2 weeks Ago By Anton Nilsson
It’s been quite the ride since Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declared the start of the election campaign last Friday. It might be hard to remember, but that was the morning after Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s budget reply speech , which Albanese succeeded in wiping from the news agenda with his announcement of a May 3 election. On the weekend that followed, headlines were dominated by new polls showing Labor with a narrow lead in two-party terms.
Supermarket price gouging was another big topic of the first few days of the campaign, with the Coalition ridiculing Labor’s first major campaign promise to crack down on the practice as “wet lettuce”. In the next few days, there was talk of whether the country’s next leader should live in Kirribilli House or the Lodge , a teal MP apologised for an unfortunate sex joke, and the Coalition made headlines with plans to cut government spending. But by Thursday, all of that had been forgotten, and US President Donald Trump’s tariff announcement became the only issue dominating headlines and press conferences.
Here’s a look back at some of the highlights of the first campaign week. Most eye-catching prop A tiny man dragged a regular-sized toothbrush into the ABC News Breakfast studio on Friday morning to promote a policy to include dental care in Medicare. Actually, wait, it was the regular-sized Greens leader Adam Bandt, and the toothbrush was of gigantic proportions.
My bad. Photo of the week Snappers were quick to capture Anthony Albanese’s tumble off the stage during an appearance in NSW’s Hunter Valley on Thursday. It’s happened to lots of rock stars , actors , and politicians before, and it provided some much-needed slapstick comedy to an otherwise sombre day of trade politics.
Luckily the prime minister was unhurt, and he even claimed afterwards he never actually fell: “Just one leg went down ...
I didn’t fall off the stage,” he told ABC News in the afternoon ( you can watch the video and judge for yourself). Either way, it wasn’t the fall of the week — that honour goes to the sharemarket. Most dramatic flip-flop Peter Dutton’s initial reaction to Trump’s tariff news was to strike a statesmanlike note of national unity.
“Well, I’m happy to stand shoulder to shoulder with the prime minister to make sure that we send a very clear message to the Americans that we don’t find this acceptable at all,” he told radio station 2GB immediately after the US president’s speech finished. Just hours later, his tone had shifted markedly, telling reporters the tariff news had exposed Albanese as a “weak leader”. Quickest rise to fame This award could only go to Australia’s external territories.
Trump’s surprising decision to single out localities such as Heard Island and McDonald Islands, Norfolk Island, and Christmas Island in his list of tariff rates saw the territories’ search rates spike. Norfolk Island was slapped with 29% tariffs — compared with 10% for mainland Australia — and even the uninhabited Heard Island and McDonald Islands, “accessible only via a two-week boat voyage from Perth”, according to Guardian Australia, was listed as a “country” subject to tariffs. Porkiest barrelling It’s hard to say who won the competition to make the most local election promises in the first week.
Both major blocs did their best to impress voters along the campaign trail, with pledges such as $5.45 million for a Victorian sports club (Labor), $10 million for a weather radar in Queensland (Coalition), $16 million for swimming pool renovations in NSW (Labor), and $225,000 for a Queensland museum (Coalition). These are far from the most expensive promises: newly announced plans for roads, rails and hospitals total in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
The reason we can’t declare a winner is that we don’t know the full extent of all the promises, nor the total cost — plus, the announcements we have covered this week have been exclusively from the actual campaign itself. There were many, many more promises made before the election was called, as ABC News and others have reported. Since we published our pork-barrelling tracker on Wednesday, reader tips have come in for announcements we had missed.
Just to name a few: Liberal Casey MP Aaron Violi promised $5 million for a community hub in Lilydale, Victoria, and Labor’s Macnamara MP Josh Burns pledged $18 million for the creation of a Jewish Arts Quarter in Elsternwick, also in Victoria. Keep the tips coming! Have something to say about this article? Write to us at [email protected].
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