Anthony Albanese has found an unlikely ally in former prime minister John Howard after the Opposition Leader stumbled out of the gates on the first official day of the election campaign.
Out on the hustings in Tasmania, Mr Albanese was asked by reporters if he knew the official reserve bank cash rate and the national unemployment rate. He could not answer either question.
“I think it’s five … point … four. Sorry. I’m not sure what it is,” he said of the unemployment rate on Monday morning.
Coalition MPs are expected to pounce on the embarrassing gaffe, as it plays into their narrative that they are the superior economic managers and Mr Albanese is inexperienced.
But Mr Howard defended the mistake when he was stopped by reporters in the Perth electorate of Hasluck later that day.
“Is that a serious question? Okay, well Anthony Albanese didn’t know the unemployment rate. So what?” Mr Howard said.
He may well have been reflecting on his own televised pre-election stumble over interest rates in an interview with A Current Affair before the 2007 poll.
Asked at the time if he could nominate the reserve bank’s official rate, Mr Howard answered: “It’s 6.25 per cent”.
Then opposition leader Kevin Rudd –who went on to win that year’s election for the Labor Party – correctly quoted the figure of 6.5 per cent in a separate interview later that night.
Mr Albanese made the error on Monday as he stood next to Labor’s finance spokeswoman, Katy Gallagher, who was then asked whether she knew what the unemployment rate and cash rate were.
“The reserve bank current rate is 0.10. And the unemployment rate is at 4 per cent,” she said.
Mr Albanese later apologised for his mistake, telling reporters he “made a mistake”.
“I’m human. But when I make a mistake, I will fess up to it and I will set about correcting that mistake. I won’t blame someone else, I will take responsibility.”
In a sign of how seriously Labor took the fumble, Mr Albanese later fronted up for an interview on Sky News.
“I do know the official cash rate. It’s point one. But the thing that matters to people is their interest rates that they pay and no one out there is paying point 1 per cent on their mortgage either,” he said.
Asked if this could be considered the day he lost the election, Mr Albanese told host Andrew Clennell he was “being melodramatic”.
“People make mistakes and when it comes to figures, quite often. I don’t want to get into the Prime Minister’s mistakes that have been made,” Mr Albanese said.
“You know, people make mistakes. That happens. I face up to it, I’m accepting responsibility for it. And that’s it.”
But he denied reports he had apologised to his colleagues for the error.
The two figures Mr Albanese was asked to name go directly to the cost of living, a major issue this campaign.
Graphs show how Australia’s unemployment figure – which currently sits at four per cent for the first time since 2008 – has fallen to a near-historic low.
Unemployment Figures
Mr Albanese also failed to answer what the official Reserve Bank cash rate is – despite it having been a record low 0.10 since November 2020.
Australia's Cash Rate 2022
The same questions were put to Scott Morrison later on Monday while he was campaigning at Culburra Beach in the Labor-held marginal seat of Gilmore.
“0.1 per cent is the cash rate, and it has been for some time,” he said.
“The unemployment rate I’m happy to say is 4 per cent, falling to a 50 year low.
“It came down from 5.7 per cent when we were first elected. More importantly, as we went into the pandemic, we were facing unemployment rates of around 15 per cent. Now it’s 4 per cent.”
Mr Morrison has more than once claimed the unemployment rate is at a 50-year low, but it is at an equal 50-year low, having fallen to about 4 per cent in 2008 under Mr Rudd’s Labor government.
