Albanese goes to Queensland, Dutton heads to Melbourne, as Australia refuses to hold China’s hand

Welcome back to your daily election wrap. Brett Worthington will catch you up on news from the campaign trail.

Anthony Albanese dug deep into his pop culture knowledge to offer what seemed like a planned zinger.

You remember the famous line. It’s 1996, Tom Cruise is starring as a sports agent in Jerry Maguire. He’s on the phone and he has to echo Cuba Gooding Jr, who’s bouncing around in a kitchen.

Over to you PM. 

“I don’t want to channel Tom Cruise here with, ‘follow the money’, but follow the market,” Albanese offered.

So close. 

Albanese can blame the sun he was soaking up in Australia’s far north for not quite landing his lines while trying to savage the Coalition’s energy policies. 

Too much vitamin D might also might explain his five-and-a-half minute answer that covered everything from his engagement with the media, to his early part-time work at McDonald’s, his first plane trip, India’s prime minister’s refusal to hold press conferences and Tu Le’s chances in the western Sydney seat of Fowler before ending with “enjoy your swim”.

The sun’s out guns out PM in a white polo shirt and Rabbitohs cap found himself in the seat of Leichhardt, one of Labor’s few real prospects in the sunshine state.

Ever since “I’m Kevin from Queensland and I’m here to help”, Labor has failed to live up to the federal electoral highs it experienced in 2007 under Rudd. Currently, it holds just five seats in Queensland. 

How realistic Leichhardt is at this election depends on who you talk to but Albanese’s movements in Queensland suggest the party is slowly learning from its failures in recent elections.

Instead of spreading itself thin across a dozen electorates, the party is focusing its efforts on Leichhardt and the three Brisbane seats the Greens picked up at the last election. 

Those in the know in Queensland Labor are already talking down the party’s prospects in those three seats, tipping the Liberals to reclaim Ryan and the Greens to hold Griffith — Rudd’s old seat that Labor lost in 2022.

If true, it leaves just Brisbane (a three-cornered contest that few are confidently predicting the outcome of) and Leichhardt as potential gains. To have just two somewhat realistic gain possibilities offers yet another reminder for federal Labor that it’s got a lot of work to do if it is to find broad support in Queensland.

Dutton visits must-win seat

The same can be said for the federal Liberal party in Victoria, whose misfortunes at the last election continued into this term of parliament.

Labor’s once-in-a-century victory in Aston saw yet another previously safe Liberal seat fall in early 2023. 

If Peter Dutton is to offer his own one-in-a-hundred-year event and roll a first-term government, Aston is a non-negotiable. 

Set in Melbourne’s eastern suburban mortgage belt, the electorate has above-average levels of homes owned with a mortgage. 

Touring a laser-cutting factory, he continued his high-vis, hard hat campaign. 

While Albanese waffled, Dutton sought to dodge, avoiding questions about when he would detail his revised plans to remove 41,000 jobs from the federal public service.

“We will do that,” Dutton told reporters, without saying when.

On cuts more generally, Dutton’s hand-picked government efficiency spokesperson Jacinta Nampijinpa Price says she won’t be saying before the election what might be in stock.

“It’s about working along with my colleagues in their portfolios to understand the lay of the land within their portfolios,” she told RN Breakfast.

“We won’t know until we’re in government exactly what the lay of the land looks like.”

Trump’s tariff merry-go-round

There has been no shortage of comparisons to Price’s efficiency role and that of Elon Musk’s in Donald Trump’s administration.

In a sign of just how well things are going in Washington DC, Musk and Trump adviser Peter Navarro (a man who has no love for Australia’s pleas for a tariff exemption) are openly sparring over the tariffs Trump has imposed. 

“Boys will be boys,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, with little regard for the world markets melting down around the lads. 

Musk’s opposition to the tariffs has found himself in rare agreement with Australia’s political leaders, who have spoken out about the economic harm they’re causing.

Along with waking up to news Trump was pausing some of the tariffs, Australia too found itself being invited by China’s ambassador to “join hands” and push back against the “bullying behaviour of the US”.

“I don’t think we’ll be holding China’s hand,” Defence Minister Richard Marles told Nine News. 

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Good day for…

Chinese restaurants, which are clearly popular among the frontbenchers. Labor’s Chris Bowen said he’d seen “more detail in a Chinese menu” than in the opposition’s gas reserve modelling. Not to be outdone, his Coalition counterpart Ted O’Brien suggested Bowen’s own plans “wouldn’t fit in a Chinese fortune cookie”.

Bad day for…

Liberal pre-selection. Dutton faced questions on Liberal pre-selections, after the Nine newspapers reported the candidate in the Melbourne seat of Wills pleaded guilty to obtaining financial advantage by deception. Dutton also faced questions about his candidate in Leichhardt, who had to apologise for a series of social media posts dubbed as being anti-China and anti-feminist.

What to watch out for 

Having dumped its candidate in the NSW seat of Whitlam, the Liberal party has just hours to decide if it will stick with its candidates. After tomorrow, the party won’t be able to change its candidates if new issues arise in any electorates.

Where pollies have been

Catch up on today’s stories

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