People arrive at a polling station as early voting begins in Sydney, Australia, on April 22.Mark Baker/The Associated Press
Early voting is under way in Australia as the country heads into a general election on May 3, which, like Canada’s, has been dramatically reshaped by the return to power of U.S. President Donald Trump.
Heading into 2025, things were looking bad for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Labor Party: inflation, housing and the overall cost of living were all up, while an unsuccessful and often bitter referendum to expand Indigenous rights had turned off many voters. Mr. Albanese had to call a general election by mid-May, and amid a worldwide anti-incumbency wave, it seemed the conservative Liberal-National Coalition, which governed Australia from 2013 to 2022, would be swept back into office.
Then came Mr. Trump. The chaos wrought by the U.S. President since January has upended polls in Australia, with Labor now leading the Coalition in most surveys, due in large part to the unpopularity of Liberal Leader Peter Dutton, a former police officer who modelled himself as an anti-woke Australian Trump, until that became a political liability.
“Australians view Trump’s agenda as contrary to our interests in many ways,” said Ryan Neelam, director of the Public Opinion and Foreign Policy Program at the Sydney-based Lowy Institute. “We found very high rates of disapproval for pretty much all of his policies that we put to Australians. That should be a clue for anybody seeking to echo or shadow Trump’s agenda that it won’t go down well with the public.”
Recent polling by Lowy found Australians’ trust in the U.S. has dropped to a 20-year low, with 64 per cent of respondents holding a negative view of Washington since Mr. Trump took office, compared to 44 per cent last year.
“We expected to see some diminution in trust,” Mr. Neelam said. “But this is much larger in terms of magnitude than we predicted.”
Labor’s improved fortunes are not just due to Mr. Trump: recent months have seen the economy pick up, while both the Prime Minister and his Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, have made a strong case for being better positioned to respond to potential U.S. tariffs than the Coalition.
But if the election was being fought purely on kitchen-table issues, Labor would likely be headed to the opposition benches. Most polling has put the Coalition ahead when it comes to handling the economy – though this has narrowed in the final stretch – and Mr. Dutton has repeatedly blasted the government for overseeing what he said was the “worst collapse in living standards in the developed world,” with higher borrowing, inflation and utility bills.
“There are pretty solid fundamentals for why a government might expect to be tossed out,” said Mark Kenny, director of the Canberra-based Australian Studies Institute.
Even as polls show Mr. Albanese is poised to be the first Australian leader to lead his party to back-to-back election victories in more than two decades, the Prime Minister said he is “certainly not getting ahead of myself,” acknowledging Labor still faced “a mountain to climb” to stay in power.
Having Mr. Dutton as his foil has made things easier however, and Mr. Albanese has at times appeared to relish sticking the boot into his gaffe-prone opponent, who has repeatedly made negative headlines over the campaign and struggled to reinvent himself in voters’ eyes.
After Mr. Dutton appointed Jacinta Nampijinpa Price – a controversial Indigenous senator who spearheaded the “No” campaign in the 2023 referendum – as shadow minister for government efficiency, a role clearly modelled on Mr. Trump and Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, Mr. Albanese accused him of being “policy lazy” and said Australians “don’t have to adopt all of America’s policies.”
Ms. Price hasn’t helped Mr. Dutton’s efforts to distance himself from the U.S. leader by being photographed wearing one of Mr. Trump’s signature baseball hats and saying in a speech – as Mr. Dutton stood alongside her – that the Coalition would “make Australia great again.” (She has since said wearing a MAGA hat was a family “joke” and accused the media of being “Trump obsessed.”)
In an April focus group run by News.com.au, Liberal voters across the country were asked their opinion on both the major party leaders, and were not complimentary about either, with Mr. Albanese described as “weak.”
But the results were more damning for Mr. Dutton, with even supporters of his party saying the first words that came to mind about him were “extreme, creepy, aggro, charmless,” and “too Trumpy.”
Prof. Kenny said Mr. Dutton’s Trumpist-pivot would likely have hurt him even without the U.S. President’s global trade war, as Australia’s compulsory voting system – a rarity in much of the democratic world – tends to benefit moderate politicians and hurt those on the extreme.
Indeed, this was the case in the last election, when Labor benefited from the so-called “teal wave,” a shift in many traditionally Liberal seats toward more moderate independents, many of whom were critical of the government’s hard right policies on climate and social issues.
“When you’ve got to get out the vote, the two most important things you can do is make people scared or angry or sometimes both,” Prof. Kenny said. “That’s not a system designed to emphasize the middle, whereas Australian elections have historically been about the broad middle ground.”