Peter Dutton held a Brisbane press conference before quietly heading to Sydney. (ABC News)
Welcome back to your weekly federal politics update, where Brett Worthington gets you up to speed on the happenings from Parliament House.
Natural disasters have a great way of ruining a politician's plans.
Just ask Scott Morrison how holidaying in Hawaii while Australia burned turned out in 2019.
Doubling down and insisting that he didn't hold a hose dug a hole that Morrison was never able to get out of.
Failing to adequately respond to a disaster can be deadly for political leaders.
Even just the prospect of acting in a partisan way during these moments can irk voters, as Opposition Leader Peter Dutton astutely observed earlier this week.
Anthony Albanese has been eager to portray a sense of preparedness ahead of Cyclone Alfred's landfall. (ABC News: Ian Cutmore)
With Cyclone Alfred readying a path not just for the mainland but Dutton's own Queensland electorate, now was not the time for an election, he argued.
"I think the prime minister would have a tin ear to do that," he told Radio 4BC on Wednesday morning.
"People probably want from their prime minister governing not campaigning, at a time like this."
The curious part of Dutton's assessment is that the evening before he was nowhere near his electorate.
Rather, as was first revealed by the Australian Financial Review, Dutton was the featured guest of businessman Justin Hemmes for a political fundraiser inside his Sydney harbourside mansion.
Justin Hemmes' historic mansion, The Hermitage, overlooks Sydney Harbour. (Wikipedia: Sardaka)
Dutton had started his day in Queensland, where he held a morning press conference outside the state's emergency management centre after a briefing from the premier and police.
He then headed to Sydney for a community event and later to the hospitality king's historic mansion for the fundraiser.
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By Wednesday, he was back in Queensland and pre-recorded an interview with Sky News from his home north of Brisbane.
The ABC has confirmed Dutton was due at a lunch event in Melbourne on Thursday but cancelled his attendance.
Guardian Australia on Thursday also revealed Dutton was due at a fundraiser at the Melbourne headquarters of Macquarie Bank on Wednesday night but it was cancelled at the last minute without explanation.
Questions from ABC News to Dutton's office remained unanswered at the time of publication.
When asked about Dutton's fundraiser attendance, fellow Queenslander Jim Chalmers said it would be "disappointing".
The treasurer told 4BC he was reluctant to "weigh into it enthusiastically" because "now's not the time for politics".
"I assure all your listeners and I assure you that our focus has been on the disaster," he said.
"I hope his has been as well, because we all need all shoulders to the wheel."
Alfred giveth, Alfred taketh away
Albanese's plans for this week have been thrown into chaos as two states brace for Alfred making landfall.
Gone are his plans to head west for the WA state election.
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Having watched Labor governments fall in Queensland and the Northern Territory, Albanese had hoped to turn what's expected to be an ALP victory in WA into the launch pad for an April 12 election.
To have the poll on that day, it must be called by no later than this Monday.
For a while there, it was looking like the PM's biggest concern was how much sleep he managed to achieve on a red eye flight back to Canberra before holding the most important press conference of his political life.
Instead, Albanese is back in Canberra, vowing to hold daily briefings on Cyclone Alfred from the national situation room.
That weather system will determine what the PM does next, but he's yet to rule out calling an election in the coming days.
"I'm focused not on votes, I'm focused on lives, I'm focused on Australians," he told Sky News.
Whatever happens with Alfred, we will know by Monday when the election will be.
If the PM hasn't called it, it guarantees voters will go to the polls at one of three options in early May.
PM eager to appear across his brief
The government has been at pains to convey an air of command.
The prime minister hasn't missed the chance to appear alongside the Queensland and NSW premiers, or to mention the private contact he'd been having with both leaders.
There's a sense within the government that federal agencies can have whatever resources they need.
There's a desperation for this to go as well as it can. So much so you could imagine a bevvy of staffers standing on the coast blowing as hard as they can to turn Alfred away.
Labor knows that it has a higher bar to meet than that of Morrison after the Black Summer bushfires and 2022 pre-election Northern Rivers floods.
In opposition, Labor vowed it would be better and now it's tasked with meeting the standard it set.
The military has been deployed, sandbags have been delivered and government payments made available. For the most part, it's done almost as much as it can.
Overdue disaster alert system
Photo shows Anthony Albanese walks outside the Queensland disaster co-ordination centre
It hasn't been without headaches though, with the government conceding its promised text alert system is well overdue and not yet operational.
Communications Minister Michelle Rowland had pledged it would be ready by the end of last year.
Also nowhere in sight was a promised overhaul to communications between agencies and states, which a royal commission into natural disasters said was desperately needed.
Short-term memories on show
Before Alfred spun onto the national radar, the major parties were busily flogging their wares.
Shadow Finance Minister Jane Hume cited a Stanford paper as she pledged a Coalition government would scrap work from home in the public service.
Awkwardly, the paper she cited found hybrid working had benefits over fully in-person working.
Hume also sought to highlight a (now former) public servant spending $20,000 on a desk (that's now in storage) as proof for why public service staffing needs to be cut.
Seemingly forgotten was the desk was commissioned when the Coalition was last in power.
The PM too wasn't without a level of his own political contortions this week.
Attending Sydney's Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, he told the ABC that queer people deserve to feel safe in the community.
This from a man who still hasn't apologised for making a pronoun joke in the federal parliament that left no one on Labor's benches laughing last year.
Before joining the parade, Albanese visited a pub for his first beer of the year, announcing a cost of living policy to pause the biannual indexing of a beer tax.
While touted as a "win for beer drinkers, brewers and hospitality businesses", the less than a cent discount on the cost of a mid-strength pint might not be much of a deciding factor in an election campaign to be held in the wake of a natural disaster.
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