Anthony Albanese has claimed the Liberal advertising campaign slogan – ‘Life won’t be easy under Albanese’ – is racist bullying that makes fun of his Italian name. 

God help us if we are subjected to three years of such infantile complaining!

The Liberal Party has used the slogan in commercials ahead of today’s election.

Mr Albanese slammed the rhyme while addressing members of the Italian community at Sydney’s Club Marconi on Wednesday.

‘People of my age and older in this room will know that in school people made fun of your name,’ Mr Albanese said.

Now at this point – if the Labor leader’s minders had been on their toes – someone should have fetched the world’s smallest violin and played it in the background.

Mr Albanese soldiered on bravely without musical accompaniment…

‘My opponents think it’s still okay to make fun of someone’s name in their advertising, and that is a matter for them to consider.’

Boom! Take that Liberals! 

This is the delicate petal who wants to represent Australia in the face of an aggressive, expansionist China. 

God help us.

As an aside, I wonder whether it would be considered racist if someone held up a sign at the Labor launch reading: ‘Winning is easy for Albanese!’

Obviously not. Because rhyming ‘easy’ with ‘Albanese’ is not racism. It’s just, you know, rhyming.

But the Italian Stallion wasn’t finished.

He went on to insist that the Liberal Party should reconsider its advertisement, which he believed had left an impact on the Italian-Australian community. 

To which anyone with an ounce of sense should have screamed: ‘Non puoi essere serio!’

‘That is a matter for them to consider, perhaps, in the future – but I know that many in the Italian-Australian community have made their own judgments about what that says about them,’ Mr Albanese said.

I am certain almost no one in the Italian community judged that rhyming ‘easy’ with ‘Albanese’ said anything about them personally at all.

The racial slur didn’t get past Mr Albanese though. His offence radar – finely tuned after decades in the progressive movement – picked up on the insult immediately.

If only he was as quick to pick up on other things … like unemployment figures, and the cash reserve rate, and border policy and his own NDIS policy. 

Admittedly, it was at least different from his well-worn ‘I was raised by a single mum in a housing commission estate’ spiel.

But it’s hard to know how it was any different at all to Mr Albanese’s colleague Jason Clare’s comments about Croation-born Liberal Zed Seselja’s name, apart from the fact that Clare really was mocking Mr Seselja’s name, rather than just rhyming.

Mr Clare, criticising the government’s attempts to smooth relations with the Solomon Islands, told journalists: ‘They send some bloke called Zed. Who’s Zed? Is this Pulp Fiction or national security?’

Zed being one of the nastiest characters in Pulp Fiction who met an even nastier end.

We await Mr Albanese’s reprimand of his colleague and his apology to the Croatian-Australian community.

Any day now.

You can follow James on Twitter. You can order his new book Notes from Woketopia here.

Get 10 issues for just $10

Subscribe to The Spectator Australia today for the next 10 magazine issues, plus full online access, for just $10.

SUBSCRIBE 10 issues for $10 REGISTER 3 articles a month

Already a subscriber? Log in