As Australia goes to the polls on Saturday, the election race heats up. According to the latest Newspoll, published by The Australian newspaper on Wednesday, Labor leads the governing Coalition 51-49 on a two-party preferred basis. Polling has opposition Leader, Anthony Albanese, charting a precarious path to potential victory.
The governing Liberal-National Coalition has been in power since 2013 with three successive Prime Ministers. The current Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, has led the Coalition since 2018 and is the first Australian Prime Minister to serve a full term since 2007.
Cost of living pressures and inflation remain a focus in the dying days of the election campaign. The conflict in Ukraine and global pandemic -related supply chain disruptions for a record rise in living costs which could jeopardize Liberal-National Coalition chances of winning a national election to be held tomorrow. The consumer prices surged at the fastest annual pace in two decades last quarter, data out on Wednesday showed, as petrol, home-building and food costs rose, fueling speculation interest rates could rise from record lows as soon as next week. Australian wage growth was also forecast to accelerate, but not by enough to outpace inflation, leaving real incomes set to shrink .
Labor is on track to win this election. A Labor Party stalwart having first entered parliament in 1996, Anthony Albanese, Australia’s next potential prime minister, is the son of a single mother from a council flat. He served as a Deputy Prime Minister under the second Rudd Government in 2013 and a cabinet minister in the Rudd and Gillard Governments from 2007 to 2013.
Labor has run a election campaign around Australia becoming a renewable energy superpower, a manufacturing powerhouse, a skills and education capital of Asia and a society that guarantees secure work, cheaper childcare, and stronger, fairer Medicare and aged care systems.
Iabor lost the last election despite showing similar positive pre-election polling figures. Some attributed that loss to a cluttered, overly ambitious policy reform agenda. In this election, Labor is taking a far more streamlined, moderate approach on policy. Labor has released the cost of the promises, which it says will add $7.4 billion to the budget bottom line over the next four years, including plans to crack down on multinational companies not paying their fair share of tax, public sector efficiencies and fees for foreign investment screening.
Labor claims its commitments are modest and represent no more than an additional 0.4 per cent of the total budget in any year of the forward estimates but will deliver significant and meaningful ongoing cost of living relief and long-term economic benefits. Another focus of Labor’s Budget reply was on aged care, an area where shortcomings have been highlighted throughout the pandemic.
Albanese has promised a new Government would continue to pursue Australia’s strategic interests through structures like the Quad and AUKUS, but it would also focus more heavily on regional engagement with ASEAN and Pacific Island nations, which is a central element of Labor’s foreign policy tradition.
