ALBANESE’S BETRAYAL: PM Promised Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus His Job Was Safe Before Election – Only to Abandon Him to Brutal Factional Knifing by His Own Deputy
- Explosive new book reveals Anthony Albanese’s secret pledge to Mark Dreyfus was callously abandoned after the election
- Deputy PM Richard Marles accused of orchestrating the brutal knifing to elevate his allies and consolidate power
- MPs warn Marles will never succeed Albanese as PM due to his ruthless tactics and lack of support from key factions
- Dreyfus’s sacking came just months after his wife’s death from cancer, leaving him “euphoric” after the election and then devastated by the betrayal
In a shocking betrayal, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has been accused of abandoning his Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus to a brutal factional knifing by his own deputy, Richard Marles. A new book, Earthquake, by veteran journalist Niki Savva, reveals the PM made a secret promise to Dreyfus that he would retain his job after the election, only to fail to intervene when Marles launched a ruthless power play to elevate his allies.
The book claims that Marles, who has long harbored ambitions to succeed Albanese as PM, orchestrated the sacking of Dreyfus to make way for his numbers man, Sam Rae, and to curry favor with the Left. The move has left Dreyfus, who lost his wife of 44 years to cancer just months earlier, “devastated” and feeling “betrayed” by the PM’s failure to honor his promise.
MPs have warned that Marles’s ruthless tactics will ultimately prove his downfall, with many predicting he will never succeed Albanese as PM. “The fact that the deputy prime minister had embarked on such a cold-blooded exercise to satisfy the ambition of a backbencher, and that the prime minister had not stopped it, also sent a chilling message to other ministers about their value to the government and about the security of their tenure,” the book states.
In a dramatic showdown, Marles called Dreyfus on the night of May 7 to inform him he no longer had the support of the faction and would be punted from cabinet. Dreyfus, who had been euphoric after the election, was left reeling by the news and was later met with a “mild expression of regret” from Albanese when he flew to Canberra to plead his case.
“Dreyfus has left wounds that will never heal,” Savva writes. “The New South Wales Right appears united in its condemnation of and contempt for what Marles did. They spit on him for his impatience and for ignoring their pleas to wait for natural attrition.”
As the fallout from the book continues to reverberate, one thing is clear: the factional infighting that has long plagued the Labor Party has reached new heights of ruthlessness and betrayal. With Albanese’s leadership under scrutiny and Marles’s ambitions in tatters, the question on everyone’s lips is: what’s next for the embattled PM and his deputy?