Labor leader Anthony Albanese playing tennis might mess with other people's heads - but it relaxes his.
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When he can, he plays for Marrickville in the Sydney Badge competition.
"Tennis is a great sport for your mental health because you have to concentrate," Mr Albanese said.
"It's a very simple game; hit a ball over a net between lines, but you have to concentrate the whole time. You can't be thinking about other things.
"Whereas if you're in a movie you can be thinking about the press conference you've got to do tomorrow, or a particular policy issue that's confronting you."
It's just that sometimes, his opponents can be a bit shocked when he arrives.
"It's quite funny when you see people make a double-take if I turn up for an away game," Mr Albanese said.
"They're like 'are you...?' And I go, 'yeah'. But around the club I'm just me."
He described himself as a man who liked a beer, liked the footy and liked music.
"I hope that one of the things I bring to the leadership is I can walk into a pub down the road and talk to people and I can walk into a boardroom as well," Mr Albanese said.
"That is something I want to be able to continue to do. And from time to time that might mean that people don't like everything that I say, that's as it is.
"I'm determined, as the leader, to enjoy the experience, to not be overwhelmed and not to be moulded into something that I'm not."
With the Labor party losing seats in the last election, Mr Albanese said the party needed to broaden its electoral appeal.
And that meant looking for support away from the party's traditional trade union base.
"We need to be much broader that just representing trade union members and I make no apologies for that," he said.
"The links with the trade union movement are very important. They give us a direct link with workplaces.
"But we can't just talk to trade union members.
"We want to get 51 per cent of the vote and 51 per cent of the population aren't in unions.
"So we need to talk to contractors, we need to talk to the self-employed, we need to be the party of small business, we need to be the party that represents students and transient workers."
Glen Humphries
I'm an award-winning senior journalist with the Illawarra Mercury and have well over two decades' worth of experience in newspapers. I cover the three local councils in the Illawarra for the Mercury, state and federal politics, as well as writing for the TV guide. If I'm not writing, I'm reading.
I'm an award-winning senior journalist with the Illawarra Mercury and have well over two decades' worth of experience in newspapers. I cover the three local councils in the Illawarra for the Mercury, state and federal politics, as well as writing for the TV guide. If I'm not writing, I'm reading.
