‘He’s match fit’: Albanese takes out first week of race, but many voters probably didn’t notice

As Peter Dutton surveys the electoral map, it is voters like Peter Ryan who give him hope of picking up seats on May 3. Ryan, 58, is a leading hand at the Cougar Mining Equipment facility in Tomago, in the NSW Hunter Valley. He has voted Labor his entire life, like his father and many others in this blue-collar, mining dependent part of the country. Now he is considering voting for the Coalition for the first time.

“I’m listening to what he’s saying; I think I might be changing,” Ryan says after meeting the opposition leader during a campaign visit to the Cougar facility on Monday. His sons, both in their 20s, have struggled to enter the housing market, and he has watched in alarm as his electricity bills shot up even after installing solar panels at his home. “The cost of living is killing a lot of us,” Ryan says. “I have to think hard about where I’m going to go. I like a lot of Peter’s ideas.”

Peter Ryan has voted Labor all his life but is considering changing his vote this election because of the cost of living.Credit: James Brickwood

Dutton’s visit to Tomago, on the election campaign’s third full day, showed he is on solid ground by courting voters frustrated by high power prices and mortgage repayments. The challenge is to not drift into less favourable terrain. Earlier that morning, Dutton joined Kyle and Jackie O in KIIS FM’s Sydney studio for an interview.

Asked where he would live as prime minister, Dutton said he and wife Kirilly would choose Kirribilli House over the Lodge in Canberra. “We love Sydney, we love the harbour, it’s a great city,” Dutton said. Labor leapt on the comments as a sign of hubris, arguing they showed the opposition leader was thinking about the trappings of office rather than the struggles of ordinary Australians. Dutton knew he had made a mistake. When asked to elaborate on his comments the following day, he doggedly refused to broach the topic.

On day two of the campaign, Dutton walked back comments suggesting he wanted to hold referendums to recognise Indigenous Australians in the Constitution and establish four-year parliamentary terms. On day three, he told a Sky News forum in Brisbane that he was prepared to put conditions on school funding to stop teachers indoctrinating children, prompting follow-up questions about what he considered “woke” education.

Former Liberal adviser Tony Barry, now a director with the RedBridge research firm, says these comments have veered from the one thing that matters politically. “There’s only one game in town and that’s the cost of living,” he says. “That’s what will decide the election.”

Peter Dutton fills up at a Carlingford petrol station before spruiking his fuel excise plan on Friday.Credit: James Brickwood

“A problem is that some of Dutton’s comments have veered off message on referendums and woke education. It’s not so much about the substance of those issues. It’s that they’re not coming up in the focus groups; they’re not keeping people up at night. Dutton has found it hard to find clear air for his economic message.”

A constant question among Dutton’s travelling press pack during the week was why he had not visited a service station to highlight his vow to halve the fuel excise for a year, saving voters 25 cents a litre at the bowser. Dutton eventually did on Friday afternoon in western Sydney. Then there was the bemusing decision to visit a bucolic winery on the outskirts of Melbourne to announce funding for an airport rail link on Tuesday.

More successful for Dutton: a visit to Donnybrook, in north Melbourne, to have a cup of tea with Fulbert and Priya Xavier, who migrated from India in 2018 and are battling to pay their power bill. The setting chimed perfectly with Dutton’s pitch to working class and increasingly diverse voters in outer-suburban areas. His most intriguing stop was to a mosque in western Sydney, but this carried risk as well as reward. The visit resurfaced some of his past remarks about Muslim immigration; the mosque’s imam stressed he was not endorsing Dutton and opposed some of his past remarks.

Albanese, meanwhile, has exuded a confidence that has threatened to veer into cockiness. “One from one,” he said about his election record this week. Veteran reporters have praised the campaign for being slick and organised.

The prime minister is spending more time in places like healthcare centres, childcare centres and schools, including Cabramatta Public.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

With Labor’s internal polling showing the party’s vote on the rise – but external polls still putting it behind the 2022 election – Albanese has tried to go on the attack. Fond of playing mind games with his political opponents, he spent the first day on the trail in Dutton’s seat of Dickson and the safe LNP seat of Hinkler. In Melbourne, Albanese targeted Coalition frontbencher Michael Sukkar’s seat of Deakin even though Labor is defending about eight seats of its own in the Victorian capital. In Tasmania, he visited Braddon, held by the Liberal Party on a margin of 8 per cent.

And in Queensland, Albanese spruiked ginger beer at Bundaberg’s factory, but his style of patriotism is less blokey than Dutton’s. Much of Albanese’s campaigning time has been spent at places with feminised workforces such as childcare centres, health facilities and schools, including Cabramatta Public School in Sydney’s south-west on Friday, where he was mobbed. Dutton, by contrast, has yet to visit a school, childcare centre or hospital. He kicked off his campaign at the XXXX brewery in Brisbane, and has donned high-vis vests to visit a brick factory and drilling firm as well as the mining equipment company in the Hunter.

Such visits are carefully managed and often revolve around hyper-local funding announcements targeted at marginal seats. But what chance do they have to dominate the news cycle when Donald Trump is ripping up the rules-based trading order from the White House rose garden? It used to be a cliché of political campaigning that all politics is local; now, in the age of Trump, it seems all politics is global.

Gone too is the dictum that foreign policy is largely irrelevant to election outcomes. At the start of the year, both leaders were jostling over who could work best with Trump. Trump’s popularity in Australia, while never high, plummeted after he berated Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and imposed tariffs on Australian steel and aluminium. His decision to slap a 10 per cent tariff on all Australian goods this week will have pushed it further down still. So the most pressing question is now different: which candidate is best placed to stand up to Trump?

Andrew Carswell, who ran Morrison’s media unit, has no doubt who Trump is helping. “It’s advantage Albanese,” he says. “Up to this point he’s been weak in his response to Trump, but this gives him an opportunity to project strength.” He points out that centre-left governments around the world who were floundering only a few months ago are now in the ascendancy thanks to Trump. Look at Labour’s Keir Starmer in Britain and the resurgence of the progressive Liberal Party in Canada.

Dutton has toughened his language on Trump, saying he would be willing to “fight” him to advance Australia’s interests. At the same time, he has said he could “very quickly” strike a deal with the president by using Australia’s defence relationship with the US and critical mineral reserves as leverage. Defence Minister Richard Marles branded Dutton’s bid to link trade and defence as “loose” and “reckless”. Reporters continue to press Dutton for detail on exactly what he would offer Trump to convince him to grant Australia a rare exemption from the 10 per cent tariff he announced this week.

Crucially, Trump’s impact on the election extends far beyond trade. Labor is now framing domestic policy debates on education policy and public servant numbers as the latest front in the Trump-era culture wars.“This is Doge-y Dutton, taking his cues and policies straight from the US,” Treasurer Jim Chalmers said this week, linking Dutton’s vow to slash public servant numbers to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency razor gang. He also claimed Dutton wanted to “Americanise” Medicare. The attempt to paint Dutton as a Trump acolyte is simplistic and in many ways inaccurate: for example, it was Dutton, not Albanese, who first rubbished Trump for his stance on Ukraine. But Labor believes it can score big by connecting Dutton to Trump – and Musk – in voters’ minds.

Albanese has learnt from the 2022 campaign, when he could not name the Reserve Bank’s cash rate, and has spent the past three years facing questions from the Canberra press gallery. Albanese picks out journalists to ask questions, going one by one through the pack and rarely granting follow-ups, limiting scrutiny.

“The PM has done the homework. He’s match fit,” says Ryan Liddell, Bill Shorten’s former communications director. “He has had a good first week and stuck to his message religiously.”

Anthony Albanese fell off the stage at a union conference in the Hunter Valley, but then denied it happened.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

But there have been clangers. Albanese fell off a stage on Thursday, then denied having taken a tumble that everyone could see. Only by Friday had he decided the better strategy was to joke about it. Another jarring moment came on Wednesday when Albanese huffed at a request to ask Foreign Minister Penny Wong a question. “No,” he said. Why not? “This is my press conference.” It was a strange move given Albanese often seeks to portray himself as the leader of a team, comparing the credentials of his front bench to that of the opposition.

And there is a less flattering interpretation of Albanese’s decision to visit so many seats that polls show he stands little chance of winning: that he is wasting time. Labor veterans recall Bill Shorten’s decision to target the Melbourne seat of Higgins in 2019, a move seen as emblematic of Labor’s misguided judgment on its chances of victory.

Several Liberal MPs who were not allowed to speak publicly about the campaign said it was an underwhelming but not alarming start for Dutton. A seat haul of about eight to 10 seats is seen as a realistic target for Dutton among MPs, well short of the number required to form a majority. They expect him to improve as the campaign goes on, and the race remains close.

With a month of campaigning to go, it is clear many voters are yet to fully switch onto politics or decide whom to vote for. Carswell believes about two in five voters are now “soft”, meaning they are not locked into voting for either party. Many of them will only decide at the last minute. “There’s an advantage to finishing strongly,” he says.

This was clear during the Dutton campaign’s visit to Donnybrook, where sunflowers stood brightly in the Xavier family’s front yard. Fulbert was happy to host Dutton at his home, pour him a cup of tea and tell him about his struggle to pay a mortgage while juggling shifts at Red Rooster and a BP service station. Asked who he planned to vote for at the end of the visit, he said he had yet to make up his mind.

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