Albanese treats the last question – the opposition has accused you of a ‘spendathon’ as a dixer (which is rich coming from the opposition given it has been on its own ‘spendathon’ and has matched Labor on a whole heap of policies).

Albanese:

We put out the costings yesterday that we put out the costings that were fully costed out there for all to see. Where are their costings? This mob, to be fair to them it must be difficult for them to find costings because from day-to-day their policies change.

How do you cost things when you are all over the shop? Working from home, on migration, on how to track housing policy: so many areas of some areas they are on the same day is giving different messages depending upon where people live. What we know is that they are combining with One Nation here in other places trying to do these preference deals that you have all sorts of strange occurrences [like] the Exclusive Brethren, which they need to explain going forward.

Where are all these people coming from? Why are they campaigning?

They don’t vote but they all of a sudden have found enthusiasm in their hundreds to travel around the country to hand out how to vote? What is going on there?

We have in the Labor Party, a clear consistent position going forward, of building Australia’s future, people know on Saturday if they want certainty in these turbulent times that they’ll get a tax cut, they get a 5% deposit, for first home buyers, they’ll get free TAFE and a 20 % reduction in student debt. Future Made in Australia. A government that wants to seize the opportunities and take action on climate change is well.

Asked what he has done for renters while prime minister, Albanese says:

That we have increased rental assistance by 45 present. We are the first government since rental assistance came in to have consecutive real increases in rental assistance.

Which does nothing to help lower rents, or even help more people who are struggling financially with their rent because of a) the hoops you have to jump through to receive rental assistance b) landlords usually end up increasing the rent because of the increase in rent assistance and c) the increase has not come anywhere near matching the jumps in rental prices.

So the actual answer here, is nothing.

There is another pointless back and forth about what a credit agency might be thinking.

Albanese is asked when there will be a 2035 emissions target and says:

Under the legislation that was carried in the Parliament we need to receive the advice from the Climate Change Authority when we receive that, the government will consider it. It will be released. Publicly. That’s what how we will set at 2035 target.

Joshua Black

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Election campaigns come and go, but some go faster than others.

If the current election campaign feels long and sluggish, that may be because there have been few meaningful announcements.

The 2025 election campaign is scheduled to run for 37 days. This makes it roughly average for campaigns over the past thirty years.

However, public holidays and long weekends can shape campaign behaviour and impact voter engagement. The 2019, 2022 and 2025 elections all coincided with the Easter long weekend as well as ANZAC Day. (No federal elections from 1996 to 2016 coincided with a nationwide long weekend or public holiday.)

Public holiday dates over the Easter long weekend vary from one state to another, but as political scientists have shown, the four-day interruption to the campaign sees lower public interest, reduced media coverage and the voluntary suspension of some campaign activity.

With public holidays and long weekends excluded, 2025 is the shortest campaign of the past thirty years at just 32 days of proper campaigning. That includes polling day. It also includes the 22 April 2025, a day on which the major parties suspended their campaigns as a sign of respect for the late Pope Francis.

The law gives the prime minister some discretion in how long the election campaign runs after the House of Representatives is dissolved, but it must run for between 33 and 68 days in total and polling day must be a Saturday.

Beyond that, the timing is up to the PM in consultation with the Governor-General.

The general trend over the past 20 years has been for shorter rather than longer campaigns. The chief exception was 2016. The then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull pursued a double dissolution in the hope of winning extra Senate seats (he ultimately lost three). Constitutionally, a double dissolution had to be called by 11 May, but the election cycles of the two houses would fall out of sync if polling day occurred before 1 July. The result was an election campaign closer to the maximum length.

And while the formal election campaign is restricted by law, politicians can – and do – start campaigning ahead of any election announcement. Another reason why this election might feel long is because the major parties started campaigning in earnest in January.

In fact, a PM could announce their preferred election date on the first day of each parliament – and give everyone advance notice so they can plan their lives around the date. In 2013 Julia Gillard announced in January her intention to hold an election on 14 September. However, this was seen as a mistake that threw away the advantages of incumbency.

Control over election timing gives PMs a tantalising opportunity to place political expedience over consistency, predictability and fairness. Parliamentary agreements for three-year fixed terms, which the Australia Institute has proposed in the Democracy Agenda for the 48th Parliament, would do much to remove the partisan advantage and opportunism from election timing.

Q: Abrams tanks the government pledged to Ukraine more than six months ago are still here in Australia, is the United States delaying or blocking the transfer of these tanks or is there another reason in Australia to blame for this?

Albanese:

We are working on providing further support for Ukraine. We are contributing like $1.5 billion, 1.3 billion has been direct military support. There are logistical issues of course in moving tanks, not something you can put on a fax machine and you need to make sure you get it right. But we are continuing to back Ukraine. It’s one of the big differences as well at this election campaign, there was bipartisanship on support for Ukraine. We have said we are prepared to inner peace situation to be part of a coalition of the willing. Keeping the peace, Peter Dutton has opposed that.

Jim Chalmers comes in here too:

Very briefly, is a very important difference. The savings we are making build on the progress that Katy and the team have made over the first three years saving billions of dollars investing in the capacity of the Australian public service but winding back some of these outrageous levels of spending on contractors and consultants.

We showed an ability to do this. We’ll make the savings without coming up to people or wages or programs and here’s another important difference here. Peter Dutton wants to sack 41,000 people with all the consequence that will mean for veterans and people on pensions and payments. That’s the difference. The reason he has this policy is because he implements his policies directly from the United States. He wants the Americanisation of health, public service and education. He draws his inspiration from the policies and politics and slogans of the United States.

We believe in the capacity of the Australian public service, that’s why we are investing in their capacity and one of the reasons we’ve been able to do that in a budget which has improved substantially since we came to office is because we’ve been winding back things like expensive contractors and consultants but also travel and hospitality in some of those areas.

This is a fun question.

Q: You criticised Peter Dutton for his cuts to the public service and say that will reduce services to Australians. Aren’t you doing the same thing in a different way? Yesterday with your costings you are cutting consultants. You are cutting consultants and he is cutting public services but both provide service to the public. You are cutting services to the public in a different way.

Albanese:

That is completely not right. What we’re is cutting out some of the waste. Some 54,000 consultants over the period of office. I have met people and I am sure you have as well as a proud Canberran, met people who used to be a deputy secretary of the Department earning reasonable wages, $200,000 for a senior role. Now they are working half the time getting paid double the amount under when the Coalition were in office doing the same thing providing advice as consultants for the big four firms in particular.

A complete collapse.

We saw that 42,000 veterans were denied entitlements. Not anything extra, men and women who served our nation in uniform, some of whom passed away before they got their entitlements they had earned. [The Coalition] had Andrew Gee, you might remember, when he was a Veterans’ Affairs Minister, had to threaten to resign before the 2022 budget and they changed the budget speech, did not change all the budget papers because it was a last-minute thing to try and keep him entertained, because it was such an outrage what had occurred.

Barnaby Joyce as the shadow Veterans’ Affairs Minister in a rare public appearance during this election campaign pointed out as well that that was a problem under the former government. as well. That that was a problem under the former government. What the former government. we are doing, we are backing Australians, Peter Dutton is sacking Australians. And there will be less services whether it’s Services Australia Australian Defence Force, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the National Emergency Management Agency didn’t exist under the former government.

What happens with ASIO, Operation Sovereign Borders, the Australian Signals Directorate. These are security agencies and defence represent more than 20,000 of 68,000 public servants who are currently in Canberra.

41,000 of them are going to be sacked. That will have a devastating impact on Australian services

Jim Chalmers steps in to answer another question about the AAA credit rating:

There will be no reason to lose the AAA if Labor is re-elected. We have shown an enthusiasm for economic management, we have a good record for responsible economic management. I invite you to recall what the budget look like the day we came into office. The Treasury Secretary coming to my place after the election and there were huge deficits as far as the eye could see, we turned into two surpluses. We had this year’s deficit, and after a whole election campaign at the end of the election campaign the budget was in better nick than the start of the election campaign.

The PM is making the same point I make today and I made yesterday and Katy made yesterday is we value the AAA credit rating, we got them stable under Labor.

We know their opinions matter. We are providing exactly the right kind of responsible economic management the ratings agencies value.

Is Anthony Albanese concerned with Peter Dutton’s return to stoking right-wing culture wars?

Albanese:

Peter Dutton has spent a political career stoking division, trying to turn Australians against each other, starting culture wars, I am not interested in culture wars, I am interested in fighting for Australians.

Is Anthony Albanese going to go to Dickson while he is in Brisbane? Albanese started his campaign in Dutton’s seat of Dickson as a bit of rabble rousing and given it it a marginal seat, there are those who think Dutton could lose it (unlikely given the seat’s history. It has always been marginal – so much so that Dutton at one stage tried to unseat Karen Andrews for McPherson, which was a much safer bet (he lost) but when the Coalition is on an upward swing Dickson increases his margin and when its on the nose, the margin gets smaller – but he has held it since 2001.)

Albanese says:

Labor can certainly win what is the most marginal seat in Queensland…we get the sense that we had in the 2022 election, Ali Francis [could] be elected, the member Dickson.

Peter Dutton has gone away from his electorate, not to it, Ali France is committed to the electorate and what’s more Peter Dutton is now saying he wants a nuclear reactor and that electorate as well.

I think Peter Dutton’s key point in this election campaign where he showed a level of arrogance extraordinary very early on when he in an interview said he wanted to live in Kirribilli House. A Queensland Prime Minister who wanted to not live in the national capital but preferred Sydney, to living in the Prime Minister ‘s residence in The Lodge. I think that will go down very badly in his electorate. And will continue to campaign, we are campaigning very hard in Dickson.