Labor MPs use purple and blue branding as candidates hide Albanese, Dutton on flyers

Labor candidates are using blue and purple campaign mailouts rather than the traditional red and spruiking Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s image sparingly as they fight for re-election.

Highlighting both major party leaders’ lack of popularity, opposition hopefuls in a series of key seats such as Brisbane, Reid and Macquarie are also hiding Coalition leader Peter Dutton in their communication with voters.

Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton are both running negative campaigns.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Party machines were raring to go for an election called as soon as Sunday – for a polling date of April 12 – but Cyclone Alfred has put a hold on those plans. Sources familiar with Albanese’s thinking said he was waiting to see how severe the storm was before determining whether to delay the election date until May.

Both parties’ campaign material focuses on the negative aspects of their opponents, while much of Labor’s physical and online branding has turned Medicare green, rather than red, following the announcement of billions in spending on bulk-billing and urgent-care clinics.

Labor campaign sources said that while Albanese’s personal polling numbers were more negative than Dutton’s, strategists still believed his image compared favourably with Dutton’s among key swing voters, meaning the prime minister’s public appearances would not be minimised in the campaign. Labor has accused Dutton of avoiding press conferences.

Labor’s purple mailout in the Melbourne seat of Holt.

In Melbourne, where an unpopular state government is dragging down support for Labor, Holt MP Cassandra Fernando is using purple in her mailouts. In the Queensland seat of Macpherson, Labor candidate Alice Price is using a blue Labor logo.

Labor is using pink in the inner-city seat of Griffith, and various MPs are avoiding party branding as they run local-first campaigns in tight seats such as Gilmore. MPs Jerome Laxale and Julian Hill are using blue and green, respectively, in their communication with voters, but they have used the same colours in previous polls.

Laxale has a photograph of Foreign Minister Penny Wong on his pamphlets, utilising a politician who was rated as the country’s most popular instead of the prime minister, who has a -22 performance rating.

A proven campaigner whose seat of Bennelong is notionally Liberal after a boundary redraw, Laxale featured the prime minister on his social media several times this year, but an analysis of MPs’ social media feeds in the 20 most marginal Labor seats shows sparing use of Albanese.

Bennelong Labor MP Jerome Laxale’s mailout featuring Penny Wong rather than the prime minister.

Unlike in Western Australia, where Premier Roger Cook is gracing pamphlets in marginal seats, federal MPs’ printed advertising does not feature Albanese, although few party leaders in recent history have been popular enough to become the face of local campaign material.

Laxale said the prime minister had frequently visited Bennelong but Dutton was largely absent. “I would welcome my opponent using Peter Dutton in his material,” he said, noting what he said was the opposition’s reluctance to air its nuclear policies.

Frontbencher James Paterson, who will be Dutton’s campaign spokesman, said it was “no surprise so many Labor MPs are running away from a toxic Labor brand and an unpopular prime minister conspicuously absent from so much campaign material”.

Paterson declined to comment when asked about the lack of Dutton imagery in some candidate materials.

Dutton’s performance rating was +5 per cent in February’s Resolve Political Monitor, while Albanese’s was -22 per cent, while both had negative likeability ratings.

At the 2022 election, some Liberal candidates in seats being targeted by teal independents ditched Liberal blue to use lighter colour blue that mimicked teal branding.

Resolve’s Jim Reed said neither leader was a major drawcard for voters.

“They cannot be ignored or wiped from the campaign, of course, but this does mean they can be de-emphasised compared to candidates, policy and the more popular state premiers,” he said.

“The leaders are more likely to feature in their opponent’s negative ads than their own, the idea being that it’s easier to bring the other guy down than to build your own rapport with disengaged or disaffected voters.

“The problem is that politics is no longer a zero-sum game, so rather than negative attacks winning you vote share, people are more likely to flow to a third-party or independent option. If they want to win big, they need a positive agenda voters can get behind.”

According to polling analyst Kevin Bonham, there had been four examples in recent decades when a prime minister who recorded worse approval ratings than Albanese had won an election: Bob Hawke in 1990; Paul Keating in 1993; John Howard in 1998; and Howard again in 2001.

Although, as Bonham wrote in a January analysis, those previous leaders had shown an ability during their term to turn around the trajectory of polling and claw back support, which he said Albanese had not done since early 2023.

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