Ground zero: Campaign lines drawn in the battle for Sydney

Call it the race to the start. An early federal election in 2025 is widely expected, but yet to be declared. Yet already Sydney is ground zero for buzzing Labor and Coalition campaign headquarters.

Ground zero: The Coalition has chosen an office in Parramatta to be closer to critical electorates like Macarthur and Bennelong, deemed must-steal seats if they’re to achieve the monumental swing required to win government. Labor’s campaign will be spearheaded from a new office in the heart of Sydney’s CBD.

Ready. Set. Go (to your war rooms).

If the race to the 2025 federal election hasn’t officially started yet, the race to the starting line certainly has.

The 2024 summer break for our federal MPs and their party mechanics will be spent sharpening their one-liners and tweaking designs on corflutes.

Both the Coalition and Labor are preparing for an early election to be called and for voters to head to the polls as early as March.

Sydney will be ground zero.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton. The Coalition has chosen parramatta as its campaign HQ. Picture: NewsWire / Roy VanDerVegt

Both sides have set up their campaign headquarters in this city – albeit on opposite sides.

The Coalition has chosen an office in Parramatta to be closer to critical electorates like Werriwa and Bennelong, deemed must-steal seats if they’re to achieve the monumental swing required to win government.

Their last campaign was run out of Brisbane.

Labor’s campaign will be spearheaded from a new office in the heart of Sydney’s CBD, with staff told to get ready to hit the printers over summer with the possibility of an early election looming.

The post-Covid drain of workers from the city centre has proved a boon for Labor who have picked up their new temporary headquarters in a vacant office a stone’s throw from Oxford Street’s party strip.

Staff are expected to stream in and out of the office over summer, while other Labor insiders have said they’ve been urged to finish designing campaign leaflets and other material so it’s ready for printing the second Anthony Albanese calls an election.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s team has set up its headquarters on Oxford Street in Sydney’s CBD. Picture: NewsWire / Gaye Gerard

MARCH FORECAST?

“No one has directly said get ready for a March election – it’s just a possibility,” one Labor insider said.

“If anyone tells you they know, they’re genuinely bullshitting you.

“Material is being designed and developed so that you could hit a button at the end of January and be ready to go … the (Labor) machine prepares for the earliest possible date – no one wants to get caught in a scenario where he does go early and the lead up work isn’t ready.”

What pamphlets and hand-outs are spat out of the printer is just one facet of the multi-pronged political landscape parties must navigate in 2025.

The importance of social media – particularly video app TikTok – is underlined by the Liberals being quick to sign up conservative social media campaign firm Topham Guerin.

The New Zealand start-up has blossomed into playing major roles for Scott Morrison’s 2019 election campaign and Boris Johnson’s victory in the UK election in the same year.

It’s understood Labor will rely largely on an in-house team to push their social media campaign, with consultants likely to be brought in for help as well.

Labor has already swung hard at the Coalition’s nuclear platform, after Peter Dutton finally released costings last week, and will continue to try punch holes in areas where there’s thin detail – such as when exactly electricity bills would get cheaper.

CAMPAIGN GOES NUCLEAR

The Coalition says they’re ready for it, while they’ve already preselected the vast majority of their candidates in a bid to avoid the horror 2022 campaign where some candidates weren’t chosen until days before the election was called.

“We’ve been told internally to be ready for an early campaign … we’ve been on warning of an early election for some time – we’ve preselected the vast majority of our seats, we feel like we’re in a good position,” a Liberal source said, saying they were ready to fight against Labor’s antinuclear campaign.

“Shrill criticism of nuclear does not square with what is consistently coming up, which is that people are open to a conversation on it,” they said.

La Trobe University adjunct senior research fellow Kevin Brianton said the key to victory for Labor was selling its cost of living relief plans, and their management of the budget – something they’d struggled to do so far.

“People have elected big spending governments before, and they probably will again, ,” he said.

“But those governments have always been good at explaining the benefits.

“You’ve just got to keep hammering the benefits.

“That’s where the government has not really been that effective … it’s not really explained the benefits of it.”

Mr Brianton said the Coalition was running a “two-speed” election campaign – with a small suite of policies alongside the massive outlier of building seven new nuclear power stations.

Labor figures have gleefully seized on nuclear energy as an area they can attack.

Mr Brianton conceded it’s a high-risk, high-reward ploy for the Coalition.

“When you have any opposition claiming a big change, it can be unpopular,” he said.

“It’s a double-edged sword.”