As the second week of the election campaign wraps up, PM Anthony Albanese has taken a literal tumble, while Peter Dutton has literally rolled up his sleeves. Each side is pushing their preferred message in the campaign: Labor on Medicare, the coalition on energy and cost-of-living.
Guess which is really dominating Australians’ minds, right now?
Instead of being sucked into talking about United States’ tariffs and the fate of the Western World Dutton is talking about Australian energy costs and the fate of Western Sydney […]
At the end of the first week of campaigning in election 2025 the Opposition Leader has pulled attention back to his budget promise to halve petrol excise immediately and give families immediate relief not a $5 cup of coffee tax cut in the second half of next year.
The coalition is also campaigning on not just cutting energy bills now, with a gas policy designed to keep more of Australia’s natural gas for the domestic market, but to shore up our energy infrastructure in the future by embracing nuclear.
Peter Dutton says his gas policy will [cut] 15 per cent off their energy bills, in the first clue of long-awaited Coalition modelling.
“We’ll bring down the price of gas by 15 per cent,” he said.
“By ramping up domestic gas production, the Coalition will ensure that Australian gas is for Australians, and it will see prices start to drop by the end of this year.
“If (our policy) was in place as of February this year, I can announce today that gas prices would have been 15 per cent cheaper.”
Mr Dutton said the cost of living crisis was one of Labor’s “own making” and has warned energy bills and other costs will only keep rising.
Instead of pushing up inflation and thereby pressure on interest rates with big government-spending ‘cost of living relief’, the coalition wants to lower energy prices at the source. The question for voters is which they prefer: dropping energy prices by making gas more available, or making bills slightly less expensive by spending more of their tax money?
The Opposition Leader has vowed to decrease wholesale gas prices to less than $10 a gigajoule from $14GJ currently, representing a 29 per cent fall.
However, the Coalition on Friday updated that calculation and said the overall chop for big manufacturers would be 15 per cent, based on its new policy, after taking into account processing and delivery costs.
Frontier Economics, which has conducted as yet unreleased modelling for the Coalition on the gas forecasts, offered its first public comments on the blueprint as pressure grows on Mr Dutton to release the full set of assumptions.
“The decoupling arrangement that Peter Dutton announced as part of his budget in reply ensures that gas buyers pay no more than the price that would prevail in a competitive market – known as the long run marginal cost of gas – which includes a commercial rate of return for gas producers,” Frontier Economics managing director Danny Price said in a statement.
“Based on current estimates this will incentivise supply to the domestic market of between $9-$10/GJ for new sales of gas, which is about 30 per cent lower than current wholesale prices prevailing in the market.”
Further cementing this as an energy election, Energy Minister Chris Bowen and opposition spokesman Ted O’Brien will face off at the National Press Club next week. Any debate with Boofhead Bowen promises to at least be a clown show spectacle.
Meanwhile, Anthony Albanese took a literal tumble yesterday, falling down the stairs at the back of the stage of a union campaign event. Aside from comedy value, Albanese’s tumble risks being symbolic of Labor’s campaign performance at every election for the last two decades: starting strong out of the gate, and steadily plummeting in the polls over the course of the rest of the campaign.
Getting wedged on issues he’d clearly rather avoid isn’t going to help Labor’s campaign.
Anthony Albanese has defended his government’s record on migration, arguing numbers were down by 31 per cent over the past year.
Which means that they’re at record high levels. This is the same gambit the Democrats tried on, in last year’s elections: claiming that illegal immigration had dropped from the year before – but it was still at staggeringly high, unprecedented levels. Which is the immigration equivalent of binging on Maccas, but having a Diet Coke to wash it down.
