Australia goes to the polls today, pitting the first-term Labor government of prime minister Anthony Albanese against the Liberal-National party coalition headed by Liberal leader Peter Dutton.
As the election campaign for the federal election entered its final week, the agenda-setting Newspoll in the Australian newspaper asked voters whether Albanese’s government deserves re-election. Damningly, less than two-fifths said yes; well over half said it deserves throwing out.
It’s no wonder voters feel angry about Labor
Yet Newspoll, and all other opinion polls, have Labor on track to win today, either in a narrow majority in the 150-seat House of Representatives, or in minority supported by a left-leaning crossbench.
It’s no wonder voters feel angry about Labor. In 2022, Albanese campaigned on being a safe alternative to the decaying and disunited coalition government led by unpopular Scott Morrison. But once in office, public spending exploded, despite an already Covid-bloated balance sheet. Inflation and interest rates remained stubbornly high, fuelled by wage rises without productivity gains, and living standards fell.
This hasn’t, however, stopped the government delivering all manner of ‘free stuff’ actually paid for by taxes and borrowings. Childcare subsides; written-off student debts; lower out-of-pocket costs for prescriptions are just some examples, and more high-cost, unfunded giveaways have been promised in the election campaign.
Albanese broke a ‘never, ever’ election promise not to turn targeted, reformist changes to the tax regime into populist tax cuts for all. On energy and cost-of-living, Labor’s signature 2022 promise to lower the cost of keeping the lights on by an average A$275 (£130) per household was not only broken, but average household energy costs have risen by that and more. Adding insult to injury, the renewables and net zero fanaticism of Labor’s energy minister, Chris Bowen, makes Labour’s Ed Miliband look like the tooth fairy.
Labor improved relations with China and kept the Aukus pact with Britain and the United States, but failed on national security and defence. Embarrassingly, in February the government was only being alerted to a Chinese naval squadron’s live firing exercise just off Australia’s east coast by a commercial airline pilot. Immigration has added a million people to Australia’s 27-million population since 2022, despite strained infrastructure and housing supply in a super-tight market in which young Australians already can’t get a foothold as renters, let alone as owners.
But Labor’s defining failure was its well-meaning, but futile, campaign for a constitutional Aboriginal ‘Voice’ to parliament and government. For more than a year, Albanese’s vanity project all but totally diverted the government’s attention from day-to-day governing, and the 18-month Voice campaign was bitter and divisive. Political, media and corporate elites avidly supported the ill-defined proposal, and activists denounced the 60 per cent of voters who rejected it as un-Australian at best and racist at worst. Additionally, the Albanese government was loath to condemn and combat ugly anti-Semitism emerging after Hamas’s 7 October atrocities, largely, it appeared, for fear of upsetting Muslim voters forming sizeable minorities in key Labor constituencies.
It’s unsurprising then so many Australians think Labor doesn’t deserve re-election. Dutton’s coalition was electorally ascendant after the Voice, which it opposed, was defeated in an October 2023 referendum. All was there for Dutton to break the near-century single-term hoodoo. Instead, since February he and his Liberal-National opposition have faltered and steadily gone backwards in the polls.
Why? First, the coalition lost the campaign. For all his faults, Albanese is a cunning politician, and Labor a slick political machine. Even though they can’t stand on such a poor record, they have comprehensively out-campaigned their opponents, right down to timing the campaign to run through April, knowing the opposition would struggle to attract voters’ attention with extended long weekends for Easter and Anzac Day, and April school holidays. Labor also stayed on message – notwithstanding its messages largely being dishonest scares against the coalition, ruthlessly attacking Dutton personally and blatantly distorting his ministerial record. Dutton’s willingness to match Labor’s centrepiece splurge to fund more free GP visits, and other electorally-attractive polices, has disadvantaged the coalition as well. Why vote for a pale copy when you can get the original?
Second, changing a government means offering a viable alternative for voters to jump. Instead of going to the election with a worked-out policy manifesto, Dutton’s coalition opted for shorter-term cost-of-living relief – especially a temporary cutting of petrol excise and reserving quotas of exportable natural gas for domestic consumption – a package of housing affordability measures, and a general ‘trust us’ message. Yet an undercooked coalition backflipped and stumbled through the campaign, including a panicked dumping of its plan to end work-from-home for civil servants, which Labor mendaciously used to frighten, especially, women voters. The coalition’s campaign messages, and policy announcements, have been piecemeal and inconsistent, when it should have rammed home consistently Labor’s cost-of-living dereliction.
Thirdly, however, there’s been a third leader in this campaign: Donald Trump. Like Pierre Poilievre in Monday’s Canadian election, Dutton has discovered that failing to overcome his opponents’ successful efforts to frame him as an antipodean Trump mini-me undermines any chance of victory. Any policy, like the civil service cuts, that looked MAGA-like were branded as such by Labor and the left. Dutton himself has run a mile from Trump and especially Trump’s tariff offensive. But campaign stumbles from his team, notably a popular frontbencher declaring, in Dutton’s presence, that the coalition will ‘make Australia great again’, certainly haven’t helped. In Dutton and Poilievre, Trump may well claim two centre-right leader scalps this week – not that the Orange Man cares.
That Albanese, who once boasted of his friendship with Jeremy Corbyn, is now marketing himself as a Trump whisperer is just one incongruity in this uninspiring election campaign. It’s unlikely the Liberals will win back enough of their seats lost in 2022 to Labor, the radical left Greens party and a clutch of green-tinged independents in affluent suburbs, to have a shot at forming government. But, because Australia’s single transferable vote ‘preferential’ voting system can produce unexpected results, the outcome may be closer than opinion polls predict. It’s not quite over yet.
Terry Barnes is a Melbourne-based contributor to the Spectator and the Spectator Australia
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