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DANIEL:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Daniel James, this is 7am.

The 2025 federal election campaign has already begun, even if unofficially. While most Australians are still enjoying their summer, Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton are already in fight mode.

For Labor, the stakes are high. To secure a second term they’re hoping to reverse their losses in Queensland and regain popularity with an apathetic electorate. For the Coalition, it’s about regaining ground in suburban seats and capitalising on the government’s self-inflicted wounds.

Today, The Saturday Paper’s associate editor Martin Mackenzie-Murray on the “shadow campaign” already underway, and what Labor insiders say is the biggest threat to the government winning a second term.

It’s Monday, January 13.

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DANIEL:

Marty, happy 2025 and good morning. I'm not going to ask you about what you did this summer, but what the prime minister did. What's he been up to?

MARTIN:

Well he didn't go to the sport. Typically, over the holidays there are, you know, public appearances. We had a beautifully dramatic summer of cricket.

DANIEL:

The best.

MARTIN:

It was. But Albanese was a little conspicuous by his absence, and that's for good reason. He's sending a message that he is committed to work in preparation for the election, which is imminent-ish. Where he has been is Queensland, Northern Territory and Western Australia, where he began his quick tour last week.

He went up to Cairns, he went to the great mining town of Mount Isa where he announced about $50 million for housing infrastructure. He then flew to a cattle station in the NT and then on to Kununurra in Western Australia's Kimberley region.

Audio Excerpt - Anthony Albanese:

“but in this very vast state of Western Australia, we announced $200 million of additional funding for community infrastructure and for housing infrastructure to allow new builds in housing.”

MARTIN:

So he was out there promising the development of Australia. When it was asked of him in a media conference in Queensland. Whether or not government expenditure, including social expenditure, had aggravated inflation, he was sort of unapologetically emphatic about defending the Government's commitment to social expenditure.

Audio Excerpt - Journalist:

“You're going to have to pull some pretty fast levers to convince the electorate, I believe, that they're feeling better off because right now most people are feeling like they're going backwards, Prime Minister.”

Audio Excerpt - Anthony Albanese:

“Well under Labor, we will continue to build Australia's future. Under the Coalition, there we will go backwards under Peter Dutton, and things will cost more. Their only plan that they have put forward is for nuclear reactors that’ll cost...”

MARTIN:

There's sort of this informal campaign at the moment where it's not officially stated, but effectively the Government has mobilised into campaign activity.

DANIEL:

Yet he is clearly in campaign mode. Is there a date that seems to be firming for when the election will be?

MARTIN:

There's a lot of speculation and, of course like with this tactical coyness a lot of people are guessing, but plenty within the government believe that early April is a good guess. Which would oblige a declaration in early March.

DANIEL:

What are the benefits from a government perspective for choosing an early April date?

MARTIN:

So the benefit, what I've heard is Albanese wouldn't mind a fortnight of Parliament that's due to be recalled in February, and then the avoidance of a budget which is going to be quite unflattering to the Government.

DANIEL:

So until the election is called we are, like you said, in unofficial campaign mode. What are the early signs of what the campaign will actually be about?

MARTIN:

Well, this is the, this is the great question.

DANIEL:

What's, what's the battlegrounds?

MARTIN:

So there's the electoral calculus, so perhaps I'll begin there.

DANIEL:

Sure.

MARTIN:

Queensland was a huge problem in the previous federal election, as it was pointed out to me by a campaigner, a Labor campaigner. They described it as almost a landslide, the previous election, outside of Queensland. So they had already historic highs in South Australia and Victoria, they improved upon them. They overwhelmed in Western Australia, a state typically difficult for Labor. But Queensland, they in fact went backwards and their representation, federal representation, there is the lowest it's been since 1996. So Queensland for Labor is a focus.

Audio Excerpt - Anthony Albanese:

“We built areas where I was yesterday, Cooroy to Curra, just around the Gympie area. We built and started work on the Townsville Ring Road on the Mackay Bypass, on all of these projects up and down the Bruce. But it was being neglected by the former government, we're addressing that.”

MARTIN:

For the Coalition, Victoria. Classically a more liberal state, lowercase L liberal, one that’s been difficult for the coalition.

Audio Excerpt - Peter Dutton:

“Well, my friends, it's great to be back in Victoria. Thank you very much for being here today. I want to repeat what I've said…”

MARTIN:

So Albanese's busyness compelled Dutton's, and last weekend he did something of his own informal campaign when he went and did an event in Melbourne suburbs which is an area that they're going to have to reclaim some seats.

Audio Excerpt - Peter Dutton:

“If we win Chisholm, we're a step closer to winning government. And if we win government, we can get Victoria and our country moving again.”

MARTIN:

This is kind of the considerable feeling within the Coalition is that they're going to have to take seats back from Labor that they lost in Melbourne suburbs.

DANIEL:

You've been speaking to insiders, people at various levels of the Labor Party, including people close to the PM. How are they feeling about their prospects?

MARTIN:

It depends who you speak to. So those close to the Prime Minister say he's very confident, bullish even, about his prospects. And sort of the further away you go from the Prime Minister’s office, I think the greater the skepticism in the Prime Minister’s wisdom and confidence. There's been a lot of grumbling about Albanese's political judgement.

There was the expensive coastal holiday home which people were bitterly incredulous about. They thought that signified this very surprising absence of political judgement. And then, of course, there was the historic matter of Qantas and Albanese when he was the Minister for Infrastructure and Transport, i.e. the minister responsible for regulating Qantas, who was enjoying certain privileges.

When that story came to light, Albanese became incredibly kind of bitterly defensive. Again, particularly those on the the sort of the outskirts, those backbenchers, particularly those in marginal seats and who are becoming quite anxious about the polls, grumbled about the Prime Minister's kind of serial self-harm. So it depends upon who you speak to. But certainly Albanese is confident and not just confident of returning, but confident of returning with a majority.

DANIEL:

After the break, can the Labor party ever win outright again?

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DANIEL:

Marty, you've been speaking with a lot of people inside Labor and long time Labor watchers, about how they're trying to reset their agenda this year. What are their chances of winning re-election? I mean how are they thinking about the parts of the country where they’ll do well and where they’ll struggle?

MARTIN:

Yeah. So I mentioned the electoral significance of Queensland for Labor, when you asked me how this might be or where it might be fought upon, then there's the thematic stuff. And I think this is the dispiriting thing. Certainly the thing that was shared with me by one Labor insider is that it augurs poorly any expectation we might have of a campaign that's fought on substance. And this is from a Labor insider, and the reason they say that is on one side you have a weakened Prime Minister who seems kind of increasingly hapless, inarticulate and charmless, they are quite critical descriptions of the of the Prime Minister, who cannot sell an articulate and coherent vision for the country.
On the other, you have an opposition leader who has no vision whatsoever. And that's not to say he doesn't possess one, he certainly doesn't express it and nor has he needed to. There's been this kind of pragmatic restraint that Dutton has shown, and he's learned something from the previous election where Albanese could largely sit back, watch Morrison self-harm and have the electorate not embrace Albanese, but in fact kind of reject Morrison.

So on one side you have a Prime Minister who kind of offers no coherent, strong, articulate vision for the country, and on the other an alternative Prime Minister who needn't offer a vision whatsoever. And so what they're pre-empting with this is, is a campaign that becomes simply a highly personalised referendum on Albanese.

DANIEL:

Is the Government taking the threat from the rise of independents in the Parliament seriously? What are they doing to mitigate that risk?

MARTIN:

It's a really, really interesting time. We've been trending towards this place for a while now and that place is a fairly evenly split electorate. So in the previous federal election it was split pretty evenly between Labor, the Coalition and independents. And Labor were euphoric, obviously, previous election. They returned to government after nearly a decade in opposition. But that euphoria concealed or disguised a really anaemic primary vote. Labor received 32% of the primary vote, about 34-35% the Coalition, and the remainder going to independents. So that is unprecedented. And so for all of the euphoria that Labor enjoyed, there was still the issue of that primary vote.

And the Labor insider said that he felt that Labor was more vulnerable to this kind of erosion of the primary vote and this dissolution of traditional tribal loyalties that, as the historian Frank Bongiorno was talking to me about, has been eroding. Typically a bunch of kind of cultural allegiances, it might be to church, it might be to a union, it might be to a political party and might be all of the above. These were allegiances that were embedded in the family and often inherited intergenerationally. That's no longer true. We're kind of at a hinge point, I think. And the sum of this is the Labor insiders said they didn't want to be overly dramatic, but they did not think it implausible that the previous federal election was the last time that Labor would enjoy a majority.

And when I put that to Frank Bongiorno, I said, you know, is this, is this alarmist? And, you know, he was emphatic, absolutely not. It's hardly controversial judgement to think that that might be the case that Labor will struggle to form majority government into the future.

DANIEL:

He talked about the euphoria that Labor felt when they won and the big promises that Albanese made that night. The first thing he mentioned was the referendum on The Voice. How much damage to the loss of the voice referendum do to Albanese's popularity?

MARTIN:

I think it was known at the time that it was rather damaging, but in retrospect it was more damaging than I think even I realised. He had pegged so much of himself to it, and the referendum that it wasn't a minor loss. It was a rather, kind of, resounding loss. And I think we can look back now and see how crippling that was to the government's self-conception, its credibility and its optimism.

DANIEL:

This next question probably answers itself Marty, but if Albanese loses after just one term whose fault will that be?

MARTIN:

So one thing I've been talking about a lot this week with Labor Insiders, and also with the historian Frank Bongiorno, is in this era of increasing fractiousness and increasing voter impatience, like the conventional wisdom was a first term government would not be voted out in Australia.

One Labor insider says to me, well, what's the value of conventional wisdom anymore? So when you say whose fault is it, how do you pass an era? So the context of Albanese’s leadership, which is an era of declining primary vote for the major parties, declining tribal allegiances, a political context that is more difficult to assert national mandate, you have this kind of larger context. So where do you separate that from the individual himself, Albanese?

And it's a mixture, right? So I think, I think you know when insiders complain about Albanese's inarticulacy, his haplessness post-referendum, that kind of sudden evaporation of credibility and direction. They also had a very awkward inheritance of, of inflation as well, a problem that hadn't stricken Australia in decades. Where does one separate those too?

And I think well, certainly for the Labor insider, there was some forgiveness for Albanese given modern times, given the difficulty of governing, but also that he is perhaps the wrong man. The wrong man in the wrong time.

DANIEL:

It's going to be a big year, Marty, thank you for coming in and thank you for your time.

MARTIN:

Thank you.

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DANIEL:

Also in the news today,

Special counsel Jack Smith, who led two unsuccessful federal cases against President-elect Donald Trump, has resigned.

The former war crimes prosecutor had pursued Trump on charges of trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election and mishandling classified documents.

Mr Smith lost in both a district court and in the Supreme court, which was made up of three Trump-appointed judges. His resignation was expected.

And a synagogue in Sydney’s inner west has been targeted with anti-semitic graffiti in an attempted arson attack.
Police commissioner Karen Webb said the two people believed responsible used a clear liquid to light a fire at the synagogue which extinguished itself in a matter of minutes. A number of red swastikas had been spray painted out the front.

NSW Premier Chris Minns says the attack marks an escalation in anti-semitic crime in NSW. The investigation has now been taken over by counter-terrorism police.

I’m Daniel James, this is 7am. Thanks for listening.

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