2025-05-01 22:42:00

---

The only spectre haunting Anthony Albanese’s government going into Election Day tomorrow will be the way the polls got wrong the likely 2019 election outcome. Back then, the Scott Morrison government got re-elected in an upset result. Opposition leader Peter Dutton is clinging to that precedent, in hope of a miracle. This time, all of the prevailing signs – including the consistent theme of the polls for the past month – indicate that Albanese’s Labor government will trounce Dutton’s conservative coalition. What’s different from 2019? Albanese, like Morrison before him, is the incumbent, a known quantity. Back then, Bill Shorten was the untried Labor contender, and in the end, Australia decided not to take the risk. Yet this time...if anything, Australia has come to know Peter Dutton all too well over the last decade or more, and as the campaign has progressed it has decided it likes him less and less. So much so that in the last days of the campaign, Dutton pivoted away from the cost of living issues, and plunged into culture wars territory. All this week, Dutton has been pandering to prejudice against immigrants and the inner city elites. Along the way, he has embraced Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party, which has risen to over 7% in the polls. (The Liberal coalition and One Nation have also told their supporters to preference each other, in a system whereby voters rank their electorate choices, until the 50% hurdle is cleared.) All of this looks more like a desperate gambit for limiting losses, rather than a feasible plan for winning the election. Keep in mind that Dutton and his Liberal coalition will need to flip about 20 seats in order to win this election. Also keep in mind that tomorrow’s result is something of a done deal. Millions of Australians have already voted, and the last few days of the campaign have felt like the politicians have been going through the motions. (The nominal five week campaign has included Easter and the school holidays, giving people added reasons to vote early.) So – barring miracles – we can already hold the post mortem. What did Dutton do to blow the commanding lead in the polls that he and his party enjoyed coming into 2025? For starters, Dutton proved to be a terrible campaigner. Time and again on the stump, he proved unable to explain how several of his signature policies would work, and how they would be funded. These policies included a massive investment in nuclear energy, and a natural gas policy that even the industry and his main corporate donors (e.g. the mining tycoon Gina Rinehart) attacked him over in public. Even worse...in an early Mini-me attempt to mimic Donald Trump, Dutton vowed to sack 41,000 public servants, and stop the survivors from being able to work from home. Women voters – who loved the flexibility that working from home gave them in juggling their paid work and their domestic chores – turned on Dutton, who eventually turned turtle and canned the policy. The Trumpian aspects of Dutton’s abrasive style – and his social policies - turned off many of the voters he needed to win, including those in the outer suburbs of Australia’s largest cities that were his party’s prime target. To the point where the Crikey website ran an enlightening story with the best headline of the entire campaign: “Is Peter Dutton Aware That Women...Can Vote?” An exit poll this morning suggested Dutton may lose his own seat of Dixon, but in previous elections this threat/promise has never quite come to fruition. Is there a path to victory for him? Theoretically if all the relatively affluent voters who elected so many blue-green independents in 2022 came home to the Liberal-led coalition this time...Dutton might end up running Albanese a lot closer. (There are 16 independents of various political persuasions on the cross-benches going into this election.) However, Dutton is such a polarising figure...it seems highly unlikely that he can succeed in turning this election into a two horse race – which was Mark Carney’s path to victory in this week’s election in Canada. Currently, in the two party match-up, the coalition is trailing Labor by 47/53, and if anything, that gap is widening. True, it does seem likely that some of the so-called teal independents who were elected in 2022 – e.g. Dr Monique Ryan in Kooyong, Kate Chaney in the Western Australia seat of Curtin – will struggle to survive this time. Most of the other independents however, are likely to be back – and in seats like Bradford, Cowper and Wannon there is a chance that their numbers may even increase. Albanese, if re-elected, will have to deal with an economy that as Bloomberg News put it yesterday, has been built on three pillars – immigration, real estate property prices and China – that are all crumbling. To New Zealanders, the lack of investment in infrastructure to mitigate climate change, and the reluctance to raise taxes to amass the revenue necessary to meet social targets, will sound depressingly familiar: This week, S&P Global Ratings warned that Australia's prized triple-A sovereign rating may be at risk if election campaign pledges result in larger structural deficits. And that just goes to highlight the fiscal pressures that are facing the next government. Both the parties have really talked about various spending measures. So tax cuts, excise duty relief, student debt relief and other measures like that. But there is not a lot in the way of revenue raising. And that is a big problem, especially at a time when we are in the midst of a global trade war, China's demand is coming off as well as commodity prices. At the same time, New Zealand has been acting as if our huge projected spend-up on Defence – $9 billion of new money, $12 billion in all – will fold neatly alongside Australia within the AUKUs defence pact. Yet, increasingly, the AUKUS pact looks as if it is dead in the water. US shipyards don’t have the capacity – and the Trump White House isn’t willing – to prioritise the building of Virginia-class nuclear submarines for Australia, ahead of the US Navy’s own needs for the same boats. So…even if Albanese wins handsomely tomorrow, his problems – and the problems created by New Zealand’s dependency on Canberra as a trade and defence ally – will be only just beginning. © Scoop Media