Early this morning, even before dawn broke, Australia’s Labor party prime minister, Anthony Albanese, asked the country’s governor-general to call a general election for Saturday 3 May. Albanese’s short drive to Government House in Canberra capped a week when his government brought down a budget, in response to which Liberal opposition leader Peter Dutton set out his stall as prime minister in waiting. Effectively, both leaders gave their critiques of each other, and outlined their policy manifestos.
It’s only day one, but the signs so far are it will be a bare-knuckle, five-week election campaign
This will be one of the closest and most unpredictable elections for years. All indications are that the likely result on 3 May will be three years of chaos and instability at a time when Australia’s economy is sputtering, and the international and regional environment is increasingly dangerous and unpredictable, with Xi Jinping’s China on the march and the Trump administration putting the reliability of the bedrock US alliance into doubt. As in Britain, the United States and Canada, cost-of-living issues are uppermost in voters’ minds, but unlike our Anglosphere friends, inflation, energy prices and interest rates are stubbornly higher. This is despite Albanese’s promises three years ago that all would fall.
Australia’s three-year electoral terms are absurdly brief. As soon as the dust has settled from one election, government and opposition start campaigning for the next. Furthermore, short terms breed short-termism. Both Albanese and Dutton are resorting to power bill subsidies, and temporary tax and petrol excise relief, as centrepiece policies. Dutton is proposing lower energy prices by reserving greater proportions of Australia’s abundant natural gas – more profitable to export than sell locally – for the Australian market.
Both parties are playing policy ‘me too’, especially adopting each other’s huge-cost pledges on taxpayer-funded free GP visits, wider healthcare and hospitals. That this week’s budget reveals a decade of annual deficits in the tens of billions of Australian dollars, with public indebtedness soon to top A$1 trillion (£485 billion), matters not a jot when it comes to winning votes and seats.
The leaders’ pitches are simple and populist. Dutton adapts Ronald Reagan’s famous question, asking ‘are you better off than you were three years ago?’. He knows that his polling says the overwhelming answer is ‘No’, and is pledging to ‘put Australia back on track’. Having squandered half his term campaigning for a divisive Aboriginal voice to parliament overwhelmingly rejected by voters in a 2023 referendum, Albanese said:
Australia is turning the corner…The biggest risk to all this is not what’s happening elsewhere in the world. The biggest risk is Australia simply going back to the failures of the past. The tax increases and cuts to services that Peter Dutton and the Liberal party want to lock in.
Defending his mediocre governing record, Albanese is not averse to ad hominem attacks on his opponent.
Then there is the baleful influence of the Orange Man in Washington. The Trump tariffs, and the idiosyncratic and unpredictable behaviour of his administration – highlighted this week by the Signal group chat fiasco – repulse many Australians. Unsurprisingly, Labor and the left generally almost desperately try to paint Dutton as a ‘Temu Trump’: a cheap rip-off of the US president.
Unlike Donald Trump, however, Dutton’s an orthodox economic liberal and mainstream social conservative. While he has expressed admiration of some of Trump’s anti-woke domestic agenda, he has distanced himself from the administration’s tariff attacks, chaotic governance, and America-first foreign policy. But neither is he keen to sign up to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s coalition of the willing to keep a future peace in Ukraine.
In the end, what matters most is a majority of the 151 seats in the lower house of Australia’s parliament. This will be determined by Australia’s single transferable vote electoral system, with voters choosing constituency candidates in order of preference. Decades ago, most voters opted either for Labor or the Liberal-National party conservative coalition. These days, however, more than a quarter of voters have rejected the major parties in favour of fringe parties of the left and right, and independents. The result is sizable cross-benches in both houses of parliament, while redistributed preferences from unsuccessful candidates can determine which major party wins any given seat – and government.
Albanese goes into this election with a wafer-thin majority of two seats. Opinion polls indicate that, when candidate preferences are distributed, Australia will have a hung parliament with Albanese and Dutton short of an absolute majority. This will make the likely polyglot cross-bench kingmakers. As the campaign begins, Labor is most likely to form a minority government, but only with the support of the radical Australian Greens party and a clutch of ‘Teal’ climate-minded independent MPs who snatched affluent heartland seats from the Liberals in 2022.
The prospect of, particularly, the far-left Greens holding sway over a minority Labor government is terrifying: on climate, renewables and net zero, their fanaticism makes the likes of Ed Miliband or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seem moderate. They’re economic Marxists, extreme on identity politics, and their leader refuses to be photographed with the Australian flag. Their embrace of the Palestinian and Hamas causes has verged on naked anti-Semitism. One of their senators, Pakistani-born Mehreen Faruqi, even tweeted her satisfaction at the death of the late Queen Elizabeth ‘as the leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonised peoples’. Since the 7 October atrocities, she has been a fiery anti-Israel rabble-rouser who claims racism whenever challenged.
Whichever side campaigns best, and makes the fewest mistakes will win government in majority or minority. Opinion polls indicate more than half of the electorate don’t think the Albanese government deserves to be re-elected. Yet those same polls make clear that the Dutton opposition has not yet convinced Australians that, after only three years in opposition, they’re ready to return to the Treasury benches.
It’s only day one, but the signs so far are it will be a bare-knuckle, five-week election campaign. Both sides are expected to lavish unfunded handouts on voters while ignoring the crying need for fiscal discipline and overdue structural reform of Australia’s economy to keep it fit for purpose in a dangerously uncertain world. But, for Australia’s sake, voters need to return a majority government of either persuasion. Given who would hold the balance of power, the hung parliament alternative is a disastrous nightmare for the so-called Lucky Country.
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