Is Australia about to emulate Canada?

Whoever said that campaigns make no difference?

Until recently, it was received wisdom that the frenetic final weeks before an election made little actual difference to the outcome. With voters having made up their minds – either consciously or not – many months prior.

Few say this now.

UK politics got a rude awakening to this fact in 2017, when mid-way through the campaign the Prime Minister exclaimed – after a botched Manifesto announcement about social care funding – that ‘nothing has changed’. ‘Nothing’, that was, other than the overnight evaporation of a previously large and unassailable poll lead.

In Canada this week we’ve seen the centre-left Liberals overturn three years of horrendous polling to secure a remarkable fourth term in government.

With a General Election taking place in Australia this weekend, could our antipodean cousins be about to prove the same thing?

For the past year, polling has narrowly indicated that the centre-right Liberal-National ‘Coalition’ looked most likely to form the next government – either with a slender majority or as the largest party in a minority administration.

Federal and State by-elections have seen some significant swings against Labor in recent months – with the Liberals almost taking Labor stronghold of Werribee on a 10% swing. The type of result that’s usually a harbinger for an imminent change of government.

Yet in recent weeks, since the election was called, it has been the incumbent Australian Labor Party that has enjoyed a slight but consistent poll lead.

The political context in Australia is quite different to Canada.

Canada’s election was dominated by Trump’s tariffs and ‘51^st State’ claims – with the Canadian Liberals given a fresh face after the resignation of Justin Trudeau as Prime Minister and replacement by the respected Mark Carney. 

And whilst the ‘Trump factor’ is unhelpful to centre-right parties across the board, the key drivers behind the Australian election are more complex – and in many ways more akin to traditional political battles.

So what’s been going on in the Australian election? And what might the results bring this weekend?

To form a majority government, a party needs to secure 76 seats in the House of Representatives. 

With 77 seats at present, if Labor loses just two seats it’s into minority government territory. For the Lib-Nat Coalition to form a government, it would need to gain 18 seats.

The Lib-Nat Coalition came into the election with some key in-built advantages. 

According to Ipsos, cost of living remains by far the number one concern among Australians. Over the past year the Coalition has relentlessly tapped into the heavy toll inflation has had on people’s daily lives, alongside pledges to improve access to housing and stabilise energy costs  – whilst riding a mood amongst many voters that Labor’s Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Voice referendum was a costly and divisive error.

Yet over the course of the campaign, Labor have had some success in shifting the debate. 

A pre-election giveaway Budget sought to neutralise cost-of-living attacks with further tax-cuts promised for next year – on top of those implemented last year. 

At the same time, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has taken every opportunity to shift the debate onto investment in Medicare – an issue on which Labor polls stronger – with promises to resolve problems around ‘bulk billing’ failing to cover the full cost of many GP services (the system by which the government funds the cost of medical care).

Newspoll reports that voters prefer Anthony Albanese over Liberal leader Peter Dutton as Prime Minister by a margin of 51% to 35%. And whilst not actively disliked by most voters, Dutton has not been seen as inspiring under the campaign spotlight.

For their part, the Liberals have continued to hit the right notes on policy issues around housing, energy and petrol costs – and crafted some amusing social media skits depicting Albanese as a Muppet-style puppet who can’t admit when he’s (very visibly) fallen off a stage.

But overall, they seem to have struggled to land upon a compelling narrative for change.

It’s also a little surprising that the Lib-Nats haven’t gone harder in warning of the prospect of Green-Lab coalition dragging the government further to the left – and linking this to higher taxes and further pressures on the cost of living. 

Together, this could leave swing voters deciding it’s ‘better the devil you know’ than ‘definitely time for change’.

What are the polls saying?

Until March, the Lib-Nat Coalition maintained a slender lead over Labor on both the first preference votes and, to a lesser extent, on a two-party preferred basis.

But more recent polls have herded around giving Labour a lead of 52% to 48% on a two-party preferred basis (the main predictor under Australia’s second-preference voting system).

The Coalition will be relying upon regaining some of the 15 seats previously lost to the ‘Teal’ Independents – with the Liberals heavily targeting these seats and focusing efforts on tying the Teals to Labor-leaning policies.

The overall takeaway…

While it would be surprising if the Lib-Nats didn’t recover some of the ground they lost three years ago, it’s Labor who now look in the stronger position to form a government on Monday.

More widely, it indicates once again that the campaign in final weeks before polling day has increased in importance over recent years.

This shift is more than the traditional gravitation polls often show back to incumbent parties as elections draw nearer – and voters start thinking beyond ‘protest’ and consider the governing choice presented. If it were, polls would start to narrow more months earlier. 

Voters are ‘tuning in’ to the electoral choice later – largely as a result of personally-tailored social media newsfeeds replacing broadcast media as the main source of news for many people under the age of 45. Meaning many voters receive even less traditional political news in the period outside elections than in decades past.

And for political obsessives… whilst spoilt with two big international elections in one week, we’ll now have to turn out attentions back to Europe, where national elections are on their way in Poland, Portugal, the Czech Republic and Norway.