The Albo Diaries

The season finale. After 30 weeks, the Prime Minister finally has his Global Citizen Award. It's 3am, he's in his trackie dacks, and he can't find anywhere to put it.

A selfie with Trump. Four minutes with Andy Burnham. A Newspoll he'd rather not discuss. And one last look back through the diary he insists nobody reads.

Stay to the end for a word from me about what comes next. The Albo Diaries goes monthly from here, with longer episodes, whenever the globe needs him.

Written and performed by Rupert Degas.

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The Prime Minister is in a hotel room with a notepad and four words. The speech is due Wednesday. The verb is the problem.

This week: an award for being a global citizen, a button he already had in his pocket, 27 seconds with the sound off, and a state dinner he isn't at.

Written and performed by Rupert Degas. New entries every Tuesday at 8am.

No ads, no sponsor, no editor, no boss.

The Albo Diaries - Week 28

There's a form on the desk. It wants to know what he owns, what he belongs to, and what he's been a member of for fifteen years without noticing.

This week: a golf club nobody told him about. A cartoon he's in and didn't agree to. A new club he's founding, with a mailing list. Eleven honest seconds he can't reproduce. And a rather large conclusion reached in front of an open fridge.

The Albo Diaries is the private diary of Anthony Albanese, Prime Minister of Australia (for now). He calls it his legacy document. He thinks nobody is reading it. His office describes it as a fabrication, but his office describes most things as a fabrication, so make of that what you will.

New entry every Tuesday morning. Written and performed by Rupert DegasNo ads, no sponsors, no editor, no boss. Support the work here or upgrade to paid to keep it that way. Cheers.

"Turns Out 'Them' Is a Big Word"

Nobody runs to the front of a room waving their arms about unless they want to be counted.

Anthony Albanese said "We must defeat them". Now everyone wants to know who 'them' is.

This week: a speech that went further than intended, a trip nobody turned up to, a reporter who asked the wrong question in front of the wrong people, six takes to get one video right, and a month of press he'd very much like everyone to move on from.

And to add insult to injury, nobody's asked how he's doing. Not one person.

Written and performed by Rupert Degas.

The Albo Diaries is a satirical work of fiction. Anthony Albanese does not keep a diary. If he does, this isn't it.

New entry every Tuesday, 8am. Free to read, free to listen.

No ads, no sponsors, no editor, no boss. Support the work here or upgrade to paid to keep it that way. Cheers.

The Albo Diaries - Week 26

The Prime Minister is trying to write a text message to the WA Premier and it isn't going well.

He was half an hour away. He didn't go. Now the seat is gone and there's a phone in his hand that won't do anything.

Written and performed by Rupert Degas.No ads, no sponsors, no editor, no boss. Support the work here or upgrade to paid to keep it that way. Cheers.

New episode every Tuesday, 8am. Free to subscribe: rupertdegas.substack.com

18 minutes and 14 seconds. That is how long the Prime Minister sat in front of Sarah Ferguson on 7.30 and worked his way round to the word "error". This week he watches it back in the bath, four times over, dragging the little bar to the bit where he thinks he sounded like Bob Hawke. Somewhere in there the country went over $1 trillion in debt, dipped back under on the Friday, and he decided that technically it never happened. A man surrounded by numbers that will not add up, quietly concluding that somebody has swapped the country while he was sitting in it. And someone else is claiming to be the 'gayest' party in Australia!

The Albo Diaries - a weekly satirical column and podcast, written as the private diary of Anthony Albanese, PM (For Now).

Read it: https://rupertdegas.substack.com

"I did a thing. With my hands."

Last Thursday night the Prime Minister of Australia rang the President of the United States. No recording was released. No transcript. The White House confirmed the call happened and then said nothing else at all.

This week, the diary is the phone call.

The melons. Kylie. Pauline. The women who went out for him. And the reason the tariff isn't moving.

He was told exactly what was wrong with him. He heard something else.

No ads, no sponsors, no editor, no boss. Support the work here or upgrade to paid to keep it that way. Cheers.

The Albo Diaries is written and performed by Rupert Degas. Satire. Published every Tuesday, 8am. Also on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

"I wish there was a box for I'd rather everyone kept liking me."

The Prime Minister is on leave, in an undisclosed part of Australia, in and an old Midnight Oils t-shirt. The country is filling in the census. So is he.

This week: a jigsaw somebody else gave up on. Richard Marles telling the radio he probably deserves a break. Sixteen digits and a nine-character password. The religion box. The ancestry box. The gender box. One usual address, singular. And a Prime Minister who assured everyone their data was safe, right up until someone explained where the servers are.

Written and performed by Rupert Degas.

New episode every Tuesday, 8am. Free on Substack, Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

The Prime Minister keeps a diary. He calls it his ‘legacy document’. You are not supposed to be reading this. His office describes it as “a fabrication.” But to be fair, his office describes most things as a fabrication, so make of that what you will.

Dear Diary. I’ve been doing sums. Counting. Four hours. Call it four, it was more like three and a half with the cars. And the number they’re printing is a million. Which comes out at $250,000 an hour. Which is the first positive number anyone’s put on me since August.

Two years going down in the polls. Two years of Jim turning the laptop round. And then a twenty-five-year-old I’d never met before puts seven figures on one evening. That’s not corruption. That’s the market correcting.

Look, I didn’t take anything. That’s the bit none of them can hold in their heads. I’ve never taken a dollar in my life. The Party takes. The Party has a secretariat, and a form and a return, and the money goes in one end as money and comes out the other end as a process. I was in a room. Rooms aren’t donations.

I was put in that room the way a fridge gets delivered. Two blokes, a diagram, nobody speaks to you.

The bloke who used to run the corporate regulator was there. So it can’t have been improper. He’d have said something.

The bloke from the Commonwealth Bank was there too. Which I’d have thought settles it. Nobody’s ever been bought by a bank. They’re regulated.

Angus wants the money given back, which tells you he’s never once worked out where money actually goes. It doesn’t sit in a drawer, Angus. It gets routed.

And Pauline is a different thing entirely and I’m tired of explaining it. Gina bought Pauline. Bought her, flew her, sat her in the front row in Italy. Nobody bought me.

I was allocated.

Told Jodie the number in the car. She asked what they got for it. I said they got me. Nothing else from her the whole way over the Bridge, which in our house is a whole conversation.

Geoff says stop doing the division. Geoff says if anyone ever hears me doing the division we’re finished. I told him finished is minus eighteen. Finished is the current settings.

Forty years I’ve been at this. Forty years of branches and numbers and rooms above pubs. And the biggest figure anyone’s ever attached to my name arrived in a single night, from a bloke who was born after I’d already been in Parliament for years.

I got the Comté out. The French one. With the accent on it.

I worked out it’s $9 a hundred grams.

I worked out I’m $250k an hour.

I sat there at half eleven with a knife in my hand doing sums about cheese.

That is the system working, and that’s important.

I remain, as always, on the right side of history. History has not yet confirmed this. But it will.

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"Three thousand people clapped on cue. My dog still won't sit."

The Prime Minister keeps a private diary. He believes historians will study it. He is wrong about several things.

This week Albo is four days into a secret dog-training regime he is losing badly, and it is going better than the rest of his life. An escalator makes a decision about him in front of the nation and he takes it as a compliment. Three thousand people applaud him in exactly the right places in Adelaide, because the right places were printed on a run sheet. A woman who is not in the building will not get out of his head. And on a Tuesday night, in a very quiet house on the harbour, eight men ask him questions and nobody asks him for anything, which he has decided is respect.

He can get three thousand people to clap on cue. He cannot get one dog to sit.

No ads, no sponsors, no editor, no boss. Support the work here or upgrade to paid to keep it that way. Cheers.