Overview

The week began with the death of Pope Francis, leading to both sides cancelling their planned campaign activities in Melbourne on Tuesday.

This lost day of campaigning – in addition to their agreed pause on Good Friday and Easter Monday – has been described as being worse for Mr Dutton’s campaign than for Mr Albanese’s, with the Coalition struggling to get its message across to undecided voters.

The third leadership debate of the campaign on Tuesday night was reportedly the ‘feistiest’ of the election so far, featuring a number of personal barbs such as Mr Dutton saying Mr Albanese “couldn’t lie straight in bed”, to which Mr Albanese responded: “You can go to personal abuse, that’s a sign of desperation, Peter, frankly”. The three-person panel of journalists declared Mr Dutton the winner by two to one.

Tuesday was also the beginning of early voting. The Australian Electoral Commission reported 542,000 Australians cast their vote on the first day, compared to 314,000 on the first day of early polling in 2022. It’s forecast that over 50 per cent of Australians will have voted before Election Day.

Early voting presents a range of challenges for political parties and candidates, needing to get their major policies announced and ensure their key messages are heard much earlier. Indeed, while it may be a five week campaign from start to finish, in reality it’s much shorter window to convince particularly undecided voters.

This week, both the ALP and Coalition announced their policies to combat domestic and family violence. Labor promised to introduce legislation to end financial abuse, and committed $8.6 million to innovative perpetrator responses including ankle bracelets and behaviour change programs. The Coalition announced a $90 million domestic violence strategy which includes the establishment of a national database of domestic violence offenders, and laws to prevent mobile phones being used to threaten victims.

The Coalition also unveiled its much-anticipated defence policy this week, pledging an extra $21 billion on defence by 2030.

Polling and Betting Markets

The polls released this week show a slight increase in the primary vote for Labor, with both Newspoll and Roy Morgan now putting Labor on 34 per cent and 34.5 per cent respectively. This is the highest level of support for Labor in Newspoll since January 2024.

Newspoll has also highlighted a dramatic shift in female voting intentions. Over the first quarter of the year, primary vote support for the Coalition was 38 per cent and 29 per cent for Labor. Now, Labor leads among women at 35 per cent, compared to 33 per cent support for the Coalition.

News Corp also conducted an exit poll of 4,000 people in 19 key seats (excluding WA and ACT), which found a 4.6 per cent swing towards Labor compared to 2022.

Meanwhile, the betting markets have shifted slightly to predict a tighter race. Sportsbet has Labor now priced at $1.22 and the Coalition at $4.30, compared to $1.20 and $4.60last week. TAB is similar, though intriguingly has now raised the price of a Coalition win to $4.50 from $4.25 last week, whilst Labor is at $1.20.

Significant shifts in the odds for key seats can indicate a flurry of bets based on information on the ground or party sources. However, given the Easter long weekend and scaled-back campaigning this week, many remain unchanged.

According to Sportsbet:

Policies Announced / Confirmed This Week

Australian Labor Party

• $78 million investment to establish the Advanced Entry Trades Training program which will fast track the qualification of 6,000 tradies to help build more homes across Australia.
• $32 million to support men’s health with funding going to Movember to provide men’s health care training and develop a campaign to encourage men to visit the doctor along with $20.7 million in grassroots initiatives including $8.3 million for Men’s Shed.
• A series of policies to support victims of family and domestic violence including $8.6 million committed to boost innovative perpetrator responses.
• Legislation to protect penalty rates in pay awards and a commitment make a submission to the annual wage review for an economically sustainable wage rise for workers on minimum and award wages.

The Coalition

• $21 billion boost to defence spending between now and 2030, with a goal of increasing overall defence spending to 2.5 per cent of gross GDP.
• $90 million for domestic and family violence, with measures including setting up a national domestic violence register and criminalising the use of phones to threaten victims.
• $250 million to the Roads to Recovery program, $10 million to establish a new Driver Revive Sites Upgrades program, and $6 million to expand the scope of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau to oversee a national no-fault crash investigation pilot.
• $100 million to establish a new Raising the Regions Program to deliver flexible and innovative approaches to early childhood education and care in regional and rural areas where there is limited or no supply.
• $260 million to deliver 12 Australian Technical Colleges, which will be specialist skills schools for years 10-12 or 11-12.
• $5 million to establish a new Veterans’ and Families’ Hub in Bathurst and $5 million to expand the Veterans’ Wellbeing Centre in Dubbo.

Australian Greens

• Pledged to negotiate for $210 million over five years to restore and protect the Great Southern Reef.
• Announced plan to allocate $20 million a year to provide grants to Australian festivals and $2 million for a review to investigate the insurance in the live music industry.

Commentary

“Anthony Albanese desperately wants to guard his poll lead. The unpredictability of a debate on commercial television was always going to be more precarious territory for the Prime Minister as the frontrunner. As long as Albanese got through without making an error, he could mark it down as a win. He will feel that he achieved this. For Peter Dutton, it was a case of having little to lose. He is the underdog and needed to make a greater impression.” – Simon Benson, Political Editor for The Australian

“From the failure of its own complex gas policy to resonate, to the constant, if fake, Labor scare campaign that the Liberals will cut Medicare to pay for a $600 billion nuclear policy, the Coalition has spent much of this campaign looking ill-prepared to assert a more positive agenda. Such flat-footedness doesn’t augur well for any overall ability of the Liberals to respond with necessary agility in the marginal seats it needs to win.” – Jennier Hewett, Columnist for the AFR

“The sustained reliance on anger and resentment at the government’s inadequacies has not only not worked, it looks to have backfired. With every day of the campaign so far, the poll ratings of Dutton and his party have fallen. To win, the electorate was always going to need more than a culture of complaint if they were to ditch the established practice of giving a first-term government a second go. Even now, with voting having already begun and only a week to go until election day, the Coalition’s agenda looks thin and disjointed.” – Shaun Carney, Columnist for The Age

“The first three weeks of this federal election campaign were comprehensively drowned out by tariff policy bombshells lobbed by one of the world's most famous men. Now, it appears the last two weeks will be obscured by the funeral and succession of the only other man on Earth more famous than the first. And — for good measure— the funeral will be attended by both.” – Annabel Crabb, Journalist and Commentator for the ABC

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