With only two weeks to go until the super Saturday byelections, Anthony Albanese’s flirtation with the right wing of the Labor party has blossomed into a full-on courtship. The shadow frontbencher’s capitulation this week on turnbacks for asylum seeker boats suggests the leftwinger is determined to prove to Labor’s rightwingers that he’s leadership material.

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Until his turnback turnaround, Albanese’s regular forays into the media could have been dismissed as the high-profile shadow minister just doing his job. Albanese has never been one to hide his light under a bushel, as any journalist can confirm. His office sends out several press releases and transcripts each day. He regularly appears on breakfast television and his dance card seems packed with speaking engagements.

In one respect, that is all part of the job for an alternate minister of the Crown. But the problem, at least for Labor leader Bill Shorten, is not the frequency of Albanese’s utterances or even his high profile – the problem is what Albo has recently been saying.

Just a few weeks ago in a high-profile speech, Albanese delivered what was essentially an alternative manifesto for the opposition. In that speech he emphasised the importance of Labor having a positive and productive relationship with the business community, even going so far to suggest this could include bipartisan support for pro-business policies.

Labor’s right factions will do whatever is necessary to maximise the party’s chances at the next federal election

A week later, the medium-sized business sector was up in arms about Shorten’s (short-lived) decision to scrap their tax cuts.

We’re not privy to what took place during the shadow cabinet meeting that overturned Shorten’s captain’s call, but it would be fair to say that Albo’s entreaty must have had some weight, given it was decided that businesses should keep the tax cuts that have already been implemented. It’s also no coincidence that rightwing sources had been anonymously sharing their concerns with the media about the increasingly anti-business tone of Shorten’s economic agenda.

However, if Albo was indeed trying to remake himself to better fit the priorities of Labor’s right wing, his long-standing opposition to boat turnbacks would have presented a huge stumbling block.

Albanese set about rectifying that problem this week, appearing on one of the Sky News evening programs to concede that Labor had been mistaken to dismiss the “pull” factors that encouraged refugees to attempt to reach Australia by boat. He also acknowledged that Coalition policies such as turnbacks had “stopped the boats” and rejected the need to put time limits on offshore detention.

He did however argue that Labor would have a more “humanitarian” approach to managing boat-borne asylum seekers, but this would not include allowing them to resettle in Australia.

This is significant because Albanese led the leftwing charge at Labor’s last national conference in 2015 to make it official ALP policy to oppose boat turnbacks. He voted proudly for the motion – which failed – in front of TV cameras, while other high-ranking leftwing MPs voted by proxy instead. At the time, Albanese said he couldn’t ask someone else to do something that he couldn’t see himself doing. “If people were in a boat including families and children, I myself couldn’t turn that around,” he said in an interview.

Behind the scenes at the national conference, the rightwing factions teamed with elements of the left to defeat the motion. Not at all coincidentally, it was rightwing factions working with elements of the left that prevented Albanese from becoming Labor leader in the first place.

Labor supporters, still bearing scars from the battles of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years, get understandably exasperated when the media suggests Shorten’s leadership may be under a cloud, or that Albanese might be trying to subtly position himself as an alternate leader.

However that frustration cannot erase the facts. Labor’s right factions will do whatever is necessary to maximise the party’s chances at the next federal election. As a senior member of the right, Shorten himself helped to tear down both Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard when it was deemed necessary.

And even though Rudd imposed new caucus rules to make it harder for any such elimination to happen in the future, these rules can simply be changed again by a majority vote of the caucus.

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According to reports, the NSW right had begun to consider Albanese as an alternative to Shorten only six months after the last federal election. But then Turnbull self-imploded on tax reform and Shorten lived to fight another day.

Albanese is hoping for a similar reprieve, which could arise if Labor does badly on super Saturday. By dropping his opposition to boat turnbacks, Albo has signalled to the kingmakers in the NSW right that he’s ready and willing for the top job.

However, the true believers on Labor’s left might now think otherwise.

• Paula Matthewson was media adviser to John Howard in the early 1990s. She is a freelance writer and communication strategist