Prime Minister Anthony Albanese thanks the AFP counter-terrorism team in the wake of the Bondi shootings. Photo: Supplied by PMO.
Anthony Albanese approaches Christmas Day after an extraordinarily wild ride throughout 2025, traversing the highs and lows of the country’s top job and culminating in the worst of duties required of any prime minister.
He is also facing his lowest approval ratings since he was reelected in May.
As political years go, this has been a massive one and by no means a run-of-the-mill course of events.
Mr Albanese began 2025 still reeling from the nation’s rejection of the 2023 Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum.
Yes, still.
That defeat felt personal and resulted in the PM losing his mojo for quite some time, so when election year 2025 came around, there was a noticeable vulnerability begging to be exploited by a canny Opposition.
Polling numbers weren’t offering the PM or Labor any measure of comfort, and the Liberals’ Peter Dutton convinced himself he was actually tasting victory.
The Voice rejection fooled the then-Opposition Leader into believing that Australians felt that same negative way about everything the government was doing.
An early Federal Budget, with energy relief and tax cuts for all, heralded the imminent election and kept Labor firmly in the fight.
The Coalition lost the election pretty much from day one of the campaign as Mr Dutton spouted out increasingly conservative policy thought bubbles and had a hard time getting them across in his media appearances (fronting up to the National Press Club at least once as Opposition Leader might have given him some much-needed practice).
While it grew increasingly clear as the campaign progressed that Labor would be returned, no-one — not even the PM himself — expected such a landslide result.
Labor won a whopping 94 seats in the House of Representatives, including Dutton’s own electorate of Dickson, in the process making him the first Australian Opposition Leader to lose his seat.
Albanese was jubilantly buoyed by the victory (he had even vanquished Greens leader Adam Bandt in Melbourne), and a noticeable self-assuredness made its return.
US tariffs on Australian imported goods, announced before the May election, kept the PM from getting too cocky, however.
The on-again, off-again meeting with Donald Trump was at times outright embarrassing for Australia as the US President’s snubs of the PM started adding up.
When it finally took place late in the year, the meeting was rightly hailed as a huge diplomatic success.
Australia had to subsequently wind back its biosecurity import restrictions on US beef imports, though.
Wind back? More like back down completely.
Australia also had to back down to Turkiye over a bid to host the COP31 climate change summit.
In a bizarre and (another) embarrassing outcome, Australia will not be president of the summit but is the president of its negotiations.
How that was negotiated at all will likely never be fully revealed because another hallmark of Albanese’s government is its secrecy.
Not only has it surpassed the Morrison Coalition government in its refusals and redactions over Freedom of Information requests, but Labor is making it considerably harder to apply for FoIs and far easier for the government not to face thorough accountability through those avenues.
On the international front overall, Albo has done generally well in 2025, pressing Australia’s case at numerous multilateral forums (including his debut at the United Nations General Assembly), echoing Gough Whitlam at the Great Wall of China, and having another audience with King Charles, to name a few.
Yetn, some new ground and some even rockier foreign affairs terrain has been traversed this year.
The government expelled the Iranian ambassador, the first time an ambassador has been kicked out of the country since World War II.
Australia officially and controversially recognised Palestinian statehood, reaping very public condemnation from Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.
And Mr Albanese and his Labor Government struggled to address the rising threat of antisemitism in Australia.
The mass-murder shootings of Jewish Australians at Bondi Beach on 14 December revealed just how far the Federal Government had its foot off the pedal in addressing antisemitic violence — and invited more outrageous remarks from Netanyahu.
The Prime Minister’s response to the horrors has been fast and firm and so far appropriate.
He is initiating the nation’s biggest gun buy-back scheme since 1996, toughening hate laws, and conducting a review of the nation’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
But he was loudly booed at the memorial gathering at Bondi Beach a week after the tragedy, and various polling results released in the aftermath of the shootings show the country isn’t too happy with him right now.
It has been a year in which Labor has had some convincing legislative wins to add to its election victory (world-leading social media bans for children and an overhaul of environmental protection laws among them).
But in a year when what is left of the Coalition is happy to keep fighting itself, in a year when criticism for wearing a rock band T-shirt seemed the worst the Opposition could throw, and in a year where Mr Albanese got married, it is ending on a deeply sombre note and weighing heavily on the Prime Minister.
