Australians Go to the Polls

So, here we are at last: the 2025 Australian election campaign is over. It’s both the worst campaign in living memory and one of the hardest to pick. Sure, if the polls are to believed, Labor is a shoo in to be returned. But then, Bill Shorten couldn’t lose in 2019, Hillary Clinton couldn’t lose in 2016 and “Dewey Defeats Truman”.

The coalition claim their internal polling tells a different story. Anthony Albanese is all-but swaggering on the hustings. But then, this bloke is the classic case of whatever he says, the opposite is true. Anthony Albanese has declared that he won’t need to do deals with the Greens, which should be taken as a sure sign that the minority government agreement is already drawn up and it’ll give the Greens every loonie demand a party of radical Marxist anti-Semites can dream up.

However the election goes, Australians will need a miracle to steer us through what promise to be a perilous few years to come. The storm clouds of not just global war, but economic collapse loom large – and we have endured an election campaign where neither side has had the guts to talk the big issues, only promise more handouts than the other guy.

Worse, we have a PM who has about as much economic nous as a meth head with two dollars and a scratchie ticket. Faced with the very real prospect of the country copping a credit downgrade, Albanese’s only response was to attack the ratings agency. Because that always goes down well.

The consequences of a ratings downgrade for a country are significant and damaging, increasing the burden of interest payments on existing debt as well as on any new debt issued.

In Australia’s case, a ratings downgrade would almost inevitably lead to a ratings downgrade for several states, including Victoria, Queensland and Tasmania. Given that it is not possible for a sub-government to have a higher credit rating than the nation, this could also affect Western Australia. The big banks would also have their credit ratings downgraded.

The net effect – and this is the big story – is that interest rates would be higher for longer for governments, businesses and households if Australia’s credit rating was downgraded […]

Read my lips, Anthony Albanese, the ratings agencies don’t give a toss about fanciful forecasts made long ago. What they look at is the hard figures. The fact is that government spending under Labor has gone from $627bn in 2022–23, or 24.4 per cent of GDP, to $777bn this coming financial year, or 27 per cent of GDP.

Even Treasury boffins, who are not only trapped in the Canberra bubble but too often little more than a rubber-stamp for government policy, are telling us that Albo is talking through his arse on major policy. Especially on housing, where Albo’s promised bigger, and with less regard for reality, than Jacinda Ardern with Kiwibuild. One hundred thousand homes? Those are rookie numbers, burbles Albo: a million homes!

Tui: Yeah, right.

Treasury officials working to solve the nation’s housing crisis warned the Albanese government that it could not meet its commitment of supplying 1.2m homes by 2029, proposing that major infrastructure projects might be placed on hold in order for workers to be diverted to the task of home building […]

“The window of government intervention to address these constraints is short,” the document says. “Reaching 1.2m homes target would require a significant ramp up in housing construction activity, well above historic levels.”

Which is dry public servant-speak for, Tell ’im ’e’s dreamin’.

Even Labor know they’re talking shit.

A spokesman for Treasurer Jim Chalmers said these were always “ambitious targets”.

Translation: we pulled them out of our arses.

In the meantime, coalition supporters are wondering where this [Peter Dutton] has been, for the last month.

Coalition costings released ahead of Saturday’s election ­revealed opposition Treasury spokesman Angus Taylor had swung the axe across the Prime Minister’s marquee net-zero, ­electric vehicle and green hydrogen funding programs […]

Mr Dutton’s commitment to tear down Labor’s climate change agenda came as Spain and Portugal – which rely heavily on solar power – were this week hit with massive blackouts and former British prime minister Tony Blair warned net-zero policies that phased out coal and gas in the short term were “doomed to fail”.

Newsflash for the geniuses running the coalition campaign: policy guts like this is exactly how Tony Abbott wiped the floor with Kevin Rudd in 2013.

Maybe try it some time.

So, you’re wanting an election prediction from me? You won’t get one. Not only do I have an innate aversion to make election predictions, but I genuinely have no idea which way this will fall. It may go exactly as the polls are saying or it may pull out a stunning surprise, one way or the other.

Either way, we’re gonna need a lot of luck.