Anthony Albanese’s Freudian slip while playing a word association game at a Naarm event, sponsored by the Herald Sun, sums up exactly who he is: White, misogynist and a loyal United States ally.
When asked to describe Australia Day, Grace Tame and Donald Trump with one word each, Albanese used one positive adjective, one negative adjective and one neutral noun: “Great” for Australia Day; “Difficult” for Tame; and “President” for Trump.
Why did he choose adjectives for two responses and a noun for the third?
An adjective, as we all learnt in primary school, names an attribute of a noun. An attribute ascribes a quality, or feature, as characteristic of a person, place or thing. Adjectives judge. They qualify. They reveal perspective.
So why did Albanese choose a positive adjective “Great” for Australia Day? Simple. Because he is aligned with colonial thinking and is comfortable as a White settler on stolen land.
“Great” is not neutral. It’s not reflective. It’s celebratory. And celebration, in this context, signals allegiance with the invasion of these sovereign Indigenous lands and the genocide of its people here on Gadigal Country/Sydney.
Why did he choose a negative adjective “difficult” for Tame? Because powerful men routinely brand outspoken women as “difficult” when they refuse to comply.
“Difficult” is the oldest misogynistic shorthand in the book.
Tame cannot be tamed and so the PM framed her as a problem to be managed, rather than a voice to be respected.
And why did he choose a noun for Trump? Because “President” is framed as factual, objective and stripped of judgment. By retreating to a title rather than an adjective, Albanese avoids having to give a moral assessment. He chooses institutional deference over ethical clarity.
Trump is not just a “President”. He is a deeply harmful politician with a record that demands scrutiny. According to CBC News, his name appears more than 1500 times in the Epstein files.
He is a friend of Israel and is funding genocide. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced last March that Washington would send $4 billion in “emergency military assistance to Israel”. Scholars and scientists said last September that Israel had targeted and killed approximately 680,000 Palestinians of whom 380,000 are children under five years old in under two years.
Democracy Now has reported that since last September, the Trump administration had “killed at least 148 people in its widely condemned military strikes on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific”, while accusing the people on these boats of being “narcoterrorists”.
His government has invaded and bombed the sovereign nation of Venezuela and kidnapped its elected president, Nicolás Maduro and its First Lady.
Trump has continued to choke Cuba with an economic embargo, while adding a 15% tariff on goods from countries that provide oil to Cuba and accusing it of being a state sponsor of terrorism.
Last year ICE killed 32 people under Trump’s watchful eyes. His government bombed Nigeria. He has threatened Colombia, Iran, Panama and Greenland and yet Albanese declines to attribute an adjective. Not “dangerous”, or “divisive”, or “reckless”. Just the office. The role. The status.
But he has adjectives for a day that should be a day of mourning and adjectives for a woman who speaks truth to power.
That is not accidental. That is instinct and instinct reveals alignment.
[This piece was first published on Natalia Figueroa Barroso’s substack here. She is the author of Hailstones Fell without Rain (UQP, 2025).]