Australian politics and April 23 recap: Albanese goes on the attack over Liberals’ $21b defence plan

Voters used to treat their politics like they did their favourite department store or make of car: they chose their favourite and stuck with it.

This election though, the options are more like Anthony Albanese’s Shein to Peter Dutton’s Temu says Cameron Milner.

It’s cheap, you know it won’t fit and it won’t last, but it’s all voters can afford in this cost-of-living crisis. It’s all just fast politics for the moment.

But like so many online purchases, even as you hit purchase, you are wondering if what you ordered will ever be delivered.

Read the full story here.

Anthony Albanese has visited the Leichhardt Women’s Community Health Centre in his home electorate of Grayndler.

The PM unveiled $2.43m in funding for St Vincent de Paul to offer more crisis support and accommodation, while also providing $2.07m to upgrade the health centre and provide more counselling rooms.

Mr Albanese’s mother had regularly visited the health centre when Mr Albanese was a boy and he said the announcement of upgrading was “the easiest decision I’ll make as prime minister”.

“Often, she needed support, and feeling the comfort of coming to a women’s health centre run by women for women with no judgment, made an enormous difference to her,” he said.

The centre was “one of the earliest examples in Australia of feminism in action, set up by women for women to help women”, the prime minister said.

He was greeted by women’s health centre manager Dr Ses Salmond and St Vincent de Paul homelessness and housing manager Suzy Pace, where he viewed plans for the redevelopment of the centre.

He was told the centre has sometimes had to send counsellors home because they don’t have enough space for them.

The political temperature is scorching as Australians prepare to go to the polls next month.

And tensions spilled over on Sunrise on Wednesday as Labor Housing Minister Clare O’Neil and Liberal Senator Jane Hume argued about new polls showing Opposition leader Peter Dutton is struggling with women voters.

A Newspoll published by The Australian showed Labor is now at 35 per cent of the female primary vote compared with the Coalition’s 33 per cent. The Coalition had previously been leading Labor 38 per cent to 29 per cent last month.

Earlier this month, Dutton backflipped on his decision to end work from home for the public service — which many people had said would impact the work-life balance of Australian women.

On Wednesday, Hume and O’Neil clashed over the policy and the Coalition’s attitude towards women, with O’Neil even asking for her rival’s microphone to be cut following several interruptions.

Read the full story here.

Sunrise host Natalie Barr has quizzed Defence Minister Richard Marles on the government’s knowledge of a potential Russian base on Australia’s doorstep.

“Was there a request from Russia to establish a base in Indonesia, and if there was, did you know about it before it went public?”, Barr asked this morning.

“I mean, the question you are asking is obviously, about a dialogue, if it happened between two other countries and what that was about that and obviously it is not something that I am going to ventilate in the public domain,” Mr Marles replied.

“What is important here is that when I spoke with my counterpart Defence Minister Sjafrie of Indonesia, he made it abundantly clear to me there was no prospect of any Russian aircraft operating out of Indonesia.”

Mr Marles woukld not confirm the idea that Russia were investigating a base for their aircraft in Indonesia with its defence minister.

“Again, I am not going into every aspect of the conversation I had with the minister and again it is important that I don’t,” Mr Marles said.

“It is important that people are able to have confidential conversations with their counterparts overseas.”

Shadow Defence Minister Andrew Hastie has warned there will be “trade offs” to pay for a hike in defence spending as Australia faces an increasingly turbulent world.

Under plans due to be released today in Perth, the Coalition will boost defence spending by $21b over the next five years, setting a target to increase the military budget to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2029-30.

The Opposition has not revealed the details of how it will pay for the spending spike, with Mr Hastie telling ABC RN Breakfast that “we’ll release our costs in due course” as the election date looms next week.

“There will always be trade-offs when you’re making decisions of state. But what price do we put on defence?” he said.

“With the growth of authoritarian powers, with the war in Ukraine, with the changes in the Indo-Pacific region, with the Trump administration moving deeper into America … we need to be able to defend ourselves. That’s the lesson out of Ukraine,” he said.

Mr Hastie said the extra money would be used to restore a fourth squadron of Joint Strike Fighters, taking the F-35 fleet to 100, as well as tackling the recruiting and retention crisis.

“We’re going to urgently progress the Aukus partnership out in Western Australia, which has been delayed.

“We’re going to get Henderson [shipyard] going and our strategic ship building program that’s also at risk under Labor with delays,” he said.

Mr Hastie pointed to the need to build general purpose frigates and to boost sustainment that had suffered under Labor.

“When cuts go in, it’s always the sustainment of our defence force. And we need our ships running. We need our planes flying, and we need our troops training and under Labor with the cuts to sustainment that has impacted our fighting capability,” he said.

If the polls hold and May 3 delivers the expected result, beware the Coalition catastrophists says Andrew Carswell in his latest The Nightly column.

They’ll be the ones flicking the lighter in their fidgety hands, desperate to burn the house to the ground and begin the rebuild. They’ll be the ones scheming, agitating and conspiring in backrooms, floating leadership contenders, adamant of the need to propagate a purge. The heroes of hindsight.

But if Peter Dutton does fall short of being able to cobble together a misfit army of crossbenchers to form a minority government, perspective will be required; an art often lost in the emotional turmoil of election night.

The Coalition is attempting to defy history, putting forward an unpopular leader, standing him on a platform of limited policy foundation, fighting a ballot paper full of enemies on the left and right, with diminished campaign capabilities on the ground, and banking on disillusionment with the other side to do the heavy lifting.

It was always a high-risk wager. Even before Donald Trump came in like a wrecking ball, and decimated the conservative brand globally, making Dutton’s already colossal task near insurmountable.

Read the full story here.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton clashed on healthcare and who has plans for cuts but avoided questions over serious structural budget repair in Tuesday night’s lively debate as voters headed to the polls.

The leaders were pushed on the state of the budget and Australia’s economic future but neither could articulate a long-term plan for dealing with the sky-high debt or forecast years of deficits.

This was the third time the pair have come together to debate and the toll of the campaign was showing, with each getting under the other’s skin with increasingly personal attacks.

“There have been a lot of lies,” Mr Dutton said of Labor’s campaign to date.

Read Katina Curtis’s full report here.

The Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles has done the rounds of morning TV to question the Coalition’s proposed $21 billion more than Labor spend on defence if they are elected.

“I don’t think you can trust the Liberals in when it comes to anything they say in respect of defence,” the Defence Miniser said.

“Over the last three years, the best they can come up with at this moment is a vague number.

“There are some reports that the 2.5 per cent is a target. There is no explanation of how they’re paying for this, where the money is coming from or what it’s being spent on and this is entirely consistent with what the Liberals did in Government.

“When we came to government, we inherited from the Liberals $42 billion worth of unfunded commitments.

“Under Peter Dutton, the Defence Force was shrinking. This is what we’ve inherited and what we’ve turned around. The Defence Force is now growing again.”

Australia’s growth outlook has taken a severe cut in a dire assessment of the global economy by the International Monetary Fund.

The United Nations financial agency said uncertainty has surged to unprecedented levels as a result of US President Donald Trump’s upheaval of global trade linkages, in its World Economic Outlook for April.

Australia’s economic growth projection for 2025 was downgraded to 1.6 per cent from 2.1 per cent in January.

But the 0.5 percentage point trim is not as bad as the hit to the projection for global growth, which was cut from 3.2 per cent to 2.4 per cent.

“Major policy shifts are resetting the global trade system and giving rise to uncertainty that is once again testing the resilience of the global economy,” the IMF said in the document, released on Tuesday, US time.

Despite an equity markets suffering a correction since Mr Trump’s tariff announcement on April 2, US stocks potentially had further to fall, given price-to-earnings ratios remain at historical highs, the IMF said.

​Read the full story here.​

Peter Dutton is set to reveal in Perth on Wednesday that if he wins the election on May 3, he will pump at least $21 billion more into defence than Labor by 2030.

The Opposition Leader will pledge to increase defence funding to 2.5 per cent of GDP within five years and by the end of the decade lift that to the Trump administration’s 3 per cent target.

A key Trump administration figure in March had called for Australia to lift its spending to 3 per cent while President Donald Trump has leant on other nations, particularly in Europe, to increase their own defence capability.

The Coalition had previously promised to spend more and spend faster than Labor’s trajectory to reach 2.23 per cent of GDP over the next four years and 2.3 per cent by 2033-34.

Mr Dutton has described that target as “totally inadequate” in the face of geostrategic turbulence.

​Read Katina Curtis’s s full story here.​