Labor’s lone wolf: Anthony Albanese embarks on the fight of his life

A little over a year ago, Anthony Albanese thought he was about to die. As he drove home in his Toyota sedan on 8 January 2021, a Range Rover on the wrong side of the road ploughed straight into him. Recounting the crash this week, he says: "I thought, this is how it ends."

We know the story ended differently. The Labor leader lived, but sustained serious injuries. Recovery took time and protracted medical attention - more than he confessed to at the time.

We are starting here because some of Albanese's close colleagues say that accident picked him up and set him down in a different place. The reminder that life is short was a prompt from the universe: if you want to be prime minister, then best not to die wondering.

Back at the time of the collision, Scott Morrison was airborne on an approval rating north of 60%. With the prime minister in the ascendancy, there were harbingers of internal mischief on the Labor side. One colleague says the crash triggered more than a "life is precious" epiphany - it got the dander up. That trauma disrupted Albanese's mental cycling between fight or flight.

Some context might explain this. Albanese is from the human school of politicians. He hasn't cauterised his emotions to survive. He has normal responses to pressure, expectation and risk. Flight in this context was the Labor leader visualising the worst-case scenario: after a career spanning the best part of three decades, failing to beat Morrison, an opponent Albanese neither likes nor respects. There are easier paths in life than visualising that particular career coda in full technicolour on the back of your eyeballs at 3am.

But the car crash, and the physical and mental reset afterwards, settled things. Henceforth no flight. It would be fight. The colleague says after that accident "it became: I am going to show all of you people." This small inflection, the sprinkle of grit in the anecdote, the sense of bugger all of you, I'm going for it, feels truer to me. Less authorised history, or pre-campaign myth making.

As we drive between Moruya and Mogo on the south coast of New South Wales this week, I pursue Albanese's own account of the impact of the accident.