Australians are heading to the polls shortly in parliamentary elections which will decide if Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s centre-left Labor government will return for a second term.
Labor’s main rival is the country’s conservative coalition, led by opposition leader Peter Dutton, which came into the election campaign polling strongly but is now lagging slightly behind Labor.
If Albanese does win, it could mean Australia is following in similar footsteps to Canada, where the Liberal party reversed its prospects in recent weeks, amid concerns about the effect of United States President Donald Trump’s policies on Canada’s economy.
Amy Remeikis, chief political analyst at the Australia Institute, an independent research centre, told Al Jazeera that polls indicate President Trump is “an increasing concern for Australian voters” and that “Labor’s gamble of holding a later election to allow some of Trump’s policies to start to impact has paid off.”
In comparison with Canada, where both major parties tried to distance themselves from Trump, Remeikis notes that Australia’s opposition leader Dutton has courted “favourable comparisons” to Trump for months.
But, he has been “badly damaged by the ‘Temu Trump’ label” – a reference to the Chinese online shopping website known for selling cheap copies of original brands.
War on Gaza and the price of eggs
Uncertainty around Trump’s tariffs on Australia has only compounded the concerns of many Australians around the cost of essential items, including housing, food, healthcare and childcare.
In the final televised leaders’ debate, a week before the election, both Dutton and Albanese stumbled when asked to guess how much a dozen eggs might cost at a supermarket.
Albanese was closer, guessing 7 Australian dollars, nearly two dollars less than the actual price of $8.80, while Dutton guessed $4.20, less than half the actual price.
Cost of living has “trumped everything” leading into the election, says Josie Hess, who comes from the Latrobe Valley, a coal-mining region in Victoria, and who also works for advocacy group Environment Victoria.
For a number of Australians, the most important issue on election day will be beyond Australia’s borders, says Nasser Mashni, the president of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network (APAN).
Mashni told Al Jazeera that “the genocide that is occurring in Palestine” has seen a “new constituency” emerge in Australia that understands that Israel is “a settler colonialist movement doing exactly what occurred here [in Australia] 238 years ago”.
APAN has developed a scorecard of where the major parties stand on Palestine. Of those, only the Greens received a tick from APAN on every issue. The scorecard for Labor was mixed, while the conservative Liberal-National coalition did not meet a single criterion.
“We’ve asked for people to make Palestine their number one issue and to find a candidate that best reflects a just and humane position for Palestine,” Mashni said.
“Certainly, the easiest candidates to find will be in the Senate, but I am sure there’ll be somebody in every seat where they can vote a little bit better for Palestine, and in some cases, very well for Palestine,” he added.
Dozens of minor parties and independents from across the political spectrum are also vying for votes.
Remeikis said there is a “late surge to the nationalistic, far-right, One Nation party”, which has been aided by Dutton’s conservative coalition preferencing votes for One Nation, and vice versa, in outer suburban and inner regional seats. Next year marks 30 years since One Nation’s leader Pauline Hanson was first elected to federal office in Australia.
But Remeikis says the late surge is unlikely to affect the outcome of the election, with polls suggesting Labor will win with a minority government.
The Greens, along with some independents running on pro-climate action platforms, will also be hoping to repeat successes in Australia’s 2022 election, which followed many months of devastating fires and floods.
Going nuclear
With climate change remaining a key concern for many Australians, Dutton, whose party has long delayed taking action on climate, has chosen to focus on campaigning to build Australia’s first-ever nuclear power stations in areas where coal power stations are closing down, such as the Latrobe Valley, in Victoria.
This week, organisations representing more than 350,000 emergency and health services workers released a letter calling on Dutton to drop his plan to introduce nuclear energy to Australia, saying “Australia’s current emergency services do not have the support or resources to respond to nuclear disasters.”
Josie Hess, a Latrobe Valley local who works for Environment Victoria, told Al Jazeera that people there still have questions about the viability of Dutton’s proposal.
She says people in the valley “desperately need jobs” but the timeline to build nuclear means that it would do little to help workers now.
“We have some people who support nuclear but for the most part, the Latrobe Valley is not a monolith, and there is clear and demonstrable opposition to the proposal,” she said.
And while economic issues are a concern, she added, there is also an “intrinsic link between climate security and cost of living and housing”.
Melissa Sweet, who runs public health news site Croakey, told Al Jazeera that climate change remains a key issue for Australian health workers heading into the election.
“Heatwaves, floods, and bushfires are already driving up demand for emergency care, mental health services, and chronic disease management,” Sweet said.
The recent US cuts to “public health, global health and climate action and science generally” under Trump mean it’s “more important than ever” that the next Australian government invests in these areas, Sweet added.
