MARK RILEY: Mr. Clifftop Mansion Anthony Albanese needs to stop telling himself the story

There’s something about Labor Prime Ministers buying fancy houses while in office.

Bob Hawke bought a harborside mansion in Sydney’s Northbridge in 1991 for himself and his then wife Hazel.

He paid $1.23 million. That was a considerable amount at the time.

And he did so in the middle of Australia’s worst recession since the Great Depression.

But there was little controversy about that at the time.

Hawke bought the house for his retirement. It came sooner than he expected.

A few months later he lost the premiership to Paul Keating.

Keating stepped over him in the leadership and soon after stepped over him on the property ladder.

In mid-1994, Keating, along with his then wife Annita, invested $2.2 million to buy St Kevin’s, an 1882 mansion in the salubrious Sydney suburb of Woollahra.

Again there was little controversy.

Keating was a noted aesthete. The Queen Anne-style residence seemed a natural home for its French clocks and antique furnishings.

And now, due to the housing crisis and the cost of living, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has spent $4.3 million on an oceanfront estate in Copacabana, a suburb on the NSW central coast.

There is great controversy about this.

The political world has a much lower tolerance for such things than it once did.

But all those who criticize the Albanians first recognize that the Prime Minister has done nothing wrong.

He has every right to buy and sell houses.

It’s also widely recognized that buying one on the Central Coast makes sense.

His fiancée, Jodie Haydon, grew up there. Three generations of Haydons still live there.

Albanese says he bought the house so they could live near the Haydons when he decided to leave politics or the people or his party made that decision for him.

All fine. All valid. All logical.

The problem is timing and optics.

This is a Prime Minister buying a big house that is trickling into the ocean in the run-up to an election where one of the key issues will be the inability of average and especially young Australians to buy a house at all.

Remember when Malcolm Turnbull refused to leave his $50 million-plus waterfront home and move across Sydney Harbor to the Prime Minister’s official residence in Kirribilli?

Peta Credlin, Tony Abbott’s former chief of staff, called him “Mr Harborside Mansion”.

It labeled him as an elitist. It stuck.

Liberal MPs now say Albanese’s purchase will brand him as excessive.

They say it’s as impolitic as Scott Morrison’s Hawaiian vacation during the Black Summer bushfires.

Other Liberals say this is the worst decision since Abbott knighted Prince Philip.

They take great delight in these humiliations, while ignoring the obvious paradox that the most offensive slander they can muster is to compare him to two of their own contemporary leaders.

Those decisions by Morrison and Abbott reflected a sad judgment.

Albanese’s actions are not at that level – or lower, as the case may be.

But they can become just as harmful in the short term. They fuel the opposition’s attacks on a prime minister who they see as increasingly disconnected from the lived reality of average families.

That is not a battle the Albanian wants to wage as he moves through the crucial final months of his first term and begins the important task of setting an agenda for the second term.

Like last week’s brain teaser in Parliament when he accused shadow treasurer Angus Taylor of possessing Tourette’s, this controversy has overshadowed the government’s main message for several days.

Albanian now seems trapped in a self-perpetuating cycle of clumsy or ill-timed actions that fill the space that should be occupied by agenda-setting announcements.

However, his senior colleagues do not lose confidence in him. At least, not yet.

They forgave him for Tourette’s fault and noted that he corrected himself almost immediately.

And they understand and support his right to purchase whatever marital home he desires, within reason.

But they admit privately that they want him to stop telling himself the story.

The bureaucracy in Canberra is in overdrive working out policy options for December’s Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook, an expected early budget in March and elections in May.

It is vital that the government’s message is clear and unambiguous, and not distorted by the noise of unnecessary own objectives.

Senior ministers hope the Prime Minister’s actions will ensure that the story of the day during this critical period will be about those policies and not him.