Australians will go to the polls in less than three months, probably sooner. The latest date Anthony Albanese can call a normal election (House of Representatives and half-Senate election) is May 17. But holding out to the latest date possible will only make Albanese look desperate.
Well, more desperate than he already is.
At this stage, Albanese will be lucky if he clings to minority government. The desperation in the government is showing in its phony election campaign. Both Albanese and opposition leader Peter Dutton are criss-crossing the country and trying to drum up votes.
But there’s a noticeable pattern: Dutton is blitzing Labor-held seats, clearly confident in flipping them. Albanese on the other hand is desperately trying to sandbag government seats.
Seventy-five per cent of the seats Albanese has visited in the last two months are Labor seats. By contrast, only 12 per cent of the seats visited by Dutton are already held by the coalition. Nearly nine in 10 electorates Dutton has toured are ones he is trying to flip. Albanese is touring electorates he desperately needs to hold on to.
The summer campaign analysis shows Mr Albanese is engaged in a largely defensive posture, visiting at-risk Labor seats including Lyons twice, Hasluck and Pearce in WA twice, Gilmore, Paterson, Werriwa, Parramatta and Barton in NSW, and Solomon and Lingiari in the Northern Territory. The 61-year-old has also campaigned in target seats, including Liberal-held Bass and Braddon in northern Tasmania, the LNP-held, Cairns-based electorate of Leichhardt and the Greens-held Brisbane seat of Griffith.
Mr Dutton has ramped-up his pre-election stops over summer, campaigning in Labor-held seats the Coalition hopes to flip including Gilmore, Paterson, Bennelong, Eden-Monaro and Robertson in NSW, Chisholm, McEwen and Aston in Victoria, Boothby in South Australia and Blair in Queensland.
The Liberal leader has also focused on former Coalition seats won by teal independents and the Greens in 2022, including Ryan and Brisbane in Queensland, Wentworth and Mackellar in NSW, and Kooyong in Victoria. Mr Dutton has also visited the Liberal-held seats of Bradfield and Wannon, which are under threat from challenges by teal independents.
Elected in the first place on a near-record-low vote (unlike the UK Starmer government, Albanese cannot plead low voter turnout, due to Australia’s compulsory voting system), Labor has seen steadily declining poll numbers since. The trend accelerated after the failed 2023 referendum, and shows no signs of slowing or stopping. All of Albanese’s vote-buying policy announcements since have sunk into a mire of voter indifference. The ongoing anti-Semitism crisis has exposed Albanese as weak and overly beholden to the Muslim voters of Western Sydney and the feral left.
While opposition leader Peter Dutton may not be exactly setting the polls afire, he’s steadily increasing the coalition’s lead over the government. More importantly, he’s been setting the political agenda, from the referendum on. On almost every issue, it’s the opposition setting the running, with the government left to play catch up.
With unbelievable chutzpah, Albanese is trying to campaign on his government’s track record.
Our pitch, if you like, is that we’ve dealt with immediate challenges that have been to us, cost-of-living pressures, cheaper medicines, tax cuts for all … but we’ve also got our eye on the future, on the horizon.
Action on climate change is an opportunity for Australia. The work that we’re doing in childcare, to move towards universal provision of affordable childcare is a really important change for the country.
Could this bloke be any more out of touch if he spent his entire life bunkered down in his luxury cliff-top mansion?
The cost of living is soaring for Australians. ‘Climate change’ has never been anything more than a boutique issue for the idle middle-classes. For ordinary voters, it’s never ranked higher than the bottom of the top 10 issues, if that. Voters care about the important, kitchen-table stuff: cost-of-living, education, healthcare… on all of which, Labor has failed miserably.
Australians are also waking up to the enormity of violent anti-Semitism sweeping the big cities. What was once something we only read about in history books of the Third Reich is suddenly a living horror – and the government has, at best, done nothing. At worst, it’s tacitly fanned the flames, with one eye on Labor-voting, Muslim-dominated Western Sydney.
Voters know who’s responsible for turning Sydney 2025 into Berlin 1933.
As it spreads, its impact is reaching beyond the Jewish community, as the recent fire-bombing of a childcare centre has demonstrated […]
Voters looking at how the federal government is responding to the violence now associated with this wave of anti-Semitism will be considering this in light of their broader concerns about crime rates and the level of confidence they have in the government’s ability and willingness to deal with it.
It will quickly become a question of competence for the federal Labor government.
Once again, only the opposition has been and is on the front foot in tackling anti-Semitism.
If no one had noticed, Peter Dutton has been pulling the threads together not just on the current anti-Semitism crisis but on border protection and crime more generally in an argument that will ultimately cascade into accusations that the Albanese government’s dismantling of Home Affairs is part of the problem.
Weak, gutless and incapable of standing up to domestic terrorism: the Albanese government will be remembered as one of the most critical failures of Australian democracy.
