(March 28): Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has called an election for May 3, kicking off what’s expected to be a closely-fought campaign centred on cost-of-living pressures and a housing crisis in a sluggish economy.

Albanese is campaigning to become the first Australian leader in more than two decades to win consecutive elections, a symptom of the long-running political fragmentation which has threatened the nation’s prized stretch of prosperity. 

Under Australia’s Westminster-style system, political parties form government, meaning leaders can be switched between elections. As a result, since 2004 there have been seven prime ministers yet only three changes of government. 

Albanese’s opponent, Liberal leader Peter Dutton, will be trying to tap into a global backlash against incumbents that saw governments fall across the world in 2024. However, Australia hasn’t voted out a first-term administration in a century and Dutton — a former Queensland policeman — has to make up a lot of ground.

“Your choice has never been more clear,” Albanese, the leader of the Labor party, told reporters in Canberra on Friday. “This election is a choice between Labor’s plan to keep building and Peter Dutton’s promises to cut.”

Hanging over the campaign is global uncertainty generated by US President Donald Trump and his plans for wide-ranging tariffs due to be announced next week. Albanese has accused Dutton of copying policies from overseas, a thinly-veiled swipe at similarities between parts of the opposition’s programme and those of the Trump administration.

In his first pitch to voters since the election was called, Dutton echoed Trump by asking voters whether they were better off now than they had been three years ago when Labor was elected.

“We can’t afford three more years like the last three. There is a better way for our country,” Dutton said at a press conference in Brisbane on Friday morning.

Albanese’s centre-left government has been struggling in opinion polls, with the prime minister’s approval rating deep in negative territory and his Labor party neck-and-neck with the centre-right Liberal-National coalition. Albanese and Labor now have a five-week election campaign to turn that around.

When Albanese won office in 2022, ending Labor’s nine years in opposition, he pledged action on climate change, a restoration of political integrity and more rights for Indigenous Australians. However, much of his term has been dominated by stubbornly strong inflation and high interest rates, as well as a housing shortage that’s been exacerbated by a surge in immigration.

Now his biggest promises in the 2025 campaign revolve around cost-of-living relief — newly-legislated tax cuts and an extension of rebates to help cushion households from rising power prices.

Labor maintains the worst of the cost-of-living squeeze is over, highlighting slowing inflation and the Reserve Bank’s (RBA) decision last month to cut interest rates for the first time in more than four years.

The RBA meets again next week and is expected to keep borrowing costs unchanged this time as it waits for further evidence that inflation is returning sustainably to its 2-3% target. Money markets are pricing the bank’s May 19-20 meeting as potentially the next for rate cuts, meaning it will be after the election.

Few lawmakers expect Dutton to form a government in his own right after the election. But there are hopes among members of his party that he may be able to win back enough frustrated outer suburban seats in Sydney and Melbourne to have a shot at putting together a minority administration.

At the very least, Dutton will be looking to force Albanese into minority government, with the goal of defeating him at the election after this one.

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