Despite global tariff wars, Chinese warships circumnavigating the country, and a new Russian presence in neighbouring Indonesia, the 2025 Australian federal election campaign has been one of the dullest in living memory. Pre-poll voting has commenced for the Saturday, May 3 election. More than 50% of voters now seem unlikely to wait until election day to cast their vote – a strong indication of voters’ disinterest in what leaders and candidates are saying.
Can Labor hold on?
The center-left Australian Labor Party (ALP) has held government since 2022, when it defeated a three-term (nine-year) center-right Liberal government. Folk wisdom in Australia is that first-term governments are reelected as a matter of course. But two things now threaten that assumption. First, the ALP government led by Anthony Albanese has produced no notable policy “wins” (and one pretty resounding loss with an unsuccessful referendum to provide a new national representative body for Indigenous Australians). And second, the Peter Dutton-led Liberals (in formal partnership with the rural Nationals party) have maintained discipline and cohesion for three years.
Australia experienced nine years of “revolving door” prime ministers between 2010 and 2018. In a bicameral parliament with only 227 members in total, party leaders have found it increasingly difficult to maintain the confidence of their small caucuses, which often have disparate preferences on social and economic issues.
The two current front-runners hoping to become Australia’s next prime minister are from the “extreme” wings of their parties. Albanese belongs to the ALP’s left faction and as a junior parliamentarian helped found a parliamentary group in support of Palestine. Dutton, a former police officer, boycotted the Parliament’s apology to Indigenous Australians removed from their parents. Each has ostensibly moderated his stance, and comes into this election in good standing with colleagues.
Dutton’s (perhaps surprising) success on this front contributed to strong pre-campaign polling for the Liberal Party of Australia. Australia’s system of ranked choice voting produces two related but different polling estimates: One measures “primary” vote (i.e., #1 in the preference ranking), and the other measures “two-party preferred,” i.e., the estimated popular vote after preferences are distributed, assuming ALP and Liberal candidates are not eliminated until the final round of counting. The Liberals led the ALP on both measures through most of 2023 and all of 2024, but the ALP has now pulled ahead during the official campaign period. Both parties’ primary vote remains low, with rising voter support for independents and minor parties.
Major party strategies
At some point in the last 20 years, the ALP and Liberals learned the idea of issue ownership and now refuse to be moved from their “safe” issues. For the ALP these are primarily health and education. Economic management and national security are the issues the Liberals claim. This also contributed to the Liberals’ popularity during 2024: Like many economies, Australia saw post-covid inflation rise sharply before peaking in December 2022. The Liberals have sought to tie inflation to high-spending ALP policies, while the ALP has framed social spending as a means of riding the last of this inflation wave. As it stands, uncertainty around U.S.-imposed tariffs has highlighted how exposed the country is to global economic trends, and the relative unimportance of minor disagreements on fiscal policy.
This exercise in excessively scripted issue framing has led to confusing policy stances from both parties. The ALP announced increased incentives for Australian doctors to “bulk bill” patients, to reduce out-of-pocket costs. The Liberals immediately matched that promise, trying to minimize the ALP’s perceived strength on health policy, while also claiming that this kind of expenditure led to inflation. Nervous about its reputation for high tax-and-spend policies, the ALP announced surprise tax cuts in its preelection budget statement. Then the economically conservative Liberals blocked the cuts in the Parliament’s final week. The ALP has vowed to nationalize the Port of Darwin, currently operated by a Chinese company and often described as a national security vulnerability – and the Liberals immediately followed suit. On immigration, the ALP has described the Liberals’ planned cuts to net migration as both “savage” and smaller than the projected decrease under their existing policy.
Three issues clearly divide the parties
Beyond these preelection moves, the ALP and the Liberals have long held different views on these three issues: nuclear power, workers’ rights, and the war in Gaza. In June 2024, the Liberals announced a plan to build seven nuclear plants on existing power station sites to create a domestic nuclear power industry. The policy was received quite well at first. But following criticism on the costs of the program, the Liberals began to distance themselves, instead emphasizing their policy to redirect gas production to domestic markets. The ALP has strongly opposed the nuclear power plan, arguing that renewable energy is more cost-effective. Bipartisan agreement to buy nuclear-powered submarines in alliance with the U.S. and U.K. precludes opposition on safety grounds.
The Liberals started the election campaign promising to end “work from home” arrangements for federal public servants, but walked this back after a poor response in marginal commuter-belt districts. The ALP has said little about industrial relations during the campaign, but the Albanese government introduced a suite of pro-worker measures including “right to disconnect” laws, which give employees in medium and large enterprises the right to ignore managers’ calls and emails outside work hours. The Liberals say they would repeal this, and seek to remove 41,000 positions added to the federal public service in the last three years. Although this move has attracted criticisms for being “DOGEy,” Liberal governments have long sought a smaller public service.
The respective positions on Gaza are more nuanced. The Liberals are firmly pro-Israel, while the ALP has publicly softened its pro-Israel position since the International Criminal Court decisions on Nov. 12, 2024. However, this shift has not prevented criticism from party members – or Muslim challengers in ALP-held districts. Senator Fatima Payman quit the party in May 2024 over the ALP’s refusal to describe Israel’s military actions as a genocide, while others have focused on insufficient attention to rising Islamophobia.
Independents and minor parties may play an important role
Although notionally a two-party system, the Australian Parliament currently includes a crossbench of 19 members in the lower house and 18 in the upper house. Support for the two major parties has declined steadily since the 1980s, but it took until 2022 for independents (with the help of an influx of donations) to be elected in significant numbers.
Recent polls suggest even higher support for minor parties and independents in 2025, increasing the prospect of minority government. The frontrunning ALP has ruled out a formal coalition with the left-wing Greens and would more likely negotiate with either the centrist “teal” independents concerned with climate change and democratic integrity, or a diffuse group of independents that includes Bob Katter (famously worried about crocodile attacks) and Andrew Wilkie, an anti-gambling campaigner from Tasmania.
In the final week before the May 3 election, the path to a majority government for the Liberals looks very slim. In 2022, independents gained six seats from the Liberals, and only one from the ALP – any further gains in 2025 will likely be at the expense of the Liberals. The ALP faces challenges from the Greens in inner-city seats. And high rates of Muslim voters in western Sydney could surprise very senior members of Albanese’s government. Good money right now is on a second Albanese government, with support from independents to ensure a legislative majority.
Jill Sheppard is a senior lecturer in the School of Politics and International Relations at The Australian National University. She studies elections and voting, including political participation, compulsory voting, and public opinion.
