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2025-01-31 14:00
The reopening of parliament for 2025 will drag Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton back to Canberra for the next two weeks. But their travel schedules during a faux-campaign in January show both leaders are likely much keener shaking hands and rattling tins anywhere but the nation’s capital.
The official starter’s gun hasn’t yet been fired on the election campaign, but you wouldn’t know it from the leaders’ schedules. Crisscrossing the country with splashy announcements and jovial visits to marginal seats, Albanese and Dutton are in the media almost daily. The brushstrokes of a campaign strategy are already evident.
So far Albanese is focusing on sandbagging seats. Dutton, with a mountain to climb, needs to win a lot.
First the numbers. After the next election, when the House of Representatives will shrink to 150 seats again from its current 151, a government needs 76 seats to claim victory outright. Labor currently holds 78, the Liberal-National coalition has 55, and there are 18 crossbenchers.
To govern in majority, Labor can afford to lose just two seats, and the Coalition would need to pick up 21.
To be fair, Dutton’s numbers look worse than they might be. Calare and Monash, which voted Coalition at the last election, have seen their members defect to the crossbench, so notionally one could say the opposition leader is on 57. Labor-held Higgins and independent North Sydney are being abolished, and a new Western Australian seat of Bullwinkel is regarded as notionally Liberal, so things may be a little less steep for Dutton.
But even on the rosiest projections, the Coalition still needs to pick up about 20 seats just to scrape a majority.
Of course, Labor losing its majority looks more likely – at this stage – than the Coalition winning a majority of its own, so the crossbench comes into play. Getting to the high 60s or low 70s in a seat tally might be enough for either leader to cobble together a clutch of crossbenchers to support them.
But to borrow a sporting analogy, when you’re in the lead and your opponent is hunting points, it sometimes pays to play defence. So far, Albanese seems to be focusing on “parking the bus”.
Polling shows Dutton ascendant and Labor losing ground. But while the momentum might favour Dutton, Albanese has a healthy lead on the scoreboard that matters. Despite growing commentary that the election is now Dutton’s to lose, momentum counts for less when you’re facing a large deficit and a ticking clock.
Even the most optimistic Liberal sources currently struggle to name a dozen seats the Coalition could realistically win, even before taking into account the ones they may lose; but it’s far simpler to push Albanese into minority government.
Both men have a goat track to majority government. And we’re starting to see the contours of that track.
Analysis of the travel plans of the prime minister and opposition leader (as of Thursday) show while they’ve visited approximately the same number of seats this year, their plans are vastly different. Albanese has visited 14 Labor seats out of the 20 he’s flown into; while Dutton is spending most of his time in hostile territory, with 14 of his 17 visits into Labor or independent electorates.
Albanese is playing just as much defence as Dutton is playing offence – the benefit of a healthy lead.
Of course, it’s important to stress it’s only January, and things change quickly. The prevailing political logic is that most Australians don’t pay much attention to the news or politics before Australia Day, so the early travel plans might be very different to how Albanese and Dutton run their proper campaigns.
While Albanese has only visited five Coalition-held seats so far, with Labor realistically in the hunt to win just two of those – the Cairns seat of Leichhardt and Tasmania’s Braddon – Dutton has been focusing largely on marginals and recently held Liberal seats.
Since 12 January Dutton has visited Chisholm, Kooyong, Ryan, Wentworth, Bennelong, Boothby, Curtin – all seats lost under Scott Morrison, including three formerly blue-ribbon Liberal heartland seats won by teal independents.
He’s also popped into Blair, Lyons, Eden-Monaro and Gilmore – seats held by Labor on smaller margins, in the outer suburban or regional areas that Dutton’s strategy is said to focus on.
Albanese, in contrast, has been shoring up some key Labor seats in exactly those areas: Gilmore, Lyons, Werriwa, Hunter, Shortland and Aston. On swings through Western Australia, potentially Labor’s safest territory, he visited Hasluck, Pearce and Brand. He’s visited Parramatta, Chifley and Greenway in Sydney’s western suburbs mortgage belt.
The PM has also popped up for several press conferences and speeches in Canberra – which, as he constantly points out, including at the National Press Club last week, Dutton rarely does.
Both men have gone to Lingiari, Leichhardt, Lyons, Gilmore and Bullwinkel – perhaps early signs these will be closely-fought seats.
Parliament returns on Monday for two weeks. It might be the last sitting period of this term before the election. The budget is pencilled in for 25 March, but most Canberra observers are now expecting the election to be called shortly after the WA election in early March, which would cancel the budget.
The faux-campaign will continue with two weeks of road-testing election lines and talking points in parliament’s question time, and maybe some announcements before the national press (perhaps even a Dutton press conference? We wait in hope).
But Albanese and Dutton won’t be unhappy to see the back of Canberra at the end of this sitting fortnight, and it’s unlikely either of them will spend much time in the capital again until one of them takes their seat in the prime minister’s office sometime before the end of May.
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