Albanese warns Labor not to count on election outcome yet
Anthony Albanese has warned his colleagues and voters not to make any assumptions about the election result despite Labor pulling ahead in the polls with two weeks to go in the campaign, harking back to the party’s shock loss in 2019.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton also cited the 2019 campaign as he insisted he was the underdog but had a real shot of winning on May 3.
Early voting begins on Tuesday and the latest polling shows Labor consolidating a lead over the Coalition, with Newspoll on Monday putting its primary vote above 2022 levels.
However, pollsters and party insiders warn that this election, more than ever, will be a seat-by-seat prospect and the national two-party preferred indicator may not reflect the final result.
The fresh set of numbers left both leaders managing expectations of colleagues and voters.
The Prime Minister had a cautionary tale ready to roll when asked about the polls: remember 2019.
Campaigning for the first time in the NSW South Coast seat of Gilmore – which was Labor’s most marginal seat after the 2022 election, won by just 373 votes – Mr Albanese referred to Scott Morrison’s “miracle” victory in an election that everyone from party insiders to pollsters to bookies to Coalition staffers expected Bill Shorten to win.
“There’s no complacency from my camp. I assure you of that, and this election is certainly up for grabs,” he said.
“There is one word that I will say … it’s a year: 2019.
“I remind colleagues that 2019, the bookies paid out (on a Labor win). And guess what? That didn’t occur. That was a very unwise thing to do.”
Mr Dutton also looked back six years for inspiration, while declaring he was the underdog.
“We can well and truly win the election from here. There’s no doubt in my mind about it,” he told reporters in the south-eastern Melbourne seat of Dunkley, which Labor held on to at a by-election a year ago.
“In 2019, I think there was a bigger undercurrent of anger against … the then-opposition than people realised, and I think that’s the case against the now-government as well.”
As Labor has reversed the downward trend in both its primary vote and the two-party preferred across the gamut of public polls, Mr Albanese has appeared increasingly confident.
But he and those around him continue to be cautious about not letting that confidence turn off voters.
That fear has left the Prime Minister overtly managing expectations around the election outcome.
He has taken to saying repeatedly that Labor has a “mountain to climb” to win re-election.
“If you want a Labor government, you have to vote number one for Labor candidates. That is the clear message that I would give,” he said.
“Polls will come and go. The one that matters is when people tomorrow go into a polling booth.
“That’s the number that counts, not the number on page whatever of a newspaper.”
Mr Dutton said there was “an enormous soft vote” of people who were leaning one way or the other but hadn’t made up their minds yet.
“Frankly, I think there are a lot of people who are just busy with work, busy in their lives. Many Australians don’t even know there’s an election coming up,” he said.
“I think there’s a lot of anger in the suburbs, and I think you get to see that expressed.”
Shadow cabinet minister Jane Hume said people were “crying out for change” from their leaders.
“I’m not going to get into picking over the entrails of a chicken that hasn’t been gutted. Quite frankly, we’re here to win an election,” she said.
Mr Dutton unveiled a $750 million community safety plan aimed at cracking down on bikie gangs, paedophiles and drug dealers.
The Prime Minister claimed many of the areas the Coalition wanted to pump more money into were already being beefed up.
The opposition’s response on many policy questions continues to be there’s more detail to come, or that they need to see the state of the books.
“Every time … where they say, ‘I’ll tell you after the election’, you know what that means. What that means is cuts are coming, and they will point and they’ll say, ‘well we told you in April that we didn’t know the detail’,” Mr Albanese said.
Labor wants to focus on the Coalition’s costings as voters head to the ballot box for the first time, claiming there’s a $10 billion black hole in the policies announced so far.
It claims tax deductions for mortgages could cost $6.75 billion more, the fuel tax cut $2.4 billion and tax-deductible work lunches for small businesses $750 million more than what the Coalition has said.
“The dodgy figures they have put out show they have a budget black hole worth billions of dollars for just three policies alone,” Treasurer Jim Chalmers said.
Neither side has released full costings for election promises, although many of Labor’s were provided for in the March budget.