Path clear for Morrison to call election after High Court challenge

The path has been cleared for Scott Morrison to call the election this weekend after the High Court threw out an eleventh-hour legal challenge that sought to overturn the preselection of the Prime Minister’s hand-picked NSW candidates.

The decision secures the candidacy of Liberal MPs Alex Hawke, Sussan Ley, and Trent Zimmerman to contest the ballot, as Labor leader Anthony Albanese accused Mr Morrison of delaying calling the election so the government could continue using public money for advertising.

Labor leader Anthony Albanese has urged the Prime Minister to call the election and “let the Australian people decide”.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

In an outcome celebrated by NSW Liberal Party president Philip Ruddock, the court took minutes to reject a bid by exiled party executive Matthew Camenzuli to strike out the legitimacy of the federal intervention in state preselections.

“It allows us to continue to focus on the re-election of the Morrison government,” Mr Ruddock said.

As speculation mounts that Mr Morrison will call the election this weekend – for either May 14 or May 21 – he remained coy on Friday, saying only that he would make the journey to the Governor-General’s residence “very soon”.

Campaigning in Adelaide on Friday, Mr Albanese urged Mr Morrison to call the election and “let the Australian people decide”, as he criticised the slew of last-minute appointments to government entities and agencies and the spending on government advertising close to the poll.

“I feel like putting in a phone call to the Prime Minister if he doesn’t know where the Governor-General lives and offer him a lift to The Lodge (sic) to call this election,” Mr Albanese said.

“This absurdity of not having the election called so that he can continue to spend taxpayer funds on election ads in the name of the government, but they are really about promoting the Liberal and National parties, and so that he can continue to make these extraordinary appointments that the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, to the Productivity Commission, [and] to the Arts Council.”

The Treasury Department is spending up to $10 million on an advertising campaign spruiking the government’s economic credentials. A contract notice lodged on the AusTender website shows the campaign has been commissioned to run as late as April 17 – the last possible day before an election must be called. Once the election has been called and the caretaker conventions kick in, government advertising that is politically oriented is ceased.

Federal ministers have made almost 140 appointments or reappointments to Commonwealth bodies in the past three weeks, with a number of former Liberal politicians and staffers receiving the sought-after jobs. Among them was the appointment of former NSW Liberal minister Don Harwin to the Australia Council, while former WA attorney-general Michael Mischin and former NSW minister Pru Goward were appointed to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.

Mr Morrison stepped up his campaign attack lines against Mr Albanese on Friday, casting him as an unknown commodity and a risky economic bet, saying the election was a choice between “what you know and what you don’t know”.

“You know who we are. People know who I am,” Mr Morrison said in an interview with Melbourne’s 3AW radio. “No one knows who Anthony Albanese is. They don’t know what he’s going to do. He wants a quick little election campaign to run off to the polls and hope nobody notices that they don’t know who he is.”

He characterised the election as a decision for voters over who would best manage the economy and national security, in a bid to steer clear of Mr Albanese’s move to cast the election as a referendum on character and leadership.

“It’s a choice between the Liberal Party and Nationals, and Labor supported by the Greens. Our future plans and our track record of the economy and national security, and plans we don’t know anything about from Labor and the Greens.”

Jacqueline Maley cuts through the noise of the federal election campaign with news, views and expert analysis. Sign up to our Australia Votes 2022 newsletter here.