Författare: Michelle Grattan Professorial Fellow University of Canberra

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in conversation with Michelle Grattan.

Anthony Albanese has outlined his pitch to improve his and his government’s standing among men, as he insists he can hold onto majority government at the election to be held in April or May.

In a wide-ranging interview on The Conversation’s Politics podcast, canvassing both his plans and current issues, the Prime Minister addresses the gender voter gap the polls have been showing, which is worrying Labor strategists.

On a two-party basis, a December Essential poll had the Coalition on 51% among men, and Labor on 44%, with 4% undecided. Among women, Labor was on 49% and the Coalition on 46%, with 5% undecided.

In a Resolve poll on preferred prime minister, Peter Dutton polled 40% among men, and Albanese 34%. Among women, Albanese was on 36% and Dutton on 31%.

Albanese tells the podcast: “One of the things that we will be really campaigning very hard on is the impact on blue collar workers of the Coalition promises to get rid of same job, same pay [law], the definition of casual in employment [and] their plan to essentially go back to wages going backwards, not forwards.”

Targeting younger voters

As Labor crafts its election policy, Albanese also flags he is looking to do more for young people.

Asked who he feels is being “left behind” in Australia at the moment, he points to the issue of “intergenerational equity”.

“I think that young people feel like they’ve got the rough end of the pineapple compared with previous generations,” he says. This is “something I’m really conscious of”.

Outlining what the government has done or announced already on student debt, housing supply, schools, the universities accord and free TAFE, he suggests there will be further policies targeted towards younger voters.

The likeliest election dates

Albanese confirms he has not locked in an election date. “We make decisions when we finalise them and I’ll consult,” he says.

“But I’ve always said […] one of the problems with three year terms is that they are too short.”

The speculation is the election will be either April 12, or one of the first three Saturdays in May, with May 17 the last practical date.

April 12 would mean scrapping the scheduled March 25 budget. “We certainly are working to hand down a budget in March,” Albanese says. “The ERC [Expenditure Review Committee] will be meeting this week, as it met last week.”

Asked whether he is confident he could still deliver his program if the election resulted in a minority Labor government, Albanese says: “I’m confident that we can achieve an ongoing majority government at this election. I think there are seats that we currently hold that we have good prospects in.”

He names two Victorian Liberal seats he had just visited – Menzies and Deakin – among those he believes Labor can win from the Coalition. (After the redistribution, Menzies is notionally a Labor seat by a tiny margin.)

Watching for a rate cut and trade wars

Asked when Australia might come out of the present per capital recession, Albanese says things are “heading in a positive direction”, but does not nominate a time.

He sounds confident about interest rates falling soon:

All of the economic commentators are saying that that is the most likely prediction of markets. It’s not up to me as prime minister to tell the independent Reserve Bank what to do, but I’m certain that we have created the conditions through, as well as our responsible economic management, producing two budget surpluses – the massive turnaround that we have seen, compared with what the Morrison 2022 budget handed down by the Coalition […] was predicting.

Prompted about the Reserve Bank’s next meeting on February 18, he says “I’m certainly conscious of that date”.

With United States President Donald Trump slapping tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China while foreshadowing wider tariffs, Albanese recalls his phone conversation after Trump was elected, in which he reminded the incoming president that America has a trade surplus with Australia. Australia would “put our arguments forward very clearly” if it faced the threat of tariffs, Albanese says.

Looking ahead

Looking ahead to this fortnight’s parliamentary sitting, Albanese confirmed to The Conversation that he will not proceed with the Nature Positive legislation. It had been strongly opposed by the Western Australian government, which has its election on March 8.

But he hopes the Senate will pass the legislation for political donation and spending caps, indicating the government is willing to compromise to get the bill through.

Looking to a second term, Albanese highlights in particular the opportunities presented by the energy transition.

“We are positioned better than anywhere else in the world to benefit, in my view, from this transition that’s occurring.”

He contrasts Dutton’s energy plan, which he describes as a “myopic vision” to make Australia smaller.

“I want Australia to be more successful, to be enlarged in our optimism and our vision. And I want to lead a government that does that.” Läs mer…

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has dumped – for the second time – the government’s controversial “Nature Positive” legislation, which had run into strong opposition from the Western Australian Labor government.

Albanese, speaking on The Conversation’s Politics podcast ahead of a fortnight parliamentary sitting starting next week, said there was not enough support for the legislation, which had been on the draft list of bills for next week, circulated by the government.

This is the second time the Prime Minister has pulled back from the legislation. Late last year he also said it did not have enough support, despite Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek believing she had a deal with the Greens and crossbench for its passage.

The legislation would set up a federal Environment Protection Agency, which has riled miners who claim it would add to bureaucracy and delay approvals.

In recent days WA premier Roger Cook, who was instrumental in heading off the legislation last year, has been lobbying the federal government again. WA faces an election on March 8.

In an interview on Saturday, Albanese told The Conversation: “I can’t see that it has a path to success. So at this stage, I can say that we won’t be proceeding with it this term. There simply isn’t a [Senate] majority, as there wasn’t last year.

”The Greens Party on one hand have changed their views”, making another demand during the week, he said. While the Liberals – who began the review of the present Environment Protection Act – “have chosen an obstructionist path,” he said.

Albanese said the government would continue to discuss the issue with stakeholders in the next term of parliament.

“Does the environment and protection act need revision from where it was last century? Quite clearly it does. Everyone says that that’s the case. It’s a matter of working to, in a practical way, a commonsense reform that delivers something that supports industry.

”I want to see faster approvals. We in fact have speeded up approvals substantially.

”But we also want proper sustainability as well.”

Albanese also flagged the government might cut back its legislation to reform rules covering electoral donations and spending in order to get a deal to pass it.

Special Minister of State Don Farrell and the Liberals had been on the brink of a deal in the final week of parliament last year, but negotiations imploded at the eleventh hour.

Albanese told The Conversation he hoped the legislation could still be passed. “I spoke with [Farrell] today, he is consulting with people across the parliament.

”What I would say is that we are looking to get reform through. Now whether that is a bigger, broader reform or whether it needs to be narrowed down, we’ll wait and see.

”But we’re very serious about the reform which would lower the donation declarations, that would put a cap on donations, a cap on expenditure, that would lead to more transparency as well. It’s an important part of supporting our democracy.

”We see overseas and we’ve seen people like Clive Palmer here spend over $100 million on a campaign. That’s a distortion of democracy – if one person can spend that much money to try to influence an election and we don’t find out all of that information till much later on.”

The reforms would not start operating until the next term of parliament.

Albanese said he thought the reform would have “overwhelming support” with the public “and I hope that it receives overwhelming support in the Senate as well”. Läs mer…

When Peter Dutton was asked this week  whether a Coalition government would continue  to foster trade relations with China, he declared unequivocally that “the relationship with China will be much stronger  than it is under the Albanese government”.

Two points stood out: Dutton’s own positive rhetoric, and his apparent confidence about the future of Australia-China relations.

It’s not unusual for opposition leaders to undertake a makeover, to their person or policy, as an election approaches. Anthony Albanese lost weight and acquired new glasses. Earlier, he’d made Labor a small policy target.

Dutton is simultaneously attempting a softening on some fronts – while retaining the “hard man” image on others.

Mid-last year Dutton said: “I’m pro-China and the relationship that we have with them. I want that trading relationship to increase. […] We need to make sure we strengthen the trading relationship because there are many businesses here who rely on it. But we have to be realistic about working to keep peace […] we live in a very uncertain time. The Prime Minister also says that we live in the most precarious period since the Second World War, and he’s right, and we need to work hard at peace as well.”

Contrast Dutton as defence minister in 2021. “Does the Chinese government wish to occupy other countries? Not in my judgement. But they do see us as tributary states. And that surrender of sovereignty and abandonment of any adherence to the international rule of law is what our country has fought against since Federation.”

It’s not that Dutton has changed his views on China. Rather, he’s camouflaged them with a softer tone, and in what he chooses to emphasise. Of course circumstances have changed – Australia now has a much better relationship with China. But significantly, Dutton needs to appeal to the local Chinese-Australian voters.

At the 2022 election, the Liberals took a big hit among voters of Chinese heritage.

The party’s review of its election performance, undertaken by former party director Brian Loughnane and frontbencher Jane Hume, said: “In the top 15 seats by Chinese ancestry the swing against the Party (on a 2PP basis) was 6.6%, compared to 3.7% in other seats. There are more than 1.2 million people of Chinese heritage living in Australia today. Rebuilding the Party’s relationship with the Chinese community must be a priority during this term of Parliament.”

Marginal Labor seats that are targets for the Liberals, where the Chinese vote is significant, include Reid and Bennelong in NSW and Chisholm and Aston in Victoria.

Dutton (and the PM) will attend a Lunar New Year celebration in Box Hill in Melbourne this weekend.

It’s notable that David Coleman, named by Dutton last weekend as the opposition’s new spokesman on foreign affairs, has worked extensively with the Chinese community. One of the contenders for the post was the high-performing James Paterson. There may have been stronger arguments for keeping Paterson in home affairs, but his very hawkish stand on China might have been in the mix.

Talking up the positive side of the Coalition’s record on China, Dutton harked back to the signing of the free trade agreement under the Abbott government, and said “we want there to be mutual respect in the relationship”.

Over its years in government the Coalition’s relationship with China has varied between pragmatic friendship and suspicious negativity. After relatively smooth sailing in the Abbott period, things soured when the Turnbull government called China out over foreign interference, introducing legislation, and banned Huawei from the 5G network. Then relations plunged dramatically when the Morrison government demanded an inquiry into the origins and handling of the outbreak of COVID in Wuhan.

Despite Dutton’s confidence, it’s more than possible that managing the China relationship after the election could be trickier than it has been during this one, no matter who is in power.

The Albanese government can claim the greatly-improved bilateral relationship as one of its major foreign policy achievements. China has brought Australia out of the deep freeze, lifting the $20 billion worth of trade barriers it had imposed. Dialogue and ministerial exchanges have resumed. Anthony Albanese has been welcomed in China.

But this week’s speculation relating to the new Chinese artificial intelligence platform DeepSeek is just the latest reminder of perennial security suspicions about the penetration of Chinese technology.(Incidentally, Dutton has an account on the Chinese-owned TikTok – despite it being banned from official government devices – in part to engage with the local Chinese community, as well as with younger people generally.)

Australia’s minerals industry is potentially vulnerable to Chinese displeasure. The Senate in the next fortnight will consider the government’s Future Made in Australia legislation, that provides a tax incentive for processing critical minerals. The Chinese have a global stranglehold on this processing – and have shown a willingness to weaponise it, for example against Japan. China’s multi-billion dollar funding of nickel processing in Indonesia has had a dire impact on producers here in Australia.

The change of government in Australia certainly facilitated the improvement in the bilateral relationship, but that improvement was also strongly driven by China’s own interests. Similarly, the future of the relationship is more in China’s hands than in Australia’s.

China expert Richard McGregor, from the Lowy Institute, says:“ Relations with China are inherently volatile.

”The day-by-day relationships have returned to  a degree of normality. But all of the structural stresses which created antagonism are still there.”

These include China’s “military assertiveness in the region, competition between  the US and China, Australia’s concern about foreign interference and hacking, China’s efforts to build their power in the Pacific at the expense of Australia. None of that has gone away,” McGregor says. The single biggest change of recent years “is that ”China has become much more powerful and is far more willing to throw its weight around”.

Separate to any hiccups in the bilateral relationship, Australia could find itself caught in the crossfire if there is a serious deterioration in the US-China relationship under Donald Trump – notably if his tariff policy leads to a trade war. Simon Jackman, from the University of Sydney, warns that if US policy hit the (already struggling) Chinese economy, that would affect Australian exporters.

“US tariffs or import bans that slowed China’s economy would cause some short to medium headaches for Australian exporters,” Jackman says. “As in Trump Mark 1 and COVID, Australian export industries would find themselves looking for opportunities elsewhere, if global supply chains had to re-equilibrate in response to an upheaval in the US-China trade relationship.”

Ironically, the earlier search for diversified markets when the Chinese imposed their restrictions on Australian producers would have helped prepare exporters for such a contingency. Läs mer…

After Wednesday’s encouraging inflation numbers, the Albanese government – and the financial markets – would be shocked if the Reserve Bank doesn’t cut interest rates in February.

Having said that, with interest rates there are no guarantees, especially in a volatile world.

Underlying inflation was 3.2% through the year to the December quarter, with headline inflation 2.4%. The numbers were better than earlier forecasts by either the Reserve Bank or Treasury. The trimmed mean (the measure the bank uses for underlying inflation) for the last six months was 2.7%.

After the inflation numbers came out the markets boosted their expectations of a cut to more than 75%.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers quickly pointed out: “On every measure, we’ve made substantial and sustained progress in the fight against inflation.”

“Australia’s headline inflation is now lower than most major advanced economies including the United States, United Kingdom and Germany.”

The fight against inflation was not over, Chalmers said, but he insisted “the worst of the inflation challenge is well and truly behind us”.

It was a message for the public – and the bank. Not, of course, that Chalmers was giving any “free advice to the independent Reserve Bank”. Certainly not.

There is now considerable pressure on Reserve Bank Governor Michele Bullock. Bullock is conservative, and very much her own woman. Equally, she is also aware of the immense pressure that high rates have been putting on many households.

The inflation outcome was the last major piece of data the bank has been waiting for. If the bank at its February 17–18 meeting – the last before its new monetary policy board begins operating – decided to sit on its hands, that would be against the odds as they stand now.

Speaking before the numbers came out, AMP chief economist Shane Oliver said: “If the trimmed mean inflation rate cools in line with our expectations [3.2% year on year] it will be very hard for the RBA not to cut rates at its February meeting”.

What a February rate fall would mean for election timing is unclear. The practical choices are between April 12 or one of three Saturdays in early May. While some observers believe this increases the chances of an April 12 poll, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will have a number of factors in mind. These include whether he wants to use a March 25 budget as a launch pad, which would put the election in May.

Finance Minister Katy Gallagher flagged on Wednesday more cost-of-living relief. “As we are putting our budget together – it’s due on the 25th of March – obviously we are mindful of the economic conditions, how people are feeling out and about and whether there are any further responsible decisions we can take that can assist households as we navigate this time”.

Chalmers cautioned against the recent speculation that if there is a March budget it could contain a surplus. The treasurer also made it clear that while he is working towards a March budget, whether there will be one is in the hands of the prime minister. Läs mer…