CANBERRA, Australia -- The son of a single mother who raised him on a pension, Anthony Albanese had a humble start to life for a politician who could become Australia’s prime minister on Saturday.
His financially precarious upbringing in government-owned housing in Sydney fundamentally formed the politician who leads the center-left Australian Labor Party opposition. He is still widely known by his childhood nickname, Albo.
Albanese repeatedly referred during the six-week election campaign to the life lessons he learned from his disadvantaged childhood. Labor’s campaign has focused on policies including financial assistance for first home buyers grappling with soaring real estate prices and sluggish wage growth.
Labor is also promising cheaper childcare for working parents and better nursing home care for the elderly.
Albanese said his political rise since he joined the party as an impoverished teenager was built on his honesty.
“One of the reasons, I think, why that young lad ... became the leader of the Australian Labor Party ... is because my entire political career has been built on my word,” Albanese told the National Press Club this week.
As a young child, to spare Albanese the scandal of being “illegitimate” in a working-class Roman Catholic family in socially conservative 1960s Australia, he was told that his Italian father Carlo Albanese had died in a car accident shortly after marrying his ethnic-Irish Australian mother Maryanne Ellery in Europe.
His mother, who became an invalid pensioner because of chronic rheumatoid arthritis, told him the truth when he was 14 years old: His father was not dead and his parents had never married.
Carlo Albanese had been a steward on a cruise ship when the couple met in 1962 during the only overseas trip of her life. She returned to Sydney from her seven-month journey through Asia to Britain and continental Europe almost four months pregnant, according to Anthony Albanese’s 2016 biography, “Albanese: Telling it Straight.”
She was living with her parents in their local government-owned house in inner-suburban Camperdown when her only child was born on March 2, 1963.
Out of loyalty to his mother and a fear of hurting her feelings, Albanese waited until after her death in 2002 before searching for his father.
Father and son were happily united in 2009 in the father’s hometown of Barletta in southern Italy. The son was in Italy for business meetings as Australia‘s minister for transport and infrastructure.
Anthony Albanese was a minister throughout Labor’s most recent six years in power and reached his highest office — deputy prime minister — in his government’s final three months, which ended with the 2013 election.
“It says a great thing about our nation that the son of a (single) parent who grew up in a council house in Sydney could be deputy prime minister of Australia,” Albanese said. He had just defeated the son of a former deputy prime minister in a ballot of fellow lawmakers for the post.