Anthony Albanese is confident he will still be leading the Labor party at the 2022 election, but insists it is not about being popular now.
On Thursday, Labor party elders Craig Emerson and Jay Weatherill released their long-awaited review of what turned out to be a disastrous 2019 election campaign.
It criticised the campaign for scaring voters with enormous and complex policies while lacking a strategy and failing to address then-leader Bill Shorten's unpopularity.
Asked on ABC television's Insiders program on Sunday whether the leadership of the Labor party will now be judged through the prism of unpopularity and whether he is prepared to be cast aside by his colleagues, Mr Albanese said: "I will lead Labor to the next election."
He said he has already outlined a clear strategy for the future of the party, but has yet to rule out controversial policies like ditching franking credits, which proved a concern for some pensioners, even when they didn't own shares.
"We'll make our announcement under our terms with proper processes," Mr Albanese said.
He said as the next election is not until 2022, the party will outline in an "orderly and strategic way" the policies it will and won't do in plenty of time before then.
"One of the things that we should have learnt from the last term was that elections aren't decided two years out," he said.
"We were ahead in every Newspoll, in every published poll in the two years leading up to the election, except for when it counted - on the Saturday in the polling booth."
"My task isn't to be ahead now, it's to be ahead when people go to the polling booths in 2022, or the end of 2021.
Australian Associated Press
