Labor in the box seat for 2025 Australia election
At the midpoint of the Australian Federal Election campaign, I’m predicting Labor will win with an absolute majority.
A lot of the speculation before the campaign started was that we were heading for a minority government situation or even a possible coalition victory.
The Labor government under Anthony Albanese has been a safe pair of hands. They haven’t been an inspiring government; they haven’t been a reform-driven government, but they’re a safe pair of hands on the tiller.
There is a lot of concern amongst Australians at the moment about the escalating cost of living and about the volatile world situation since Donald Trump became President of the United States and started signing off on dozens of executive orders, which are really changing the way that the world operates in terms of trade and international relations.
In that context, I think people are looking for stability. It’s a bit like during the COVID situation where all sitting governments were returned during state elections and the federal election during that period. What we’re seeing now, I think, is very similar in that sense that people, they don’t want change because change could make things worse than they already are, if that makes sense.
I’ve been absolutely stunned by the Coalition’s poor campaigning so far at the 2025 Australia election, and Peter Dutton, the Opposition leader, comes across as being so negative.
Again, I don’t think people like negativity. I don’t have any sense that people are out there with baseball bats, so to speak, wanting to bash the Labor government and Labor MPs and Labor ministers.
I think Peter Dutton has totally misread the mood of the electorate. He needs to offer an alternative that is based on hope and aspiration, which are typical Liberal values.
He needs to define what the Liberal Party stands for. He needs to come up with policies that are going to make people feel more comfortable about their future in terms of economic security, the ability to have a comfortable retirement if they’re older folk, and the ability to buy a home and have security in the housing market, whatever age they are.
Coalition campaign mystifies
So at this stage, I really can’t see the Liberal Party coming back into this contest. I’m also a bit mystified by their personalities that they’re using in the campaign. Every time you see Peter Dutton, he’s got one of the female MPs or senators behind him.
That’s Michaelia Cash, Sussan Ley, Bridget McKenzie or Jacinta Price. I don’t know why they’re rolling out the women apart from wanting to have gender equity, because none of those women, in my opinion, add anything to the substance of the campaign. They’re all lightweights politically and intellectually, and they’re risky.
I mean, we’ve already seen significant errors from Bridget McKenzie and Jacinta Price’s reckless use of the Make Australia Great Again, comparing it to Trump. It makes me wonder if the whole Coalition campaign has been undone by the Trump implosion.
Maybe they were actually tactically thinking that they would go to the electorate with a Trump-style agenda. And they knew fairly soon after the campaign started or when it was starting that that was a risky strategy because Trump was on the nose already with Australians more generally because of the trade tariffs.
The fact that America has a surplus with Australia in trade, but they’re still imposing a 10% tariff. That’s not the actions of a friend, which is what Anthony Albanese said. It’s the actions of a rival, of an enemy, and Trump has turned Australian-American relations into one of suspicion, doubt, and we should now be seeking an independent path forward.
Otherwise, we risk becoming like Canada or Ukraine, where we’re so dependent on our “friend” to protect us that we don’t have a plan B if things go awry.
I read an interesting story in the media today about John Curtin, who pivoted Australia from being reliant on Great Britain for defence and security to the United States during the Second World War, and he made a public statement to that effect. Apparently, it was only in his New Year’s message, but it got picked up by the media and it caused a big stir at the time. We’re talking in the 1940s.
The British were really annoyed because they counted Australia as their friend in their sphere of influence. And even the Americans weren’t happy with it. Apparently, the American president at the time said that it would not do Australia any credit to be trying to ingratiate itself to the United States because the USA had no interest in Australia.
Curtin has been lauded here for taking that strategic decision and it was obviously the right thing to do during the Second World War because Britain was fighting for survival against Nazi Germany and didn’t have the resources to send navy ships or troops to the Pacific arena.
They got smashed in Singapore, which was a tactical error and that was their only throw of the dice in the Second World War, really, in the eastern sphere. Australia at that time needed to look to the United States for support and the United States needed Australia as a base and as an ally to fight the Japanese. So it was a mutually beneficial temporary arrangement.
I don’t think after that time that we should have become as close to the United States as we did. We could have still worked through the Commonwealth of Nations to perhaps turn that into a defence pact. America’s interests are always going to be America’s interests alone. We can’t trust America anymore to be a loyal friend and ally. Donald Trump has proved that absolutely.
I think Peter Dutton misread the mood of the electorate in relation to Trump; Jacinta Price certainly did. Whether she made an error or it was an accident, I don’t think so. I think she was parroting words that mean something to her, but are a turn-off for many Australian voters.
I can’t see Dutton coming back. I really can’t. The question now is who’s going to take over as Liberal leader after this election and hopefully, from their point of view, put them in a position to be a genuine threat to Labor’s dominance at the following election.
And again, I can’t see who it is. I can’t see anyone standing up in the Liberal Party immediately who is going to have that broad-church approach that John Howard had where he can unite the factions, he or she. And it’s a really sad state of affairs for the Liberal Party.
Anyhow, let’s wait and see. I might be wrong. There might be a big turnaround in the next couple of weeks until the 2025 Australia election. But the fact is that most Australians are going to be disengaged between now and 10 days time because we’ve got Easter coming up and we’ve got the Anzac Day weekend.
And then there’s only a short period left for the parties to cut through with the electorate.