3 days ago
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Australians will head to the polls on 3 May after Anthony Albanese fired the starter’s gun on the federal election campaign.
The prime minister visited the governor general, Sam Mostyn, on Friday morning to dissolve the 47th parliament, triggering a five-week race to form the next government.
Announcing the election date back at Parliament House, Albanese said the election was “a choice between Labor’s plan to keep building or [opposition leader] Peter Dutton’s promise to cut”.
He cited Labor’s tax cuts announced in the budget, its support for Medicare and bulk-billing, and cutting student debt as the centrepieces of the party’s campaign.
Albanese said the world had “thrown a lot at Australia” over the past three years but the government had chosen to face global challenges “the Australian way - helping people under cost-of-living pressure, while building for the future” and the economy was now turning the corner.
Nodding to the shadow of Donald Trump’s administration hanging over the campaign, Albanese said the biggest risk to Australia’s economy was “not what’s happening elsewhere in the world”.
“The biggest risk to Australia’s future is 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,” he said.
Albanese is aiming to become the first prime minister since John Howard in 1998 to win a second term.
Making the case for a second term, Albanese argued “it was always going to take more than three years to clean up 10 years of mess” left by previous Coalition governments.
“The world today is an uncertain place but I am absolutely certain of this – now is not the time for cutting and wrecking, for aiming low, punching down or looking back,” Albanese said. “This is a time for building – building on our nation’s strengths, building our security and prosperity for ourselves, building an Australia where no one is held back and no one is left behind.”
Albanese passionately attacked Dutton’s plan to sack 41,000 public servants, citing the example of public servants he met in Hervey Bay helping residents affected by the Queensland floods “working out of a caravan to make sure that those Australians got the money they were entitled to and deserved”.
“They’re gone under Peter Dutton.”
Albanese denied he would be running a scare campaign against Dutton for five weeks until election day.
“What I want is a campaign about policy substance and about hope and optimism for our country. I’m optimistic about Australia. That’s one of the big distinctions in this campaign,” the prime minister said.
Labor holds 78 seats in the lower house – a two-seat majority – and Albanese is adamant the government can be returned in its own right despite most opinion polls pointing to a hung parliament.
Dutton is hoping to lead the Coalition back to power just three years after its thumping 2022 election defeat, when Scott Morrison’s government lost 19 seats, including six heartland electorates to teal independents.
The opposition leader has pitched a 12-point plan to “get Australia back on track”, which features his proposal to replace coal-fired power stations with nuclear reactors, cut immigration to free up housing and slash “wasteful” government spending – including in the public service.
In his budget reply speech on Thursday, Dutton also pledged to halve the fuel excise for 12 months and increase gas supply to reduce prices.
Dutton has also targeted Albanese’s character, painting the prime minister as “weak” on issues ranging from antisemitism to standing up to Xi Jinping.
The opposition hold 54 seats, meaning it has a mountain to climb to win a majority in the 150-seat house of representatives.
Coalition strategists believe Labor is vulnerable in a swag of outer suburban seats, in particular in Sydney and Melbourne, where households have suffered under high interest rates and soaring prices.
The opposition will need to gain ground in every state but particularly has its eyes on Victoria, where it hopes to take advantage of an unpopular state government, and the outer suburbs and regional seats in NSW. Its hopes in Western Australia, where the Liberals lost four seats in 2022 as a “red wave” swept through the west, have been dampened somewhat by a feeble showing in last month’s state election.
The Greens and teal independents are aiming to retain the seats won in 2022, putting them in the frame to act as potential kingmakers in a hung parliament.
The Greens leader, Adam Bandt, remains optimistic the party can gain ground despite a string of poor results at recent state, territory and council elections.
