According to at least one poll, the Coalition has entered the informal stage of the election campaign with a winning lead: Roy Morgan kicked off 2025 with a 53-47 poll. Although as William Bowe has pointed out, this was down to an unusual preference allocation, with Labor’s primary vote actually having lifted.
Bowe’s BludgerTrack poll aggregator — the only poll you need to pay attention to — shows the Coalition has a tiny 0.6-point lead with a swing of 2.4%.
On Bowe’s state-based aggregates, Labor is facing swings against it in all mainland states. But it’s only in Victoria, home of Australia’s worst government, that the government is facing losing multiple seats (which is why Peter Dutton was there yesterday).
Even so, on those numbers, Labor would be sent deep into minority status — a welcome and, on the performance of the Albanese government, richly deserved outcome.
Albanese is already campaigning — you get the impression the Coalition planned to start campaigning early, but found itself having to bring things forward after the prime minister stole a march on it last week — with trips to (you guessed it) Queensland and Western Australia (more on those places another time). But at the moment Albanese is offering the status quo, which is not something voters find too appealing, even if Dutton’s nuclear-power-and-bigotry offering isn’t grabbing too many either.
Labor will be planning a series of policy announcements, both before and after the commencement of the formal campaign, with a treasure chest to call on in the budget papers. The most interesting question of the election campaign will be whether Labor continues to embrace Albanese’s signature managerialist caution as its defining feature, or will pursue a bolder economic agenda.
That voter perceptions of the cost of living are an existential threat to incumbents has now become a staple of political commentary across the West, especially in the wake of Donald Trump’s return. But Labor under Albanese has been particularly culpable in the way it sat back and allowed the Coalition — traditionally the party of business and still committed to rolling back Labor’s pro-worker industrial relations reforms — to outflank it, notably given the frighteningly high levels of inflation rampant under Scott Morrison when he lost office.
Labor’s approach to inflation has been managerialist: to tweak the regulatory settings of the economy and offer some small fiscal comfort to voters victimised by inflation caused by large corporations. At no stage has it embraced boldness or seen inflation as an opportunity, rather than a threat, that would enable it to pursue an agenda of rebalancing the economy toward the interests of workers and consumers and away from corporations. Even the Coalition has understood this opportunity and will go to the election with a sensible, centrist policy of adopting divestiture powers in relation to big retailers, while Labor settles for overhauling the merger assessment process in competition law.
Even as Labor appeared to bend over backwards to look after its Chairman’s Lounge mates at Qantas, the Nationals were talking about break-up powers there as well. Indeed, the government ignored a gift-wrapped chance for a significant intervention in domestic aviation via the administration of Rex, which could become the basis for a third, government-sponsored airline that can resist the anti-competitive behaviour of Qantas and Virgin and start offering consumers a real choice in an aviation market characterised by gouging and appalling service.
But such an intervention requires a change in mindset, from one in which the government simply tweaks the economic regulatory settings to one in which the government actively and aggressively pursues the interests of consumers and workers by directly intervening in, or re-entering, markets.
It’s not that Labor has lost this mindset entirely: that’s what drives its Future Made In Australia program. But the mindset is wholly misapplied there. Australia has a competition problem. It does not have a manufacturing problem. Unlike the US, we don’t have whole communities hollowed out by the loss of factories. We don’t even have enough workers to keep our kids housed, or our health and caring services properly staffed, but we’re trying to rebuild a manufacturing sector as if it were 1973, when one in 10 of us worked in a factory and British-born union leaders screamed “one out, all out” on TV news bulletins.
Future Made In Australia is a US-derived solution in search of a problem, when a similar solution — direct government intervention — is desperately needed in sectors like aviation instead, but apparently remains anathema.
What price some policy boldness from Labor in the election campaign, intended to signal to voters it really is committed to directly and aggressively protecting their interests in an economy controlled by large corporations and uncompetitive markets?
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