It’s on. It’s official. Australia will go to the polls on May 3rd to elect a new Federal government.
This should come as no surprise to anyone. The deadline to call an election was rapidly approaching, and as early as Tuesday last week, pundits were pretty confident that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese would go to the Governor-General this morning. That’s exactly what he announced last night, and did very early today.
It was an extremely clever piece of political manoeuvring. Knowing that the election was about to be called forced Liberal Leader Peter Dutton to withhold parts of his planned Budget Reply speech, so that he could announce them fresh within the context of a campaign. This undermined any potential effectiveness of the speech. By going to the Governor-General so early, and then appearing on media platforms right smack in the middle of the breakfast news time slot, Albanese also sucked the air out of what Dutton did announce, and left him scrambling to make up ground for his own campaign announcement later in the day. By that time, hours had been spent digesting, analysing, and speculating on Albo’s prepared remarks.
Certain corners of the media (mainstream and social) seem to think this was a dirty trick. To those people, I’ll simply say this: politics, do you understand it.
It’ll be a five-week campaign, so buckle in. I’ll be updating regularly on major moments in the campaign, calling out spin and misinformation, and focusing on the candidates who get distorted coverage (or, even worse, no coverage at all). Over at Something for Cate, Loki and I will be analysing policy statements, looking at where each party or candidate’s preferences land, and providing some plain language “how does this work anyway” posts on our various voting systems.
But for now, I want to kick off with Peter Dutton’s campaign announcement, because if this is a sign of things to come, this election campaign will be, frankly, horrible.
In the House of Representatives this week, Greens MP Stephen Bates referred to Dutton as “Temu Trump”. Although quickly rebuked by the Speaker and withdrawn, the nickname is likely to stick, and not only because it’s pleasantly alliterative. This morning, Dutton delivered a campaign announcement that can best be described as “Trump lite”.
I’m sure you know how this song goes.
Australia is going backwards! Labor is spending wastefully! Our towns and suburbs are not safe! Wildly inflated numbers to make you panic! Labor bad! Labor bad! Evil unions!
It was pretty clear that this announcement was pulled together at the last minute. Sprinkled in among the scary soundbites, though, were a few interesting – and chilling – points.
Dutton repeated his Budget Reply promise that the Coalition would do away with tax cuts legislated by Labor at the eleventh hour before Parliament was prorogued. Instead, Dutton promised a cut to the fuel excise, which, he said, would bring down the price of petrol and ease cost of living burdens.
This measure is transparently aimed at the outer suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney, especially the former. Melbourne is rapidly expanding, and public transport infrastructure is by no means keeping pace. This forces commuters who work in the Melbourne CBD to drive to work, often in the kind of stop-start traffic that quickly drains the fuel tank. On the face of it, then, cutting the fuel excise seems like a good way to win the hearts of these potential voters.
What Dutton didn’t say in his announcement was that these cuts would be temporary. After a year, the excise would return to its normal level.
Does this sound familiar? It should. This is exactly what former Prime Minister Scott Morrison did in 2022. That was a quick sugar hit to trick the Australian stomach into thinking it was getting real nutrition that wore off and left us hungrier than ever, and Dutton’s policy is no different.
It’s also the kind of policy that targets only a relatively small sector of the population. Younger voters, older voters, and people with adequate access to public transport, are all less likely to drive. If you’re someone from a rural area, you could see real savings, but those aren’t the voters that Dutton wants – or needs – to reach. Oh, and if you are lucky enough to drive an electric vehicle, this policy isn’t going to make a bit of difference to you.
But that’s not all. One of Dutton’s other policies is for people to return to the workplace, years after work-from-home has become a real mainstay of Australian society. Under a Dutton government, people who were saving money on petrol by working from home would find themselves once again having to fill their tanks more often. Paying less per litre won’t mean much to them, when they were paying for less petrol in the first place.
The other problem faced by outer suburbs commuters has nothing to do with fuel. Toll roads. We all hate them, right? But they are almost unavoidable, because the alternative is clogged side roads and we’re back to tank-draining gridlock again.
Finally, a cut to the fuel excise is nowhere near as simple as it sounds. The excise pays for road and transport projects (including road maintenance), and contributes to healthcare and education, among other areas of governmental responsibility. Dutton’s proposal would effectively halve that revenue, meaning that if he wants to even meet halfway the campaign promises he tossed out this morning, he’ll need to find the money from elsewhere.
Likely this would come from his threatened cuts to the public service – but they, too, are an illusion. Dutton’s promised to slash 40,000 public service jobs, arguing that the public service is unnecessarily bloated and pointing to Labor’s increase in public sector jobs since 2022. What’s he’s not saying, of course, is that many of those jobs replaced private consultancies engaged by the former Morrison government. Consultants are a lot more expensive than full-time workers. Like the fuel excise cut, then, this proposed gutting of the public sector is false economy.
Moving on from the fuel excise cut, Dutton promised “cheap energy”. This is a drum he’s been banging for a while, but today, there was one word conspicuously missing from his announcement. Nuclear. There wasn’t one mention of his beloved and apparently committed intention to conjure nuclear power plants out of the air sometime in the next 20 years. Instead, everything was a gas, gas, gas. His explanation was convoluted and muddy to the point of opaqueness, but it boils down to one thing: get those pesky renewables away from his face and drill, baby, drill. Or maybe frack, baby, frack.
To make sure we understood how much better a leader he was, Dutton claimed that under Albanese, people’s electricity bills had gone up by $1300. This is self-evidently nonsense. Dutton’s trying an old trick here – generalise from the worst example to scare voters into accepting your policy. Likely, there are bills out there that have skyrocketed like this, but this has occurred largely in the small business sector. If you run a bakery, or dry-cleaning service, or other high energy usage business, then the creep in electricity prices has a much greater effect than on private residences. For Dutton, though, it appears context is irrelevant.
And then we got to the truly Trumpian parts of Dutton’s campaign announcement. The vague promise to “make our towns and suburbs safer” (Mr Dutton? 2018 called. They’d like their scare campaign back) The solemn undertaking to increase our already astronomically high defence spending because … something something tensions. Something. Probably China.
Old Reliable got trotted out again – our borders need to be secured! Never mind that between May 1st, 2022 and December 31st, 2024, border forces intercepted a whopping 26 boats, carrying a total of only 475 people who were sent to Nauru or back to their countries of origin. If you believe Dutton, though, our shores are being stormed in an unstoppable flow of asylum seekers.
And while we’re on the subject of People Who Aren’t Us, Dutton made the outrageous and utterly unsupportable statement that Australia’s housing issues are entirely the fault of immigrants. Without these people coming from other countries (read: places we don’t like because, ick, the people there are a different colour than us), everyone would have a house. You get a house! And you get a house! Your dog gets a house!
It’s absurd. And it’s incredibly dangerous to make this line of argument. The housing situation is complex, and there are many factors that contribute to people being unable to find places to live. Skyrocketing rents from predatory landlords, the wholesale buy-up of apartments that stay vacant for months at a time because their owners rent them out as wildly overpriced AirBnBs, and the lack of social housing are just a few of those factors. But Dutton would have you believe that good red-blooded Aussies are being kicked out onto the street by evil immigrants who take their house away.
It’s almost like he wants Australians to turn against people who want to become part of our society.
You see what I mean by Trumpian. Dutton hit the major markers – racism, lies about government waste, empty promises, and the vague threat of being murdered in our beds. Honestly, by the end of the speech, I was surprised that Dutton didn’t wholesalely condemn trans people for simply existing.
He wound up by telling us, yet again, that he used to be a police officer and a small business owner. Basically, that he was One Of Us. You know, a rich white straight cis man whose idea of hardship was having to conduct work via a Zoom call during lockdown.
There was one thing conspicuously missing from Dutton’s announcement (and, to be fair, from Albanese’s as well). Our crazy big brother, the United States of America. The upcoming election is going to be overshadowed by the havoc Donald Trump and Elon Musk and the DOGE Edgelords are causing both over there and around the world. On April 2nd, tariffs will come into effect, and, while they will primarily affect American business, there is likely to be a knock-on effect in reduced exports.
Our universities are already being threatened with cuts to funding for crucial research projects, after a truly absurd, insulting questionnaire was sent to them. These are just a few of the questions:
Can you confirm that your agency has not collaborated with, had any accusations or investigations of working with an entity on the terrorism watch list, cartels, narco/human traffickers, organized or groups that promote mass migration in the last ten years?
Can you confirm that your organization does not work with entities associated with communist, socialist, or totalitarian parties, or any party that espouses anti-American beliefs?
Can you confirm that this is no DEI project or DEI elements of the project?
Does this project take appropriate measures to protect women and to defend against gender ideology as defined in the below Executive Order?
I can’t overstate the danger here. The US is not satisfied with merely turning itself into an authoritarian nightmare – it clearly wants to impose this on any other country that ever wants to have even the most casual of ties. There’s no suggestion Trump is going to relax his stance any time soon, either, and so it is absolutely imperative that the parties who seek to govern Australia be ready to answer this threat.
The campaign has just begun. In the next five weeks, Dutton, Albanese, and every candidate who wants our vote will flood us with policies, rhetoric, and hyperbole. That’s expected. What they must also do, however, is disclose how they intend to deal with the US, and how they are going to protect Australians from the US.
Email your MP. Call them. Bail them up when they go walking around your neighbourhood glad-handing the locals. Make them answer.
Dutton has already signalled a willingness to at least adapt some of Trump’s policies for Australian society. Thanks for the warning, mate. We’re watching you.
