Election 2025: When you think you have it by the throat … surprise!

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and Anthony Albanese before the third leaders debate last week. Picture: Alex Ellinghausen/NewsWire

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The very nature of a surprise is that you don’t see it coming.

And there may well be more than a few of them this Saturday.

What is increasingly likely is that a decisive outcome may not even be known on election night.

The national polls have been pointing in one direction for some time – a likely hung parliament with a minority Labor government.

Labor will lose seats. This is almost assured. But the Coalition can’t be confident that it won’t lose seats of its own.

The expectation from both sides is that this election is going to be a brutal exchange of seats.

And in places that no one can confidently predict.

What we know is that the voter churn is high. This is a relatively unique feature of this election.

There are some parts of the country that are buying Peter Dutton’s message and not buying Labor’s. The question is whether it will be enough for the Coalition to make the inroads it needs.

The Opposition Leader is projecting a confidence that it will. But this may end up being wishful thinking.

There are seats that Labor is clearly concerned about. Be prepared for some surprises!

One of those seats is Gorton in metropolitan Melbourne, otherwise referred to by conservatives as a “dead red” seat. Owing to the retirement of long-serving Labor cabinet minister Brendan O’Connor, Labor is running without an incumbent.

This seat goes into the outlier column. The Liberals might be surprised if they win it, Labor won’t be surprised if they lose it.

Another in this column is the Queensland seat of Blair held by Shayne Neumann. It is one of the few seats Labor holds in the state, on a margin of 5.2 per cent.

The Coalition has been pushing hard into this seat, blasting away on the cost of living and local crime.

Its epicentre, the city of Ipswich, represents the dynamic that would play out in Melbourne’s northern seats such as McEwen and Hawke and the seats on Sydney’s outer fringes of Werriwa and Whitlam – and even the Hunter seats such as Paterson, if the Coalition message resonates.

The Coalition insists that on its own polling, it is ahead of Labor in both Werriwa and Whitlam.

So does Blair then become a bellwether seat for the Dutton campaign?

The most important question becomes one of whether Victoria ends up being the village of political carnage that it was looking like at the start of the year for Labor. Probably not. Yet there are still risks for Labor, beyond the wildcard of Gorton.

Labor is under no illusion that Aston is a seat that could fall back into the Liberal Party column. It has almost conceded this point.

And McEwen is lineball.

Then there is also the chance the Liberal Party could pull off a win in the ultra-marginal seat of Dunkley in Melbourne’s southeast.

The Liberal Party appeared to stop trying in the by-election after the death of popular Labor member Peta Murphy. It has renewed its efforts.

And the new Labor candidate hasn’t a claim on incumbency, having only been in the seat for 12 months since the by-election.

Another jolter would be if the Liberals failed to finally win back the NSW coastal regional seat of Gilmore, where Dutton was campaigning on Tuesday.

In terms of risk, these are all seats Labor would be willing to concede could be problematic. They aren’t counting them in their potential losses. And that suggests it will fall short of 76 seats in terms of losses.

But Labor’s campaign is not entirely defensive, as some would like to believe.

It feels confident of retaining Bennelong in Sydney, largely due to the missteps of the Liberal candidate.

And another surprise could be the seat of Bonner, in metropolitan Brisbane, held by the LNP’s Ross Vasta on a margin of 3.4 per cent. Labor ran a lacklustre campaign in 2022 in this seat, which suggests the margin could be theoretically exaggerated.

There is a sense that, if they run a good campaign this time around, which seems to be focused on health and Dutton as a risk in an unstable world, they might be in with a shot with a high-profile candidate in former Brisbane city councillor Kara Cook.

Bonner is a middle-metro electorate that incorporates three state seats, two of which are held by Labor.

For Sydneysiders wondering what Bonner looks like, think of the inner-western Sydney seat of Reid.

It’s harder to get a read on what might happen in Leichhardt in far north Queensland. Not a lot of polling, at least on the Labor side, has gone into this seat.

Labor is clearly bullish about taking seats from the Coalition. This is a reversal of the posture from three months ago. And the national polls would give Labor confidence that it could be on track to retain a majority.

The Liberal-held seats of Menzies and Deakin in Melbourne are in the crosshairs. Labor isn’t ahead in any polling conducted by either party in either of these seats. While Labor claims to be on the offensive in both, there is little evidence it is. The ground campaign and social media insertion into Deakin is an apparition.

Both sides are spinning outcomes and expectations. And this only goes to show how closely contested some seats are. Hence the expectation of surprise results that neither side may see coming.

Labor is overly confident about its prospects for taking the Liberal-held Adelaide suburban seat of Sturt. Although it has reason to be optimistic.

Its view would be a wipeout of the Liberals in the Adelaide suburbs thanks to popular South Australian Labor Premier Peter Malinauskas, but Boothby is not beyond redemption for the Liberals.

Labor also fancies a potential reversal of fortune in northern Tasmania in the seats of Bass and Braddon.

It’s hard to imagine the popular local member Bridget Archer being unseated in Bass. And Braddon’s margin is at 8 per cent.

Such an outcome for Labor would be less a surprise than it would be a fantastical awakening.

But then there is Dutton’s own seat of Dickson. Labor has talked this seat up every election since its ill-fated experiment with former Democrats leader Cheryl Kernot. It remains an ultra-marginal seat at 1.7 per cent but has been for years.

Labor’s candidate will now have run thrice to win this seat for Labor and failed.

Yet Labor has already exhausted every resource that was available for Dickson, including social media and volunteers. Its own polling suggests it is again within striking distance – but maybe this is less about winning the seat and more about engineering a psychological advantage.

There are plenty of seats on the pendulum that are in play. Lingiari in the Northern Territory and Bullwinkel in Western Australia. Neither side has a good read on what might happen in these.

And while Labor isn’t counting the former Brisbane seat of Griffith once held by Kevin Rudd in its column yet, if the Greens member Max Chandler-Mather runs third, it could well realise this historical restoration.

And then there are those most talked about, such as the Labor-held seat of Robertson on the NSW central coast.

Predicting the outcome of the teals’ performance is a crap shoot. They could well lose Kooyong and Goldstein in Melbourne to the Liberals but may pick up Bradfield in Sydney.

Regional Victorian Liberal MP Dan Tehan is under pressure in his seat of Wannon from a teal candidate, but it is looking more confident.

But the one that may surprise the most is the old bellwether seat of Eden-Monaro. The recent redistribution has dramatically altered the dynamic of this seat, now held by Labor on a margin of 6.1 per cent. But One Nation and Clive Palmer votes run strongly.

The story of this election is that, while the primary votes for both major parties are down, the preference flows mean running a good local campaign matters more than ever.