The Australian heads to the poll on May 3 after Anthony Albanese fired the starter's gun in the federal campaign.
The Prime Minister visited Governor Sam Mostin on Friday morning to dissolve the 47th Parliament, causing a five-week race and formed the next government.
Albanese, who announced that Election Day would be going back in the House of Representatives, said that the election would be “a choice of workers' plans to maintain the building, or [opposition leader] Peter Dutton promises to cut it.”
He cited the worker tax cuts announced in the budget, support for Medicare and Bulkville, and reduced student debt as a central challenge to the party's campaign.
Albanese said that the world has been “threwed into many Australians in Australia” for the past three years, but the government has chosen to face the global challenge of “helping people under the cost of living and building for the future in Australia in the Australian way.”
Nodding to the shadows of Donald Trump's administration, Albanese said the biggest risk to Australia's economy is “not what's happening elsewhere in the world.”
“The biggest risk to Australia's future is going back to past failures and going back to tax increases and reductions in services that Peter Dutton and the Liberals want to lock themselves up,” he said.
Albanese aims to become the first prime minister to win a second term since John Howard in 1998.
Albanese made a claim in the second term, claiming that “it would always take more than three years to clean up the more than ten years of chaos” left behind by the previous Union government.
“The world today is an uncertain place, but I'm absolutely certain of this. Now is not the time for low aims, punch-downs, or cuts and destruction to turn around,” Albanese said. “This is about building on the strengths of our nation, building our security and prosperity, building Australia where no one can be held back and no one has left.”
Albanese passionately attacked Dutton's plan to loot 41,000 civil servants, citing the example of civil servants he met in Hervey Bay in support of Queensland's flood-affected residents.
“They were under Peter Dutton.”
Albanese denied running a campaign of fear against Dutton for five weeks until Election Day.
“What I want is a campaign about policy material and hope and optimism for our country. I am optimistic about Australia. That is one of the big distinctions of this campaign,” the prime minister said.
Labour has 78 seats (two seats majority) in the House, and Albanese has asserted that the government can return it on its own, despite most opinions that bothers Congress.
Dutton hopes to lead the coalition just three years after Scott Morrison's government prevented the 2022 election loss, when the government lost 19 seats to the Teal Independent, including six Heartland electors.
Opposition leaders pitched a 12-point plan to “get Australia off the ground.” This is characterized by his proposal to replace coal-fired power plants with nuclear reactors and reduce immigration to free up housing and reduce “wasteful” government spending.
In a budget reply speech on Thursday, Dutton also pledged to halve the fuel excise tax for 12 months and increase gas supply to lower prices.
Dutton also targets Albanese's character, portraying the prime minister as “weak” on issues ranging from anti-Semitism to Xi Jinping.
The opposition holds 54 seats. This means that there are mountains to climb to win a majority in the 150-seat House of Representatives.
Union strategists believe labor is vulnerable, especially with stolen items in suburban seats outside Sydney and Melbourne.
Opposition parties need to gain positions in all states, but they are particularly looking at Victoria. There, they want to take advantage of seating in the unpopular state governments and outside suburbs and local areas of NSW. That hope in Western Australia, when liberals lost four seats in 2022 as a “red wave” swept the West, was somewhat attenuated by weak shows in state elections last month.
The Greens and Teal independents are aiming to retain the seats they acquired in 2022, framed them to act as potential kingmakers in the suspended assembly.
Greens leader Adam Band remains optimistic that the party will be able to win position despite a series of poor results in recent state, territorial and council elections.
