EDITORIAL: Anthony Albanese shatters usual political summer silence to fire unofficial election starting gun

Usually the only noises we hear from Canberra at this time of year are the sounds of burnout displays coming from the Bush Capital’s Summernats car festival.

It’s generally not until Australia Day that the usual routine of day-to-day politics slowly begins rumbling back to life.

But with an election a few months away at most, things are different this year.

Anthony Albanese shattered the summer silence on Monday with the announcement of $7.2 billion in Federal funding to upgrade Queensland’s pothole-ridden Bruce Highway.

The announcement itself, made from the safe Coalition seat of Wide Bay, was an all-hands-on-deck affair.

Flanked by his Treasurer Jim Chalmers, Employment Minister Murray Watt and Infrastructure Minister Catherine King, Mr Albanese was in full campaign mode, declaring the yet-to-be-called 2025 election would present Australians with “a clear choice”.

“Labor building Australia’s future, or a Coalition determined to return Australia backwards and costing more under Peter Dutton,” he said.

It’s on.

Queensland is just the first stop on Mr Albanese’s new year, multi-State campaign roadshow.

Next on the itinerary is WA, the State which delivered Government to Labor at the 2021 poll.

In both crucial mining States, Mr Albanese will visit seats which would be home to nuclear power stations under a Dutton-led government, where he will try to convince voters that the Coalition’s plan would result in higher electricity prices.

The Prime Minister’s early start to the campaign year has intensified speculation he is preparing to visit the Governor-General as early as the end of January to call a vote.

But most election watchers believe the most likely dates for a poll will fall in either April or May.

Going before then would risk raising the ire of West Australians, who have their own State poll scheduled for March 8.

Delaying the election would also have the advantage of giving the economy a further chance to recover.

And with economic data scheduled to drop this week expected to show lower-than-anticipated trimmed mean inflation, Labor strategists are even allowing themselves to dare to dream that the Reserve Bank will answer their prayers of a pre-election interest rate cut.

That would take some of the potency out of the Coalition’s argument that three years of a Labor Government have resulted in living standards in freefall.

A single cut to the cash rate won’t do too much to relieve the pressure on household budgets heaped on them by this protracted cost-of-living crisis.

But it would be a powerful psychological boost to families, and an indicator that there’s reason to hope things are improving.

Whether it will be enough to keep voters from punishing Labor for their financial hardships remains to be seen — if it comes to pass at all.