Peter Dutton says there’s still a chance Australia will go to the polls early and suggests a December election

Australia could still go to the polls this year, Peter Dutton believes, declaring a December 9 polling date was a viable option for Anthony Albanese as cost of living issues continue to dominate the political agenda.

In an exclusive interview with The Nightly, Mr Dutton said he was on an election footing and did not discount a poll before year’s end if there was a change of Labor leader.

He highlighted an explosive column by former Labor State Secretary Cameron Milner in The Nightly on Wednesday on the stability of the Prime Minister’s leadership.

Mr Dutton pointed to senior ministers as leadership contenders, including Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles and new Immigration Minister Tony Burke.

The election, which must be held by May next year, must also be called for a Saturday, with a 33-day campaign in the lead-up. Polling day is unlikely to be called for the summer period between mid-December and Australia Day with most voters tuning out.

“There’s still a prospect of going to an election this year, particularly if, as we saw with Cameron Milner’s piece in The Nightly if those drums are starting to beat for Labor and they believe that the positions not going to be recovered under Anthony Albanese, then he might look at going early before Tony Burke or Jim Chalmers or Richard Marles or Tanya Plibersek could move on him,” Mr Dutton speculated.

“It depends on whether the Prime Minister’s waiting to see if interest rates come down.

“He’d be desperately hoping that they come down in February of next year and he can go from there.

“If he thinks that they’re going to go up, or if there’s no chance of them coming down and if he thinks he’s got a restless backbench, then December 9.”

Mr Dutton said the campaign messaging the Liberals would pursue against the Prime Minister would focus on a government in chaos.

“The Voice really damaged the Prime Minister, and I don’t think he’s recovered from that,” Mr Dutton said.

“His instincts on the economy are all wrong, and it’s clear that he’s butting heads with Jim Chalmers at the moment, and that, as we know through history, never works out well when there’s a there’s such an obvious tension between the Prime Minister and the Treasurer.”

Mr Albanese has repeatedly said his preference was for his Government to go full term.

In his column in The Nightly, Mr Milner said he believed Labor needed to consider dumping Mr Albanese from the leadership.

“The real power lays with the Labor Caucus that, with a simple vote of fifty plus one, can simply decide a new way to elect the next Prime Minister of Australia for Labor,” Mr Milner wrote

“Thus the nuclear option for Labor is really at the fingertip of every Labor MP. The Albanistas all know it because they tried the very same mechanism to shoe-horn their bloke into the role in 2016, even before Shorten had the chance to take Labor to the polls just once.”

Newspoll has showed a tight race for the next federal election, with the two major parties tied on 50 per cent each on two party preferred support for the past three surveys.

Sitting on 78 seats in the Parliament, Labor can only afford to lose two MPs at the election before it needs to rely on deals with the crossbench and the Greens to govern from minority.