Albo Politely Declines Staffer's Suggestion He Do A "What Were You Like In The 90s" Video

ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has today gently declined a pitch from a 25-year-old social media adviser who suggested he join the viral "what were you like in the 90s" trend currently doing numbers on TikTok.

The staffer, armed with a mood board and a folder of oral history she'd compiled from Hansard, old Herald clippings and three conversations with Laurie Brereton's former secretary, was adamant the PM had "done heaps of cool shit".

"You were at the NAB in Earlwood that day Darcy [Byrne] and the other Balmain boys tried to stick it up. You talked them down. That's content."

"You told Marrickville Council chambers, on the record, that Jenny Leong was the one pouring Roundup on the 10th green at Marrickville Golf Club. That you saw her one night but you weren't wearing your glasses. That's funny. You wrote a letter to the Glebe demanding the Cooks River stop being treated as the colon of the Inner West. You were banned from the Sando for a calendar month. People would love this."

What the staffer did not realise was that the soundtrack would have to be Radio Birdman. And that this alone would end careers.

Because the spiritual calisthenics required to become a federal Labor Prime Minister demand that a man be flensed of all personal content and rendered into pure connective tissue between the likes of Richard Marles, a private-school boy who encountered the proletariat during his second postgraduate degree, and the latent, flickering socialism of Penny Wong and Tanya Plibersek, who both still probably own an illegal firearm of some description.

You cannot be that load-bearing wall and post a photo of yourself on the hill at Henson Oval in 1994 holding a Kalashnikov.

"He went very quiet," the staffer later told our reporter.

"He said 'mate' about four times. He told me to go pitch it to Darcy Byrne."

More to come.