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Anthony Albanese has urged Australia’s voters to reject global uncertainty and back his government as he wraps up his election campaign and seeks to become the first prime minister to claim back-to-back victories in more than 20 years.
Australia’s poll on Saturday comes just days after Canada gave a comeback win to the country’s incumbent government, now under the leadership of Mark Carney. It could cement a trend in which global elections are defined by a reaction against Donald Trump.
Polls suggest a narrow advantage for Albanese and his Labor party over Peter Dutton and the rightwing Liberal party. Dutton, a former police officer, has campaigned on a Trump-like platform of slashing the public sector workforce and attacking the “woke” agendas of Australian institutions.
Both parties’ leaders criss-crossed the country on a final hunt for votes. Voting is mandatory, and ballot boxes have already been open for more than a week.
Albanese opened the penultimate day of the campaign in Dutton’s seat of Dickson in Queensland, which the Liberal leader holds by a slim margin and the Labor leader has said his party could win.
“Australians, in uncertain times, need continuity. The country needs continuity as we go forward,” said Albanese.
A YouGov poll on Thursday indicated Labor was on course to win 84 of the lower house’s 150 seats, up from 78 in the last parliament. It suggested the Liberal-led Coalition could lose 11 seats from the 58 it won in 2022, which would represent its worst performance since 1946.
Paul Smith, director of public data at the polling company, said Labor had improved its performance in the outer suburban and regional seats targeted by Dutton. “This is a dramatic campaign turnaround considering our data in February pointed to a likely Coalition government,” he said.
Cory Alpert, who worked on US election campaigns for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, said Trump’s tariff policies and aggression towards US allies had refocused the minds of voters during the campaign.
He said Dutton and Pierre Poilievre, Canada’s conservative leader who lost this week’s election as well as his own seat, had “misread the tea leaves” by aligning themselves with Trump-style policies. “Trump’s not a mythical figure any more. He’s having a real impact on people’s retirement accounts in Australia,” said Alpert.
“The story that is emerging now in Canada and Australia is that the world is reacting and responding to what Trump is doing,” said Alpert, who is researching the impact of artificial intelligence on democracy in regional Australia.
Kos Samaras, director of strategy at polling company Redbridge, said a simple outright majority would be “a good Saturday night” for Albanese. That would avoid the need for support from the Greens or other independents.
Albanese said there was still “a mountain to climb” for his party to win the election outright.
Dutton said Saturday could still bring a “2019 situation” in which his party defied the polls and won what was called a “miracle” election win.
Australia’s voting system — whereby votes are redistributed based on the voter’s ranking of their preferred candidates until one achieves a majority — could provide a sting in the tail. A third of the electorate voted for an alternative candidate to the two major parties in the last election.
John Scales, founder of JWS Research, said voter disengagement with the Labor and Liberal parties had never been higher.
Smaller rightwing parties including the populist One Nation, led by senator Pauline Hanson, and the Maga-inspired Trumpet of Patriots, founded by mining magnate Clive Palmer, are expected to win many votes.
That could potentially “turbocharge” the distribution of preference votes towards the centre-right Liberal party and improve their performance. “It won’t be enough to swing it, but it could put a [Labor] majority out of sight,” said Scales.
