Election 2025: Anthony Albanese targets trio of Liberal seats in bid to hold majority government
Anthony Albanese hopes to snatch Sturt, Deakin and Leichhardt from the Liberals while Peter Dutton is pouring energy into a swag of Labor seats headlined by McEwen and McMahon.
Anthony Albanese has targeted the Liberal electorates of Sturt, Deakin and Leichhardt as the Prime Minister uses campaign trail visits to try to lock in crucial seat gains, while Labor’s defence-focused itinerary has thrown maximum support into the battleground seats of Lyons, Swan and Solomon.
Peter Dutton, meanwhile, is pouring his energies into a swag of Labor seats headlined by McEwen, McMahon, Hasluck, Swan, Tangney, Parramatta and Paterson, as well as a couple held by the Greens.
And remarkably, neither leader has visited the nation’s current bellwether seat, Robertson on the NSW central coast, which has been held by the government of the day for 42 years since Bob Hawke won the 1983 election.
Labor holds Robertson on a margin of just 2.2 per cent.
These are the broad battleground themes to emerge from The Australian’s analysis of where the leaders have travelled in the first three weeks of the election campaign.
The Prime Minister has spent about 60 per cent of his campaign visits sandbagging Labor seats, in a bid to stop his government from sliding into minority. Labor can afford a net loss of only two seats if it is to retain power in its own right.
However, in the past three days the focus has started to shift, with Mr Albanese visiting two Liberal seats, one Greens seat and, on Friday, the Labor-held but notionally Liberal seat of Bennelong in Sydney, which has been heavily reshaped by a redistribution.
Labor MPs in the ultra-marginal central Tasmanian seat of Lyons, along with Swan and Perth in the West Australian capital and the Darwin seat of Solomon, have already hosted the Prime Minister on two occasions.
In an indication of which Liberal seats Labor is targeting most strongly, Mr Albanese has twice dropped into the knife-edge Liberal-held seats of Sturt in Adelaide and Deakin in Melbourne and devoted parts of two days either side of an overnight visit to Leichhardt in far-north Queensland.
While Mr Albanese has made multiple visits to only six seats so far, there are 13 electorates where the Opposition Leader has campaigned more than once, suggesting the Coalition has a tighter focus on the seats it wants to win.
Mr Dutton has already made three visits to McEwen on Melbourne’s northern fringe and Energy Minister Chris Bowen’s western Sydney seat of McMahon (including for the leaders’ first debate), while he has doubled up on nine other Labor seats as well as Greens-held Brisbane.
The only Coalition seat Mr Dutton has been to more than once is his own northern Brisbane electorate of Dickson, with two campaign stops in the first three days, and he has visited only four Coalition-held electorates across the whole three weeks.
The Liberal leader has also shifted his focus from outer-metropolitan seats to inner-metropolitan seats as the election campaign has progressed.
In the first 12 days of the campaign, Mr Dutton stopped in 14 seats in the outer suburbs of the nation’s capital cities and six in inner-ring suburbs.
Across the next nine days, the Liberal campaign entourage stopped in 12 inner-metropolitan seats but only seven in outer-metropolitan areas.
Mr Dutton’s campaign has been heavily focused on offence, with 44 of his 49 seat visits in enemy territory: 35 Labor electorates; five held by the Greens; one by teal Kate Chaney; and one by independent Dai Le. The community-backed candidate has also seen the Prime Minister visit her Sydney seat of Fowler, hoping to claim it back after the shock loss to Ms Le in 2022.
Labor expectations that Aston will be lost to the Liberals – after snatching the seat in a rare government by-election victory in 2023 – as will Gilmore on the NSW south coast, are borne out by the fact the Albanese campaign has not devoted any time to the two seats, while Mr Dutton has visited twice.
The Prime Minister’s campaign has been focused on defence, with 25 visits to Labor seats out of 41 overall. Mr Albanese has spent the same amount of time in seats potentially at risk from the Greens, with a visit each to Wills and Cooper, as he has in Greens-held seats, having stopped in Griffith and Brisbane once each.
The Coalition appears to have higher hopes than Labor for Brisbane, visiting Stephen Bates’ seat twice, while also stopping in Greens-held Ryan and Griffith.
However, Mr Dutton’s campaign has steered well clear of most seats lost to the teals, with only the one visit to Ms Chaney’s Curtin and no stops in any of the other five teal-held seats in Sydney and Melbourne.
He has visited Forrest in southwest WA, which is at risk from teal candidate Sue Chapman. However, Bradfield, where Nicolette Boele is having a second tilt at the blue-ribbon seat, has not featured on Mr Dutton’s itinerary.
The Opposition Leader has also not campaigned in four of the 10 seats the Morrison government lost to Labor in 2022: Bennelong, Boothby, Reid and Robertson. A fifth, Higgins, was abolished in a redistribution.
However, Mr Dutton has entered seats the Coalition has never held, including Calwell in northern Melbourne and the western Sydney seats of McMahon and, on Friday, Tony Burke’s Watson.
The Prime Minister has been to both seats Labor lost in 2022: Griffith and Fowler.
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