LIVE

Thu 24 Apr

Australia Institute Live: Day 27 of the 2025 election campaign. As it happened.

Amy Remeikis – Chief Political Analyst

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Key posts

The Day's News

07.07 AEST

The Age is reporting on an incident at a Kooyong candidate’s forum overnight, after three far right agitators gatecrashed the Friends of the ABC event and started screaming about immigration and home invasions.

The men made it their mission to disrupt the event and one woman had to be held back by people, including Monique Ryan herself, after she attempted to punch one of the men. They left after police arrived soon after.

There is some footage of the incident on the Age’s website.

Far right content creators and agitators have attempted to make themselves known in this campaign in a way we haven’t seen for some time – Anthony Albanese was surrounded by a group of far right influencers in his hotel lobby in Melbourne earlier in the campaign, which was a shock for both the campaign and those watching.

07.00 AEST

Good morning

Hello and good morning and welcome to day 27 of this seemingly never ending campaign! 

Both major party leaders are in Perth, so the press conferences will be a little later in the day, east coast time. 

Peter Dutton might still be recovering from what seemed one of the most difficult press conferences of his career yesterday. After settling on the traditionally Coalition safe area of defence spending as the next big announcement, Dutton didn’t get the strongman vibes he was hoping for and instead was questioned on how a government he led would pay for it (scrapping Labor’s tax cuts apparently), what support for Ukraine actually looked like to him (he’s a bit unsure) and included a couple of mess ups, including that he had no plans to change Australia’s Israeli embassy location – which had to be ‘clarified’ later to there being no change to the Coalition’s position that the embassy should recognise Israel’s illegal claim over Western Jerusalem.

There was another ‘clarification’ a little later in the day – Dutton WOULD scrap Labor’s FBT exemption for electric vehicles, which was a reversal from Monday when Dutton said the Coalition was only opposed to “Labor’s tax on hybrids’.

So things are going well.

Albanese also seemed a little off it with the press pack yesterday – he’s naturally a bit cranky and that was showing in yesterday’s press conference. So four weeks in and everyone is feeling a bit worse for wear. 

And we have a whole other day to get through! Huzzah. 

Coffee number two is on, the papers are read and the remaining Easter eggs are calling. 

Ready? 

Let’s get into it. 

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