Karen Middleton picked the perfect title for her biography of Anthony Albanese – Telling it Straight.
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Federal Labor MP “Albo” was in Bega on Wednesday night to discuss the biography and his personal life laid bare through its pages.
However, the well-attended Q&A session at Candelo Books also became rather heated when audience members hammered Mr Albanese on the controversial Adani coal mine project in Queensland.
In the hours before Mr Albanese’s visit to the Bega Valley, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten said he supported the idea of the open cut coal mine, but distanced Labor from any proposal to invest taxpayers’ money into the Indian-owned venture’s startup – as flagged by the government.
“I want to see more jobs in Australia, I want to see more jobs in regional Queensland, but it has got to stack up commercially, it has got to stack up environmentally,” Mr Shorten said on Wednesday.
Perceived Labor support for the Adani project was a sore point for several members of the 60-strong crowd at Candelo Books.
“I understand there’s a debate now that Adani equals the Great Barrier Reef, but you know and everyone here knows, it’s not that simple,” Mr Albanese said.
“Because if you take that logic, then every coal mine that exports should be shut down now – that’s not our position.
“I understand where you’re coming from and that you’re coming from a good place...[but] it would be dishonest for us to say that.
“If the argument is that burning coal kills the Great Barrier Reef...I fail to see a moral distinction between a coal mine that’s already open and one that isn’t – the outcome is exactly the same.”
Albanese managed to then move on after giving “people a pretty fair chop” on Adani only to be pinged for a friendship with Christopher Pyne and the impression of “humanity in politics”.
“Pyne is not an awful human being, one-on-one!” he said to chuckles around the room.
Meanwhile, the biography Telling it Straight “is very much about my mother as well as me” Mr Albanese said, opening up about a tough childhood living with his ill mother in inner Sydney and a more recent search for his unknown Italian father.
“Relationships and families are very complex,” he said.
True of political life as well as personal.
- Watch the full video of the event below. (The Adani conversation happens around the 45-minute mark)