AUSTRALIA’S CAMPAIGN season is officially open, following weeks of speculation. The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has set May 3rd for the general election. He hopes to become the first prime minister in recent years to serve two consecutive terms, following a convincing win for his (social-democratic) Labor Party in 2022 against the (conservative) Liberal-led ruling coalition. The race is too close to call.
Mr Albanese’s chance of keeping his job looks higher than it did a few months ago. Then the Liberal leader, Peter Dutton, was landing punches over inflation, a listless economy and high housing costs (Sydney has the most unaffordable housing in the English-speaking world bar Hong Kong). Above all, Mr Dutton attacked Labor on high immigration. Yet the economy has since turned a corner, the government thinks. In February the central bank cut interest rates at last. The budget that the Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, unveiled on March 25th proposed modest cuts in taxes, throwing the tax-cutting Liberals off-balance.
But Labor knows it is risky to boast about a recovery that few voters yet feel. Besides, the recovery is unlikely to be full-throated, given poor Australian productivity, over-regulation and risk-averse businesses—all ills the Labor government has done little to cure. And though Mr Albanese is an able tactician and backroom dealmaker, he does not fire up crowds.
So Labor strategists are hoping the opposition coalition will continue to do some of their work for them. By 2022 the Liberal Party had lurched so far to the right, including with a raucous scepticism over climate change, that it lost seats to moderates who ran as independent candidates. So-called “teals”—economic conservatives but social and climate progressives for whom the Liberal Party was once the natural home—chalked up victories in prosperous, inner-suburban areas. That sealed the coalition’s defeat.
Mr Dutton, a hard-right, hard-edged former copper from Queensland, deserves credit for holding together a hotch-potch coalition of arch-conservatives, oil-and-gas interests, populists and moderates. Yet his front bench is underwhelming, while he himself comes across as a knock-off Donald Trump, denigrating the prime minister with weird epithets (“a child in a man’s body”). He has acquired from his detractors the nickname “Temu Trump” after a popular Chinese app that sells heavily discounted merchandise. It does not help that the American president’s own standing in Australia, such as it was, has fallen since announcing tariffs on Australian steel and aluminium.
Even some of Mr Dutton’s colleagues acknowledge that his chief policy proposals are a salmagundi of silliness. His reluctance to concede a proper role for renewables in Australia’s energy mix led to his promotion of nuclear power in a country that has no nuclear experience and a dismal record of state-run investment. In response to Mr Chalmers’s budget he proposed that taxpayers’ money should be used to get gas out of remote fields, supposedly cutting electricity prices. It is true that high power costs bother voters. But Australia has vast quantities of gas already, while abundant wind and sun go untapped. Wind, solar power and battery storage should be the priorities; ideology and interests forbid Mr Dutton from acknowledging them. Some Liberals think that won’t hurt them in working-class constituencies.
What result is most likely? To hold its majority Labor must defend most of the seats it won at the last election. Things should go its way in Western Australia, where a popular state government has kept the Labor brand strong. Its task is tougher in blue-collar suburbs in New South Wales. Its fortunes hang above all on Victoria, where a Labor government in its fourth term is tainted by rising crime and perceptions of corruption.
The coalition has an even harder path towards a majority. Thus much of the speculation in Canberra, the capital, is over who will manage to form a minority government. If neither Labor nor the coalition wins a majority the independents, who now help make up the largest cross bench in history, will come into play, by offering supply-and-confidence votes in return for getting their priorities onto government agendas. One teal from a prosperous Sydney constituency—Allegra Spender, who wants better regulation, more renewable energy and tax reform—thinks her kind can prod the major parties into action. Their efforts will test whether the centre in Australia can hold—and learn to govern again. ■
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