Adjectives and Allegiance: What Albo’s Word Choices Reveal
Albo’s Freudian slip of the tongue 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 US ally.
When asked to describe Australia Day, Grace Tame and Donald Trump with one word each, he used one positive adjective, one negative adjective and one neutral noun: “Great” for Australia Day, “Difficult” for Grace Tame and “President” for Donald Trump.
Hmm. Why did he choose adjectives for two of his 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 he choose a positive adjective “Great” for Australia Day? Simple. Because Albo 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 in so-called Sydney Cove.
Why did he choose a negative adjective “Difficult” for Grace Tame? Again, simple. 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 — not by any man, not even the Prime Minister — and so she is framed as a problem to be managed rather than a voice to be respected.
And why did he choose a noun for Donald Trump? Because the noun he selected “President” is framed as factual, objective, stripped of judgement. By retreating to a title rather than an adjective, Albo avoids moral assessment. He chooses institutional deference over ethical clarity.
Trump is not merely a “president”. He is a deeply harmful political actor with a record that demands scrutiny. According to CBC News, his name appears more than 1,500 times in the Epstein files. He has said he is a friend of Israel, and Al Jazeera has reported that “in March US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that Washington would be sending $4bn in emergency military assistance to Israel”. That’s $4bn to Israel, a state that scholars and scientist have said has targeted and killed approximately 680000 Palestinians of whom 380000 are children under five-years-old in under two years. Trump’s government is funding genocide. Since September, Democracy Now has reported that the “Trump administration has 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” without substaintail backup. His government has invaded and bombed the sovereign nation of Venezuela and kidnapped its elected president, Nicolás Maduro and its First Lady. Trump’s Washington has continued to choke Cuba with an economic embargo and continuing to list them on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list and further pressing down on Cuba and Cubans on the island’s neck by adding a 15% tariff on goods from countries that provide oil to Cuba. The Guardian wrote that 2025 was “ICE’s deadliest year in two decades”, with 32 people killed under Trump’s watchful eyes. His government bombed Nigeria. He has threatened Colombia, Iran, Panama and, and, and. Yet Albo declines to attach any quality to him. No “dangerous”, no “divisive”, no “reckless”. Just the office. Just the role. Just the status.
Adjectives for a day that is a stain on national history, a day that should be a day of mourning. Adjectives for a woman who speaks truth to power. And a neutral noun for a US figure with too many skeletons in his closet.
That is not accidental. That is instinct. And instinct reveals alignment.