Not even Menzies looked this good in a penguin suit, Anthony Albanese thought to himself as he stood before the mirror in the bedroom at Kirribilli House.

His tailor deserved some credit but, truth be told, it takes more than expensively cut fabric to look this good. What was it that the Poms said, something about the man maketh the clothes?

They were right, especially when it came to this battler from the slums of Camperdown. You can take the boy out of public housing, but you can’t take the public housing out of the boy, especially when he winds up living at the finest public housing in the nation, under the Harbour Bridge at Kirribilli House.

He winked at himself and smiled. The size of the wardrobe and the cut of the clothes had changed, but at least he hadn’t.

Out the window, ferries crossed Sydney Harbour, taking people home from work or into the city for whatever ordinary folk did on a night on the town these days. A Midnight Oil gig at the Hordern, perhaps? Dinner at Harry’s Café de Wheels?

He felt a pang of nostalgia for his own simpler times when he too was a member of the working masses, cutting his teeth as a researcher for Local Government Minister Tom Uren in the heady 1980s while helping to create Labor’s Hard Left faction, the same faction to which he owed his current success.

It had been a long way to the top, and he made a mental note to mention it in his speech tonight. Maybe there’s an AC/DC joke in that? He’d have to read the room first.

One of his staffers had told him that tonight’s event, the GQ Man of the Year Awards, was going to be the most prestigious night of the year, with even more red carpet than the G20 in Bali!

‘So it will be bigger than the Logies then?’ he said.

‘OMG, is that like a new brand of Covid or something?’ she replied.

He had to stifle a chuckle. Young staffers didn’t know much these days. That’s why he was Prime Minister and she was just the person in his 60-plus entourage who advised him on the hottest events to attend during his rare visits to Australia.

He didn’t know who these GQ people were but he liked their style. They were going to give him the Politician of the Year award at the event tonight, and rightly so. The six months since he’d won the federal election had been hectic!

One minute he was promising the Australian people he would, if elected, reduce emissions to Net Zero, the next he was on a private jet to Japan to meet Joe Biden, then to Indonesia, United Arab Emirates, Spain, and France to meet various fellow dignitaries and statesmen, then to Ukraine to check if the shipment of Aussie coal and cash Scott Morrison had promised had arrived on time, and to ask President Zelensky if he needed anything else, other than a selfie for the official war photo library, of course.

He’d barely had time to unpack the suitcase before he was dragged overseas again to attend the Queen’s funeral, which as a republican was the respectful thing to do. He had a quick catch-up with Charles at the palace, who told him, with a wink, that despite his announcements to the contrary, he had absolutely no plan to abandon his true calling, to save the planet from his own boorish subjects, a cause for which his new title might, nudge nudge, be useful.

‘Nuff said, Charlie old Maj,’ Albo said, still familiarising himself with the protocols of the job.

Albo was way ahead of him anyway. He had already put off the republic referendum till after the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, so no loss.

This diplomacy gig’s a doddle, he thought, as he wondered if it was customary to leave the palace by Uber or just walk out the front door and grab a cab.

Albo wisely left the dark suit in the suitcase when he got back to Sydney, knowing he’d be needing it in Tokyo a few days later for another funeral, this time Japan’s Shinzo Abe.

He was starting to wonder if anyone would notice how much jet fuel he was burning through while still trying to get Australia to Net Zero, but when the ABC asked one of his junior ministers why he, the PM, had not chucked a left at Tokyo and flown on the COP27 in Egypt, he breathed a sigh of relief.

His friends at the ABC understood just as well as he did: you need to emit a lot of carbon to save the planet from carbon.

By the time he got to the East Asia summit in Cambodia two weeks later, the travel was starting to get boring, so he appointed Nicholas Moore, from Macquarie Bank, to be his strategic envoy for the region.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong didn’t seem to mind. She looked busy enough trying to keep that upstart conservative Jacinta Price in her place in the Senate anyway.

Price was an enigma to Albo. Here was an Indigenous Senator who didn’t want an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. In his whole career in politics, Albo had never seen anybody turn down a free ticket like that.

Well, Price was not going to win this battle, if he had anything to do with it.

He ditched the idea of the AC/DC joke in his speech to the GQ crowd – they looked more Yellow Brick Road than Highway to Hell, euphemistically speaking – and went straight to his signature theme.

‘I’m a proud houso,’ he said, and paused for the whoops of applause.

They didn’t come, so he pivoted to a topic the room would understand. ‘What we need to do is to make sure we widen those doors of opportunity so that everyone regardless of their, ah, race, their religion, their gender, their sexuality can, ah, aspire to be the best that they can be, that’s how we will build a stronger nation of Australia.’

That hit the mark. The crowd erupted. They erupted again when he urged them all to vote for the Voice referendum next year.

It was a sure sign that the Voice referendum was already in the bag.

What a night, he thought to himself as he returned to Kirribilli House. He resisted one last look at his new, sharp tuxedo in the mirror, and instead turned the lights off and went straight to bed.

Even as Politician of the Year, he was still doing his bit to hit those Net Zero targets.