It was a rare stumble in an otherwise sure-footed campaign.
On April 3rd, exactly a month before Australians go to the polls in an election on Saturday, the country’s Labor prime minister Anthony Albanese fell off a stage while campaigning in New South Wales.
Worried about looking weak compared to opposition leader Peter Dutton – a no-nonsense former police officer – Albanese was still denying three weeks later that the incident, clearly caught on camera, was a fall.
“I stepped off the stage, I didn’t fall over on my backside. I stumbled. That’s what happened... It’s no big deal,” he said last week, showing it clearly was a big deal to him. But that misstep has been the only one of note in his re-election campaign, while Dutton’s run has been riddled with unforced errors.
Just seven weeks ago, a newspaper headline said “Labor’s slump puts key seats at risk”, and the government seemed on course to become the first in Australia in almost a century to not win a second term. But with voting booths opening on Saturday morning and millions having already voted in pre-polling, Labor now leads in every published poll.
In 2024, Australia exported beef valued at Aus$3.3 billion (€1.86 billion) to the US. The 10 per cent tariff now added to those exports is almost certain to see that figure slump this year
The election has been overtaken by what former UK prime minister Harold Macmillan called, “Events, dear boy, events.” The biggest was the tariffs imposed by US president Donald Trump not only on rival nations such as China, but also on friendly countries like Australia.
The Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement came into effect in 2005 and the US historically has a trade surplus between the two, but that has not cut any ice with Trump. It is cutting deep with Australian exporters, though, particularly those in the beef trade. In 2024, Australia exported beef valued at Aus$3.3 billion (€1.86 billion) to the US. The 10 per cent tariff now added to those exports is almost certain to see that figure slump this year.
Many of the wounds to the Liberal-National coalition, as the opposition alliance is known,have been self-inflicted, though, not least of which was the spectacle of Dutton using his son Harry as a prop to make a point about housing affordability, with Dutton jnr saying “it’s almost impossible” for him to afford to buy a house.
Given Harry is just 20 and was standing beside a father who has made $30 million worth of property transactions over the last 35 years, voters did not gush with sympathy. “Out of touch” – a phrase all politicians dread being tarred with – was the most common response to Dutton.
Albanese must have breathed a sigh of relief at that as he was accused of the same transgression last October when he and his fiancee Jodie Haydon spent $4.3 million on a beach home with ”uninterrupted ocean views”, an hour north of Sydney. The prime minister also owns a house worth $2.65 million in Sydney and sold another for $1.75 million last December.
Dutton, whose Liberal Party is Australia’s equivalent of the UK’s Tories, has spent a great deal of the past month preaching to the converted on the right-wing echo chamber of Sky News – Australia’s version of Fox News – and on conservative talkback radio shows whose hosts and listeners tell him how great he is.
The Guardian used Dutton’s line as a rallying call for donations in an email with a subject line saying it was “A note from the ‘hate media’”
He avoids one-on-one interviews in which he might get pushed for some policy clarity, and even took the extraordinary step of saying state broadcaster ABC and the Guardian’s Australian edition were “hate media”. For a man trying to distance himself from the Trump tariffs, echoing the US president’s reference to journalists as “the enemy of the people” was an odd move.
The Guardian used Dutton’s line as a rallying call for donations in an email with a subject line saying it was “A note from the ‘hate media’”. ABC kept quiet, though, fearful of how much its funding might be cut if the coalition wins. ABC has no advertising and there is no TV licence, so it is almost entirely reliant on government subvention.
Labor has been helped by the focus on the opposition’s lack of policies – it has promised to bring in state-funded nuclear power, but is short on cost details – and Dutton’s gaffes, which included accusing Albanese of making a policy announcement “after a couple of wines”. Though the prime minister is often pictured with a beer in his hand, he has been teetotal during the election campaign.
With everything seemingly going his way – including falling inflation and interest rates – Albanese is in danger of engaging in hubris, such as his recent appearance on British podcast The Rest is Politics. There are no votes to be won on a foreign show whose few Australian listeners are already deeply engaged with politics and unlikely to not have already made up their mind which way to vote.
If the polls are right, Labor will retain power either in its own right or with the backing of independents. But the polls said Labor would win the 2019 election and on that occasion the Liberal-National coalition upset the odds to emerge victorious. Dutton and the coalition will be hoping history is repeated.
