Key events
Welcome
Good morning and welcome to our live election coverage. I’m Martin Farrer with the best of the overnight stories to get us into gear before Krishani Dhanji takes the wheel.
Former Liberal prime minister John Howard says Peter Dutton is the underdog in the federal election and that history favours Anthony Albanese because there hasn’t been a one-term government since 1931. Speaking on Sky News last night, Howard said Dutton is taking the fight to Labor but he was up against it. However, he said “a volatile electorate” made things difficult to predict and he condemned Anthony Albanese as being “out of his depth”. More coming up.
Dutton will continue his “underdog” fight when he takes his campaign to Western Australia for the first time today. He will announce a plan to spend $600m on roads across the country, hoping that the promise of federal spending on infrastructure will appeal to voters in a state where transport links are crucial for the dominant mining and agriculture sectors.
Anthony Albanese will be anxious to show he is not out of his depth and that he can stand up to Donald Trump if the US president’s tariffs hit the Australian economy. There is concern that Trump’s expected levies will hurt Australian pharmaceuticals, meat and metals among other things, and Albanese yesterday did not rule out the possibility of countering the tariffs by taking a case to the World Trade Organisation.
The PM revealed on social media that he dined with golfer Greg Norman last night. It’s interesting timing, as Australia braces for Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs.
We’ll have all the political and market reaction to those tariffs as it happens.