Frank Yuan

Foreign affairs haven’t featured prominently in this election, but events are moving fast in the wider world with real implications for Australia. It looks like President Donald Trump, the Dealmaker-in-Chief, has finally achieved something on trade. 

No, his Chinese counterpart still hasn’t called. This is about the US-Ukraine agreement announced hours ago, which grants America privileged access to investing in Ukraine’s natural resources development.

Reportedly, the deal would partly reimburse the US for its future military aid to Ukraine but – likely thanks to Ukrainian negotiators’ effort – the Trump Administration is apparently no longer demanding repayment for the aid already given to Ukraine. As it turns out, even when Trump tells you that “you don’t have any cards”, there are alternatives to capitulation.

Contrast that with the bipartisan consensus in Australia (with voters gravitating away from major parties) on AUKUS, a huge financial contribution to America’s military industrial complex for the highly uncertain prospect of America actually delivering nuclear submarines, even before we get to the questionable strategic rationale for having those submarines.

Another lesson for Australia is that its natural resources can be leveraged for the benefit of the wider public. The mineral and hydrocarbon deposits in Ukraine are just too good for Trump to walk away from. Australia’s advantage is even greater – resource endowment, political stability, and quality of workforce. So, shouldn’t Australians also make better deals for themselves with mining or fossil fuel businesses?

Stephen Long

Climate change seems to have barely featured in the media’s election coverage and in the contest between the major parties yet it ranks as one of the top concerns of voters.

On the ABC’s vote compass survey of more than a quarter of a million people, about 12% rank it as their number one concern. Overall it’s in the top four, above housing, health and immigration.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04-20/federal-election-2025-most-important-issue-vote-compass/105178788

So why is it receiving so little attention?

Perhaps its because everyone has decided this is the “cost of living election.”

Fair call – but the reporting, commentary, and much of the campaign rhetoric largely ignores the significant role climate change plays in driving up prices.

Australia Institute research shows a direct connection between climate change and the cost of living.

https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/climate-crisis-escalates-cost-of-living-pressures/.

Its key findings:

• Insurance premiums have soared due to an increase in natural disasters, with some households now spending over seven weeks of gross income just to cover home insurance.
• Food prices have risen by 20% since 2020, with climate-related disruptions wiping out harvests and making it harder for some regions to grow food.
• Energy costs remain high due to a reliance on fossil fuels, underinvestment in renewables, and fossil fuel exports locking Australia into high global energy prices, forcing Australians to compete with the global market for Australia’s resources.
• The impacts of the climate crisis disproportionately affect lower-income and regional households, who are already feeling the financial strain more severely.

Climate change-related cost increases have also kept interest rates higher for longer.

The Reserve Bank has repeatedly cited sticky “services inflation” as a reason for its reluctance to lower the cash rate.

Rising insurance premiums – driven by climate catastrophes – has been the main driver of this services inflation.

Despite the overwhelming evidence, there are still voters who don’t believe in climate change – but their insurance companies sure do.

Glenn Connley

Imagine being on top of the Liberal Senate ticket in the ACT.

It’s fair to say Jacob Vadakkedathu has been handed Mission: Impossible at this election.

Not only has Liberal leader Peter Dutton flip-flopped on a policy which would rip the heart out of the Canberra economy … the Opposition leader has left what – to be fair – appears to be a fairly poor candidate utterly high and dry.

In February, Mr Vadakkedathu survived a hastily-convened bid to have him booted off the ticket – slammed for his poor performance and accused of branch stacking to win the party’s endorsement in the first place.

Mr Vadakkedathu went on radio a fortnight ago, insisting Mr Dutton’s proposed public service cuts would not all be in Canberra … only for Mr Dutton to slap him down during a press conference in Tasmania a couple of days later. In what sounded like an off-the-cuff comment to keep Tassie journalists happy, the Opposition Leader said, yes, indeed, all 41,000 of his proposed public service job cuts would be in the capital.

This morning, Mr Vadakkedathu was back on ABC radio, in a debate with David Pocock, Katy Gallagher and Greens ACT Senate candidate Christina Hobbs.

When the subject inevitably turned to public service cuts, you could almost hear Mr Vadakkedathu’s heart drop.

To be fair, he vowed to fight Peter Dutton’s plan but, once again, insisted it was possible to rip the equivalent of several departments’ worth of jobs out of the public service, using only natural attrition and voluntary redundancies over five years, without destroying the public service.

To say Mr Vadakkedathu was torn apart by the other three candidates is an understatement.

They destroyed him.

And the more he fumbled and bumbled his way to find the right Dutton talking point, the deeper he dug.

Has Peter Dutton visited the ACT at all in this campaign? I don’t think he has.

For a bloke who wants the most important job in Canberra (albeit working remotely from beside Sydney Harbour) the disdain with which he speaks about the nation’s capital is sickening.

Perhaps he identified early that the Liberals had no chance of knocking off Mr Pocock or Ms Gallagher to win back the Senate spot the party lost in 2022.

Perhaps he identified early that he had a dud candidate.

But, as Mr Pocock so eloquently put it, “punching down on Canberra public service who, by law, aren’t allowed to fight back” … is pretty gutless.

Bill Browne, Joshua Black

At this stage of the election, you have no doubt seen plenty of political ads.

They’ll be on your TV screens, buffering at the start of YouTube videos and filling up your letterbox.

Who funds these ads?

Well, in large part, you do.

Over three years, Australia’s political parties received roughly a third of their money, $208 million, from the taxpayer.

And nobody knows where another third of their income came from.

Dark money

As Figure 1 shows, undisclosed funding (also called “dark money”) was the largest source of political parties’ income over the three-year period to 2023-24.

Some of that money is undisclosed because it was comprised of small donations gifted by small donors – individuals, small businesses and the like.

A party reliant on that sort of funding will inevitably record a large share of “dark money” in its finances.

But sometimes large donors find ways of evading donation disclosure rules, chiefly by splitting donations over time or spreading their contributions across multiple branches of a single party.

We don’t know what share of undisclosed donations are from bona fide small donors and what share are from large donors splitting their donations.

When the Albanese government proposed sweeping and unfair changes to Australia’s electoral laws last year, the bill’s main redeeming feature was the promise of lowering the donation disclosure threshold from nearly $17,000 (where it sits currently) to just $1,000.

But when the major parties stitched up the deal that saw the bill pass, they raised the new threshold to $5,000. This means “cash for access” payments of $4,999 and less will remain in the dark – which is seemingly most of them.

The Australia Institute, along with the Centre for Public Integrity, Australian Democracy Network and Transparency International Australia, have advocated for all cash-for-access payments to be disclosed, regardless of their size.

Over $100 million in contributions from the mining company Minerology have been placed in a separate column.

These contributions are significant, but exclusively went to Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party – so to include them in the donation figures for other politicians would distort the picture of how most candidates and parties are funded.

Public funding

Better the devil you know.

At least that was the argument for “clean” election funding when it was introduced in 1983.

Theoretically, public funding compensates parties for spending on election material such as advertising. But as Australia Institute research has pointed out, candidates only receive that money after an election campaign, leaving first-time contenders at a disadvantage.

That’s not the only problem with public election funding. At the federal level, there’s nothing stopping parties from using your money to tell you lies. South Australia and the ACT both have truth in political advertising laws, but federal MPs have not yet followed suit.

In 2024 the Albanese government drafted a bill to introduce truth in political advertising for federal elections, but they did not proceed with it. Instead, they prioritised a significant boost to public funding, which the Coalition supported. That means future elections will feature even more advertising with no disinformation guardrails attached.

There’s nothing wrong with political parties wanting to persuade voters. Political debate is a good thing and spending on political advertising is wholly legitimate.

But voters are entitled to expect certain standards from political parties that are in large part taxpayer funded.

For instance, in NSW parties are now more dependent on public funding than some public sector agencies such as art galleries and museums – but with much less public accountability.

Nobody has stopped to ask Australians what they expect in return for their money.

A bit more donations transparency and a lot more accountability for misleading advertising would significantly improve the quality of Australia’s election contests.

Dr Emma Shortis is in The Conversation today on how the Trump comparisons have hurt Dutton. (As the originator of Temu Trump I was surprised at how much it took off – but as Emma points out, it’s because it seemed to fit)

You can read the whole thing here, but Emma points out the press conference where JD Vance began berating the Ukrainian leader as a turning point (Or as I like to call it the ‘find out’ era after having ‘f*cked around’)

After this incident, Dutton was careful to distance himself from Trump’s abandonment of Ukraine. He even went so far as to say that leadership might require “standing up to your friends and to those traditional allies because our views have diverged”.

Similarly, influential Coalition powerbroker Peta Credlin wrote in The Australian:

it’s hard to see America made great again if the Trump administration’s message to the world is that the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must.

Therein lies the bind for the Coalition – an ideological alignment with “Make America Great Again” cannot be fully reconciled with a nationalism that puts Australian interests first.

MAGA ideology is all-or-nothing, not pick-and-choose.

During the election campaign, the Coalition attempted to walk the path of “pick-and-choose”. And Labor quite successfully used this against them. Assertions the opposition leader was nothing but a “Temu Trump”, or “DOGE-y Dutton”, stuck because they had at least a ring of truth to them.

Just back to Peter Dutton’s press conference for a moment – he is already in post-mortem mode:

We should have called out Labor’s lies earlier on. That’s something I have commented on before. But again, I think Australians as time has gone on, through this campaign, and they have seen the negative ads and see the posters, etc, as they go to the polling booths, people are smarter than that. They know, hang on, Anthony Albanese is talking about how good Medicare is. Bulk-billing rates are down by 11%. People are paying $43 out of pocket to go and see a doctor.

If you live here in Strathpine, or at Kallangur or in other areas around the country, in outer metropolitan areas, people are not making doctors’ appointments under this Government.

So I think there will be a level of backlash and a protest vote against the Labor Party for some of these false claims that have been made. The Prime Minister can’t look the Australian people in the eye and say they’re better off after three years. He can’t even answer that question when he’s – when it’s put to him at the Press Club. So the Prime Minister can’t tell you how you’re better off after three years, how do you expect, you know, to tell the story years’ old.

You can’t, because you’re not. The Prime Minister won’t tell people they’re better off after three years because you’re not. Now is the time to change a bad Government.

If we have a global recession or uncertainty in our region, you don’t want a Labor-Greens Government in power. Have a look at the economy in Victoria. Labor near destroy that economy and it’s a tragedy because it’s such a great state and we will rebuild Victoria. But when you have a look at what this Government has done, the hurt, the personal family hurt, that the Albanese Government has delivered on Australians is without precedent. We have had almost two years of negative household growth. A family of two, an average family is $50,000 worse off under this Government. And I think that people in increasing numbers will send a message to Mr Albanese that we’re in the happy about the last three years and they’ll support their Liberal-National Party candidate. If we do that, we can get this country back on track. We’ll get our economy well managed again and provide support to those families who are really in need.

Vaughan asked:

Do you know if is it an AEC requirement on how-to-vote cards handed out at polling stations to include each political party with each name? The LNP in McPherson (where they are preferencing One Nation) aren’t.

There are very few restrictions on political materials – including how-to-vote cards.

It is against the law to mislead people about how to vote, so for example you could not put out a how-to-vote card encouraging someone to tick the box next to a single candidate (that would be an invalid vote). Most other misleading political advertising is not illegal – although it should be, and nine in ten Australians support truth in political advertising laws.

We see a lot of variety in how-to-vote cards. For example, many independent candidates recommend a first preference for themselves and then encourage you to allocate later preferences yourself. Some candidates have given multiple options: follow this how-to-vote if you want me first and Liberal second, and follow that how-to-vote if you want me first and Labor second.

As long as it’s authentic and doesn’t confuse voters, I don’t think there’s a problem with different candidates taking different approaches to how-to-vote cards.

The ballot with which you vote does show a person’s political party. So when a political party or candidate leaves off political parties on their how-to-vote cards, it could indicate that they are embarrassed about who they are directing preferences to.

We have seen much more serious incidents in relation to how-to-vote cards.

For example, in 2019 in Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s seat of Dickson people handed out “How to vote for a minor party or independent” how-to-vote cards, with Animal Justice Party, Greens and Conservative Nationalist Party logos on them.

But the preference orders were different to what the parties themselves were recommending, and put major party MP Peter Dutton ahead of minor parties and independents! Journalist Sam Maiden had the scoop and Paul Karp later explained the AEC’s response. Similar incidents occurred in 2013, and in the 2020 ACT election.

Poverty is not something we have to accept. Australia is a rich country and while we might not be able to afford everything, we can afford anything – it is just about priorities.

Right now, both the government and the opposition choose to prioritise giving tens of billions in dollars in tax breaks to the wealthy, billions in fossil fuel subsidies and billions to gas companies by not charging royalties for the gas the extract or properly tax their profits over reducing poverty.

This is the choice they are making.

But two different times in Australia’s history, show how clearly the choice can be different – two times when governments dramatically reduced the number of people in poverty.

The first was in 1987 when Bob Hawke rather famously set the goal: “By 1990 no Australian child will be living in poverty”. He was often ridiculed for that statement afterwards, and yet it is undeniable that his setting the goal did have an impact.

In the 1970s and 1980s a family of 4 living on government benefits was very much living below the poverty line. After Hawke set the goal, that was reversed. The Hawke Government achieved an increase in payments for an unemployed family that put it 10% above the Henderson poverty line in the early 1990s.

All these gains were eroded away when John Howard changed the way payments were indexed. This saw people on these payments fall back below the poverty line.

The second time was during the pandemic when the Morrison Coalition Government introduced the COVID supplement. This gave $550 per fortnight for people on welfare payments and this one change immediately lifted 650,000 people out of poverty, including 120,000 children. Unfortunately, these people were pushed back into poverty when the supplement was later removed.

Both of these show that we don’t have to accept having hundreds of thousands of Australians living in poverty. It is all a matter of priorities.

Does Peter Dutton believe in miracles?

I feel confident, I feel good about where our candidates are and we have selected some amazing people, and we have got a record number of doors knocked in electorates, in many cases and this is evidenced in the research that we have done, our candidates have got a higher name ID than some lazy sitting Labor members. (you could say that about independents as well)

They have done more work, they’re more connected with their local electorates and that’s why I think you’ll see a lot of surprises seat by seat on Saturday night because there is an enormous amount of work that’s been undertaken on the ground and I have no doubt that – there are a lot of Australians who are saying – I haven’t voted Liberal before, but I’m going to vote for Liberal at this election because I have just had enough of not being able to afford to pay my bills. That’s the reality of life. I think that will be one of the issues obviously that decides the election.

There is a lot about the Coalition polling and you can tell who has been talking to Coalition sources because they use phrases like their polling ‘gets down under it’ and ‘really narrows down the vote’.

But for the polling to be this wrong, it would have to be wrong on primary and 2PP vote, and preferences and policy and leader’s popularity/unpopularity and trend. That has never happened before.

Despite having gone on about ‘wokeness’ in the education curriculum, Dutton says the Coalition don’t have any proposals to change it.

His answers are very, very short. This is a man who knows he has lost but has to keep up the charade for a little bit longer and he is struggling to do so.

Previously, he would have been in the background talking about how he would have done everything different and working to undermine the leader/campaign. Now it’s his. It’s his campaign, his leadership. And he’s not doing so well now that it’s all gone pearshaped