Albanese and Taylor have both missed a chance to score points

Anthony Albanese was foolish enough to do it, Angus Taylor was dumb enough to pursue it, and Australia is missing the larger point.

Melons. It’s a teachable moment.

Albanese first. He is usually so careful to be prime ministerial, with the occasional well-rehearsed manifestation as DJ Albo. He makes a virtue of his careful and methodical approach to government. He prizes stability. He reminds his caucus regularly of his ambition to lead a “long-term Labor government”.

And he almost got away with his melons offence. The initial wave of outrage passed after he apologised for another element of the same episode of the proudly moronic Bush Deep podcast. He issued his unreserved apology for saying that he’d like to “shag” and marry Kylie Minogue in the event that his marriage failed. That was five weeks ago.

The obvious lesson is that he should not have demeaned his wife, his marriage and women generally. But should he have agreed to take part in the podcast at all? The clue is in the Bush Deep podcast’s self-promotion – that it “asks the questions no one else would dare”. If it asks the questions no one else would dare, should the prime minister supply the answers that no other prime minister would dare?

He’s justified it by saying he needs to communicate with a wide range of audiences. But, even on this excuse, it fails. Despite weeks of political scrutiny and public debate, the podcast had been viewed on YouTube by 84,000 people by Friday afternoon, hardly a big hit.

So how did “melons” come to dominate Australian politics more than a month later? In the podcast, the host asks Albanese to name the “most crap” gift he’d been given on an overseas visit. He nominated a “pretty strange” gift, a melon from the prime minister of Japan. The crown melon is a customary Japanese gift, prized for its perfection. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi was celebrating the fact that the melon had been permitted to enter the Australian market just this year.

The host, a comedian, then outsmarted Albanese by inviting him into innuendo, an invitation he foolishly seized. But it was stale material and needed a new angle to make it fresh news and politically potent. Specifically, it took three elements to align.

First, the set-up. A Murdoch title, The Australian, craftily arranged an incendiary opinion piece by a retired Japanese diplomat, Shingo Yamagami, who’s now a hypernationalist YouTube star. Yamagami wrote that Albanese had “casually mocked” Takaichi, Japan’s first female prime minister, with the “insulting joke of likening the carefully chosen gift of two melons to a woman’s chest”. And, of course, Albanese is guilty as charged. It was fleeting, but his leer was unmistakable as he emphasised two melons with an invisible-bra hand gesture. The newspaper published Yamagami’s piece, amplified by a prominent news story, on the eve of the resumption of parliament for maximum impact. That supplied the outrage.

The second essential element was that the opposition had to co-operate with this effort. Sure enough, it took the bait. The Coalition went into question time and one of its minions demanded that Albanese apologise. But prime ministerial vanity was engaged.

When Albanese refused, the third element was in place. The story was up and running.

Of course, the wise course would have been for the prime minister to take 20 seconds to say that his slight on Takaichi was not intended to offend and to apologise for any hurt. The story would have died in that moment. Just as the “shagging” of Kylie Minogue had died five weeks earlier.

Excited by the traction that the story was getting, the next day Angus Taylor himself proceeded to demand that Albanese “man up” and apologise. Albanese had dug in, and Taylor kept demanding, so the story ran on until the end of the week.

It was a loss for both men. For Albanese, the problem was not that it damaged relations with Japan or with Takaichi. It certainly didn’t help, but it did no real harm, as Japan’s current ambassador, Kazuhiro Suzuki, made plain in a public statement affirming the “personal trust relationship between the two leaders”.

Rather, Albanese’s venture into lewdness dismayed many Australian women. And even some men. Families trying to raise boys to be respectful of girls in the age of the manosphere are struggling. A prime minister who reduces a female prime minister to being the butt of a puerile boob joke is no role model.

And does anybody believe his insistence that he was actually being respectful? Of course not.

A lesser problem for Albanese is that the noise drowned out news of the government’s work this week. The government wanted to showcase its work against domestic violence, against bird flu, against gambling ads. It wants attention on its progress on making US tech firms pay for Australian journalism, on higher wages for workers in aged care, on the two new treaties signed with Fiji.

Instead, Australia mostly heard about melons.

For Taylor, it was worse. Because Albanese is secure in his post. Taylor is not. He is on a deadline to prove himself.

Ever since Pauline Hanson began her polling upsurge in September, the Liberal Party has behaved like a bunch of kindergarteners who’ve found a brown snake in the playground. It’s all they can talk about.

Believe it or not, the opposition leader actually has tabled a couple of strong, positive ideas that could be the makings of a comeback. Taylor announced two prospective policies that have been overlooked ever since he presented them.

The two policies? One is Taylor’s plan to match immigration intake with the number of new dwellings built. So Australia admits only as many immigrants as it can house. This is practical. And entirely consistent with a non-discriminatory immigration policy.

The other is his promise to index income tax brackets to inflation. In other words, you don’t get pushed up into a higher tax bracket by stealth, just because your wages are keeping up with inflation. The Liberals call it a “permanent tax cut”, which isn’t a bad way to present it. They can and should do better to push it. It’s a bold promise that would impose real spending discipline on a Coalition government. It’s a strong contrast to Labor and it could be the backbone of a serious campaign.

The Liberals should be promoting these big ideas, as John Howard advised this week: “The way to deal with the One Nation challenge is for the Liberal and National parties to be the best demonstration of themselves,” he told my colleague, Paul Sakkal.

Instead, Taylor and his colleagues gave us melons. Cheap politics with a cheap return. And another wasted week for an opposition leader quickly running out of weeks.

So much for Albanese and Taylor. And the larger point that Australia has missed amid the melon mania?

With America increasingly erratic and China increasingly expansionist, Japan is increasingly vital in Australia’s urgent enterprise to stand on its own feet for the first time.

Japan already is one of Australia’s two or three most important allies. Economically and strategically. The Albanese government gets credit for its energetic diplomacy in general, broadly in the Indo-Pacific and specifically with Japan.

It will be to Albanese’s chagrin that any mention of his government’s solid work with Japan can now be undercut with a snide line about melons, a line as cheap as his own.

The week before Albanese’s Bush Deep routine, a parliamentary inquiry delivered a troubling report on the death of Australian skills and knowledge for dealing with its own surrounds, sometimes called Asia literacy.

“While Australian statecraft in Asia has never been more active than it is today, the pipeline building the capability that enables it is in crisis,” reported a committee chaired by Labor’s Tim Watts. For instance, it found that fewer uni students are studying Indonesian today than in the time of Bob Menzies’ prime ministership.

The report calls for federal government leadership to build Asia expertise. Irony, Albanese is thy name.

At the same time, Chris Kenny of News24 in a forthcoming documentary asks Pauline Hanson to name the leaders of Indonesia and Japan. She could name neither. Yet further demonstration that she’s unfit for high office.

And just now, Albanese is in no position to criticise. His only consolation is that no one seems to have got to the end of the inane podcast where he declares, without any apparent prompt: “We should just take over New Zealand.”

Peter Hartcher is political and international editor for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. His world column appears on Tuesdays.

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