Anthony Albanese has spent the past two years telling Australians that violence against women is a national crisis, one he has personally pledged to help end within a generation.
So, it was strange to watch the same Prime Minister sit on a couch at The Lodge and agree to play “shag, marry, date” on comedian Nikki Osborne’s Bush Deep podcast with Kylie Minogue, Nicole Kidman and Rhonda Burchmore, presented as the options.
Pressed by Osborne on what he would do if his marriage “went tits up,” Albanese landed gamely, on “all of the above” for Kylie. “She’s terrific,” he said. She is. But it’s worth sitting with the fact that the country’s most powerful elected official chose to spend a few minutes of national airtime sorting three accomplished women into boxes marked for sex, marriage and everything else. Not exactly the leadership moment his office might have hoped for.
His apology, when it came, was welcome. It was also necessary. The issue was never that the Prime Minister likes Kylie Minogue; that puts him in the company of millions of Australians, as one of his colleagues helpfully pointed out. The issue is that he agreed to play a game built entirely around sorting women into categories of male consumption: who to sleep with, who to marry, who to date. He could simply have declined.
The family violence crisis is not an abstraction. The government’s own National Plan is built around ending violence against women within a generation.
Our Watch reports that two in five women have experienced violence since the age of fifteen, and that a woman is killed by a partner or former partner roughly every nine days. In just the last few months, multiple schools have had to confront boys secretly rating and ranking their female classmates. The manosphere is moving through teenage bedrooms via algorithm, feeding boys a diet of resentment and entitlement dressed up as self-improvement. Into that climate walks a Prime Minister, a job held by a woman exactly once in our history, to play a game that ranks women by their sexual availability to him. The timing, at the very least, is unfortunate.
Some will say, fair enough, lighten up, it is a comedy podcast, we have all played that game at a sleepover. True, most of us have. But we were fifteen at the time, and none of us held the highest office in the land. That is really the point that gets lost when people leap to defend this. A game that is harmless enough between teenagers reads differently coming from the most powerful man in the country, broadcast nationally, at a moment when boys are being told, loudly and often, that women exist to be rated and ranked. Culture is built on modelling, and if leaders want better behaviour from boys and men, they have to be seen practising it themselves, not shrugging it off with a quiet statement two days later.
It is also not the first time an unscripted moment like this has tripped Albanese up. This is a man who once described Grace Tame, a sexual abuse survivor turned advocate who changed how this country talks about child sexual abuse, as “difficult” as though naming her own abuse and demanding accountability was an inconvenience rather than an act of real courage. Quick-fire games and off-the-cuff exchanges seem to keep becoming political banana peels for this Prime Minister. It’s starting to look like a pattern, and not a flattering one. What is frustrating is how easy this question could have been sidestepped. He had two perfectly good options sitting right there. He could have simply smiled and said, “I don’t deal in hypotheticals.” Problem solved. Or, if he wanted to actually lead on an issue his own government talks about often, he could have looked the host in the eye and said something like “these games and labels are degrading to women and girls, and women are so much more than the categories you’re offering me”. That would have been a Prime Minister gently challenging a tired ritual instead of joining in on it, using a light-hearted platform to say something worth hearing.
None of this makes Albanese a misogynist, and it does not erase Labor’s genuinely solid record on women’s representation — the numbers in caucus, cabinet and senior leadership are real achievements worth naming. But representation and respect are not interchangeable, and a government can promote women in record numbers while still fumbling a moment that shapes culture. If anything, the expectations are higher precisely because this government generally understands why gender equality matters.
There is a fair question, too, for a podcast and its host serving up women as options in a shag-marry-date lineup in 2026, though that is a conversation for its host as much as for the Prime Minister.
Albanese apologised unequivocally, and that was the right call. But the better outcome would have been not needing to apologise at all. Australia does not need its Prime Minister to be the cool guest at the podcast table. It needs him to read the room, model the standard his own government claims to champion, and occasionally have the good sense to just decline to play.