Blair attained a near-messianic moral triumph over evil as he walked through large cheering crowds in Kosovo after convincing BIll Clinton to intervene.
British novelist and journalist Robert Harris observes in the documentary that Blair's ascendancy confirmed an "almost cyclical natural rule of politics".
"Whenever something in politics looks at its zenith, the termites are at work on the base," Harris muses.
That moment in Kosovo, he adds, was when "for the first time maybe a slight parting from reality began to take place".
"In that triumph the seeds of tragedy were sown," Harris cautions in a nod to what would unfold only a few years later in Iraq.
Twelve months ago this columnist noted that " these are Anthony Albanese's salad days ".
"He can do no wrong," even as the threat of stagflation and roaring bills already darkened the government's political horizon.
Still brimming with confidence from his defenestration of Peter Dutton in the May 2025 landslide, the prime minister was on a political and personal high.
About to marry his partner Jodie Haydon at the Lodge, he'd banished any doubts that he could manage the mercurial Donald Trump, and was just a few weeks away from passing devilishly challenging environmental approvals laws as well as a spate of historic alliances and defence pacts with Pacific states.
"In political terms, this moment may well be as good as it gets. The real question: are these sunlit uplands a long plateau for the government or a peak where everything now goes downhill?" that column noted.
We now know the answer, if only because nothing stays static in politics for long.
Outrage over Communications Minister Anika Wells's hugely expensive trip to New York set off weeks of media headlines and social media meltdowns at the end of last year over MPs' travel entitlements.
Something in the government was "beginning to rot at the core", a Sydney Morning Herald editorial declared in early December in reference to the travel row and suggestions the "wily Albanese government is suffering from a hubris previously unseen".
The first signs of termite damage were already becoming apparent. Then came the devastating Bondi killings and months of fallout that left the government — in the eyes of its critics — on the defensive, reactive and shaken.
Anthony Albanese, with wife Jodie Haydon, at the Bondi Beach memorial service on December 21, 2025. ( ABC News: Jack Fisher )
It was also around this time that One Nation's rise in the polls began to steepen.
In February came the first big blow to the Albanese government's economic management with the first of what would become five Reserve Bank interest rate hikes.
Despite managing well the fallout from the war against Iran, next came the May budget which involved breaking election promises on changes to negative gearing and capital gains taxation — reforms that continue to bedevil the government, with legislation due before the Senate next week on trusts.
Winter was marred by Bush Barbie and Japanese royal melons. The less said the better.
More recently, the prime minister has been seared by ABC News-led coverage of a $6 million federal grant to the Marrickville Golf Club .
And now the treasurer is facing the big pile-on over the government's fiscal settings, which the opposition has successfully linked in the minds of many to high inflation and rising interest rates.
It's a long list of woe, and barely includes more recent setbacks such as the government's backdowns on the sale of some Defence properties and a plan — mere weeks old — to crack down on backpacker visas.
Little wonder things look crooked for the government.
Anecdotally it's hard to find people willing to speak warmly of the prime minister, even among Labor diehards.
Survey data for the government has been bleak. This column has been told by one prominent pollster to brace for even gloomier figures early next week.
"It's the worst set of numbers. Everything is bad," he said.
So bad that the danger for the government is that it becomes self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating by drowning out successes and good news — the political equivalent of a bank run.
Underlying the grimness inside the government is the realisation that there are few easy policy options to hand.
The notion of spending more money to appease grumpy voters appears to have become toxic.
Whereas it wasn't long ago that both the government and the Coalition regarded fiscal sugar hits as pragmatic politics.
This is a big shift in the political economy.
Another is the growing corridor chatter about the need for the government to undergo a reset and refresh, both of the ideas it pursues and the personnel leading those debates.
Talk of a Cabinet reshuffle appears to be taking on greater urgency. It was previously considered a second-half-of-next-year issue.
As the government flounders, that timeline has shifted towards the first half of the year, perhaps the opening months of 2027.
Albanese's own future and his remaining goals as prime minister are also increasingly coming up in conversations.
A leadership upheaval of that magnitude seems unlikely any time soon. But the chances are also not zero anymore, like they have been over the past five years or so.
Labor's most prominent backbench provocateur, Ed Husic, told Nine newspapers last month that the prime minister should ensure rank-and-file members get to vote on the party's next leader if he resigned next year or after the election.
The story was published on the day that independent MP Helen Haines was struck by a car outside her electorate office, so it didn't get much wider notice.
For now, Ed Husic is a lone public voice inside the government. ( ABC News: Ian Cutmore )
But Husic's remarks made him the first MP to openly speculate about the prime minister's political longevity.
"If you do it more than 12 months from the next election, you've got that opportunity [to hold a vote with party members]," he told the papers, adding that it was important the next leader is selected by a "wider base" to ensure a "debate about the direction of the party" and the "big issues confronting Australia."
For now, Husic is a lone public voice inside the government.
It would be foolhardy to bet on the prime minister pulling up stumps before the next election. Albanese insists to his caucus that he has what it takes to turn the ship around before the next election, due in 2028.
He's also got an eye on becoming the second-longest serving Labor prime minister in history behind Bob Hawke and Andrew Fisher, whose total over three stints in the job was just under five years.
That milestone for Anthony Albanese would arrive in mid-March.
Jacob Greber is political editor of ABC's 7.30 program.
