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West Australian
14-05-2025
- Politics
- West Australian
Opinion: ALP's Durack candidate Karen Wheatland on her Federal campaign, why she won despite not being elected
I wasn't elected. But that doesn't mean I lost. I've won — in so many ways. Running for Durack brought everything into focus. Every chapter of my life — rough seas, rebuilding after injury, raising kids through the hard stuff, fighting for better — led me to that campaign trail. I didn't put my hand up because it was easy or expected. I did it because I've lived the consequences of policy. I've seen what happens when people are left behind. And I knew I had something real to offer. This campaign wasn't about chasing a title — it was about standing in my truth, showing up, and giving people something honest to connect with. I travelled thousands of kilometres, heard stories that will stay with me forever, and shared my own — not to impress, but to connect. My values weren't handed down to me. They weren't shaped by a party line or family tradition. They were formed the hard way — through experience. Through working-class struggle, union activism, single parenting, injury, addiction, recovery and public service. They've been tested and rebuilt — just like me. That's why I back Labor. Not because I was told to — but because it matches what I've lived. Because I know how much it matters when government shows up with practical policies —free Tafe, HECS relief, housing support, mental health funding. Not handouts — lifelines. If there's one thing I want people — especially younger voters — to take from this journey, it's this: Think for yourself. Ask where your values truly sit. Sometimes we vote the way we were raised to. We follow what feels familiar. And there's nothing wrong with honouring where you've come from, but make sure it lines up with where you're going. The world's changing. And we can't move forward by holding on too tightly to the past. You have a voice. Use it. That's what I did. And while I didn't win the seat — I found my place. And I'm just getting started.
The Guardian
03-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Anthony Albanese's experience showed, but a truly terrible Trump-inspired Coalition campaign helped
Just as Australians were returning from the calm of summer holidays, Labor and the Coalition both held their breath as Donald Trump took the presidential oath of office in Washington. With a federal election year under way and the Albanese government desperate to restart Labor's flagging political prospects, Trump's victory had emboldened conservatives in the Coalition and right-wing minor parties. Along with sections of the Australia media, they pushed for a version of Trump's unapologetic politics here. Sensing a shift to the right across the electorate, Peter Dutton and the Coalition finalised policies to slash the federal public service and root out 'woke' ideology in schools and social policy. They fine tuned messages about the Indigenous welcome to country and accused Labor of dangerous overreach in the transition to renewable energy. But, despite predictions of an inevitable slide into minority for Labor, Anthony Albanese's remarkable election victory showed voters aren't interested in appeals to the fringes. Instead, Australians were eager to reward a focus on the mainstream. For months, Labor's national secretary Paul Erickson had been building an election campaign around cost-of-living assistance and better Medicare services, encouraging Albanese to talk up urgent care medical clinics and cheaper childcare and Tafe course. While the Coalition sought to demonise public servants supposedly slacking off in Canberra and struggled to explain Dutton's plan to build seven nuclear power plants, Labor smashed them for voting against household payments and tax cuts announced in March budget. The unpopular work from home policy, which led too many voters to believe their own workplace flexibility was under threat, will be remembered as one of the great stinkers of Australian election campaigning. Like John Howard before him, the times look like they suit Albanese. Few leaders will get as lucky, in the form of a truly terrible opposition campaign. But his experience showed as well. Trump's 'Liberation Day' tariffs announcement had loomed as a risk to Albanese's reelection bid, but he successfully managed the hit, criticising Trump's plans and pledging to negotiate a better deal for exporters once he was back in The Lodge. As Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency slashed and burned, Labor played havoc with Dutton's approval rating, deriding him as 'Dogey Dutton' and accusing the Liberals of harbouring even more radical ideas. The now former member for Dickson wasn't helped by frontbencher Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and her promise to 'make Australia great again.' Like the undecided voter who asked Albanese and Dutton how they would protect Australia from Trump's erratic decision making in the first leader's debate on April 10, fear of an unstable world was front-of-mind around the country. Albanese successfully argued calm leadership was Australia's best approach to the unpredictability the US president has cultivated as his personal calling card. His unflashy approach to the job might be regarded as a key asset. Albanese's victory speech alluded to Dutton's flirtation with the MAGA approach. He told the Labor faithful his government would continue to choose an Australian way forward. One of his biggest cheers came as he promised to continue to recognise Indigenous heritage and leadership every day in the job. The politics of division might be front of mind for the Coalition as they pick up the pieces. Queensland senator James McGrath, hardly a moderate in the joint party room, had the unenviable task of explaining the historic loss on the ABC's broadcast. He warned the Coalition should be firmly in the centre right, and avoid importing division and distrust. 'We must resist that path [and] focus on where middle Australia is,' he said. That's where the voters are too. Just ask Labor.
The Guardian
01-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Australian federal election polls tracker: Labor v Coalition latest opinion poll results
As the 2025 Australian federal election approaches, political polls are coming thick and fast. This page will be regularly updated so you can track who is polling up, how the independents are faring and how the parties stand with different demographics. This first chart is based on a poll averaging model developed by political scientists at the University of Sydney. It factors in sample sizes, previous results and 'house effects' (bias towards a party) of each pollster. There is a lot of uncertainty in political polling and modelling and these charts show a range that likely contains the support for each party. You can read more in our methodology at the end of the page. The next shows a timeline of the two-party preferred (2pp) vote since 2022: Looking at two-party support alone can obscure one of the biggest stories of the last election: almost a third of votes were for independents and other parties. The 68.5% primary votes share for Labor and the Coalition is an all time low and the continuation of a steady decline since the two parties claimed 98% of votes in 1951. The chart below shows the primary votes for Labor, the Coalition, Greens and others/independents. It is based on the same model as our main tracker, starting with the vote share at the last election. Use the drop-down menu to see what has changed over different periods since the election. To get a sample that reflects the nation at large, pollsters collect a lot of demographic information, including age, sex, location and education. Polling companies occasionally release two-party preferred measures for these sub-demographics. The following charts use simple rolling averages to try to find the underlying trend in two-party support. There has been no adjustment for sample size, house effects, weighting or release date. The first shows support by the age group of the respondent. The next chart groups respondents by education – those with no tertiary education, those with a Tafe or technical education, and those with university education. The chart below groups respondents by sex – male or female. As the numbers are rolling averages, they will not always add up to 100. The final demographic category is state. Data is not available for all states, largely because of their size. Tasmania, for instance, makes up about 2% of the population. A representative sample of 1,000 Australians would have far too few Tasmanians to provide a robust estimate. The final table shows the two-party preferred share for all of the polls that feed into our models. What does Guardian Australia's poll tracker actually do? Most Australian political polls have a sample size of a little over 1,000 respondents. There's only so much any one of these polls can tell you. And the fluctuations between polls and for the same pollster across time can often just be statistical noise. The poll tracker pools all of the polls using a model developed by political scientists at the University of Sydney. It assumes political intentions yesterday are similar to today and today is like tomorrow, but with small random changes. The model starts, and is anchored to, the actual 2022 election results. And it assumes polling organisations' bias is fixed. This is what was observed in previous elections, such as in 2019. Why does the polling model draw a line below Labor's actual poll numbers (the circles) while the Coalition's line goes right through their polling numbers? As noted above - the model begins with the last election results and assumes voting intentions evolve over time. The model indicates the polls are overestimating the Labor vote. This pattern was also observed between the 2016 and 2019 elections. In that period the model was correcting for the pollsters' systematic bias between those elections. Is the Guardian Australia tracker a prediction of who is going to win the election? No. It is simply an aggregation of the public polls. It is a snapshot in time of people's stated voting intentions, which can change. Why have we changed the poll tracker format/What is the range we are showing? Every time we update the poll tracker the model runs thousands of simulations. The first version of this page only showed the average of these simulations – a single number. Our charts did include a credibility interval - sometimes also known as a margin of error. But highlighting just one number implied greater certainty than the data warranted. The refresh to the page puts the emphasis on the credibility interval. We are using a 95% credibility interval - there is a 95% chance that the actual support for each party is inside this range. We are aiming to emphasise that there is a degree of uncertainty to both the results of any one poll and an aggregate of polls. Why are we using a rolling average for some things instead of the same poll average model? The demographic data is not consistent. Not every pollster releases demographic breakdowns, and the ones that do don't necessarily release it with each poll. There can be months in between releases for some demographic variables, such as voting intention by level of education. But this data is still useful and should be included in some form. Given we can't model the data in the same way, we are instead using a simple rolling average to track it over time. Notes and methods The main poll tracker is based on work by Dr Luke Mansillo and Prof Simon Jackman. You can find their paper here. The model in different disciplines is called a hidden Markov model or a state space model and employs a Kalman filter algorithm that uses a series of measurements over time, including statistical noise and other inaccuracies, to produce estimates. These types of models are often used in fields such as robotics, economics and medicine to create estimates from noisy measurements. Each newly published poll is treated as a new measurement, with the model factoring in new data in the context of what has come before. The model begins with (is anchored to) the vote share for each party at the last federal election. Only polls with a defined sampling procedure, reported sample size and fielding dates have been included in our dataset. Polls are sliced over the days that they are in the field. Sample sizes are adjusted to account for non-response, with effective sample size fed into the model. The model calculates house effects for each pollster dynamically, by finding systematic differences to what would be expected, given the current average. The two-party preferred vote is adjusted to remove unknowns or nonresponses, leaving only Labor and Coalition shares. The model is run 1,000 times for each update
The Guardian
15-04-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Axing Labor's free Tafe would mean fewer builders and higher house prices, experts warn
Australia's construction worker shortage – and prospects for affordable housing – would worsen if Peter Dutton scraps Labor's free Tafe program, experts warn, pushing housing prices even further out of reach of prospective buyers. After a video emerged of Liberal frontbencher Sarah Henderson saying the fee-free Tafe policy was 'just not working', the opposition leader was asked on Tuesday if he would cut the scheme – designed to encourage people to work in priority industries like the construction sector. He replied that the Liberal party had said it was 'not supportive of the government's policy in relation to Tafe'. Sign up for the Afternoon Update: Election 2025 email newsletter Labor's bill to legislate its $1.5bn fee-free Tafe program, which the opposition voted against, passed in March. It directs ongoing funding to states and territories from 2027 for at least 100,000 fee-free course places a year, prioritising equity cohorts including First Nations people, women, youth, people out of work or receiving income support, unpaid carers and people with disability and areas of 'high workforce demand' such as housing, care, early childhood education and defence. The Coalition said it had consistently opposed the scheme because it was 'badly designed and poorly targeted'. Roy Green, special innovation adviser at the University of Technology Sydney, said fewer homes would be built if the program ended. 'If you don't have the skills, you won't get the resulting supply of houses, and will continue to have housing shortages and high prices and high rent,' Green said. Australia's construction industry suffers from a shortage of workers, with 83,000 more skilled tradespeople needed for the country to build the 1.2m new homes planned by the Albanese government, according to the Housing Industry Association (HIA). Close to 40,000 people had enrolled in construction courses at Tafe with free tuition since 2023, with nearly a further 530,000 enrolling in other subsidised qualifications, the federal government said in January. The fee-free program had helped people into vocational training who might otherwise have stayed away or were from disadvantaged backgrounds, said Melinda Hildebrandt, a policy fellow at the Mitchell Institute. 'We're dealing with a pretty crazy cost-of-living crisis right now, so it does actually help,' she said. The construction sector has persistent problems attracting new trainees and in September 2024 hit its lowest level of new apprentices since 2020, according to the National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER). But industry bodies have also drawn attention to the sector's struggle to retain trainees. More than half of those starting construction courses in 2019 have since withdrawn from the courses, NCVER found. Sign up to Afternoon Update: Election 2025 Our Australian afternoon update breaks down the key election campaign stories of the day, telling you what's happening and why it matters after newsletter promotion An unknown number of trainees have dropped out of the free Tafe courses, which a Coalition spokesperson highlighted when asked about whether the opposition would remove free Tafe and offer a new program. 'We can do better than Labor's free Tafe program and under a Dutton Coalition government we will do better,' the spokesperson said, without outlining alternatives. The major parties announced their competing housing plans this week, in an election focused on cost-of-living policies, particularly housing affordability. Both major parties plan to pay to keep trainees in the construction sector, with Labor offering wage subsidies and $10,000 incentives for apprentices staying on, while the Coalition would give some businesses up to $12,000 for taking on new apprentices. HIA said rewarding employers and students for completions would be more effective than free Tafe. But Nathan Quinn, Carpentry Australia's head of development, said removing free Tafe entirely would deter people from taking up construction courses. 'You would see a huge drop off and a huge lost opportunity to really meet that workforce demand of the future,' he said. More supports could help free Tafe get the outcomes the sector needs, he said. 'We've got part of the puzzle, right? We just need their surrounding pieces to be in the right place.'
The Guardian
10-04-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Australian federal election poll tracker: Labor v Coalition latest opinion polls results
As the 2025 Australian federal election approaches, political polls are coming thick and fast. This page will be regularly updated so you can track who is polling up, how the independents are faring and how the parties stand with different demographics. This first chart is based on a poll averaging model developed by political scientists at the University of Sydney. It factors in sample sizes, previous results and 'house effects' (bias towards a party) of each pollster. There is a lot of uncertainty in political polling and modelling and these charts show a range that likely contains the support for each party. You can read more in our methodology at the end of the page. The next shows a timeline of the two-party preferred (2pp) vote since 2022: Looking at two-party support alone can obscure one of the biggest stories of the last election: almost a third of votes were for independents and other parties. The 68.5% primary votes share for Labor and the Coalition is an all time low and the continuation of a steady decline since the two parties claimed 98% of votes in 1951. The chart below shows the primary votes for Labor, the Coalition, Greens and others/independents. It is based on the same model as our main tracker, starting with the vote share at the last election. Use the drop-down menu to see what has changed over different periods since the election. To get a sample that reflects the nation at large, pollsters collect a lot of demographic information, including age, sex, location and education. Polling companies occasionally release two-party preferred measures for these sub-demographics. The following charts use simple rolling averages to try to find the underlying trend in two-party support. There has been no adjustment for sample size, house effects, weighting or release date. The first shows support by the age group of the respondent. The next chart groups respondents by education – those with no tertiary education, those with a Tafe or technical education, and those with university education. The chart below groups respondents by sex – male or female. As the numbers are rolling averages, they will not always add up to 100. The final demographic category is state. Data is not available for all states, largely because of their size. Tasmania, for instance, makes up about 2% of the population. A representative sample of 1,000 Australians would have far too few Tasmanians to provide a robust estimate. The final table shows the two-party preferred share for all of the polls that feed into our models. What does Guardian Australia's poll tracker actually do? Most Australian political polls have a sample size of a little over 1,000 respondents. There's only so much any one of these polls can tell you. And the fluctuations between polls and for the same pollster across time can often just be statistical noise. The poll tracker pools all of the polls using a model developed by political scientists at the University of Sydney. It assumes political intentions yesterday are similar to today and today is like tomorrow, but with small random changes. The model starts, and is anchored to, the actual 2022 election results. And it assumes polling organisations' bias is fixed. This is what was observed in previous elections, such as in 2019. Why does the polling model draw a line below Labor's actual poll numbers (the circles) while the Coalition's line goes right through their polling numbers? As noted above - the model begins with the last election results and assumes voting intentions evolve over time. The model indicates the polls are overestimating the Labor vote. This pattern was also observed between the 2016 and 2019 elections. In that period the model was correcting for the pollsters' systematic bias between those elections. Is the Guardian Australia tracker a prediction of who is going to win the election? No. It is simply an aggregation of the public polls. It is a snapshot in time of people's stated voting intentions, which can change. Why have we changed the poll tracker format/What is the range we are showing? Every time we update the poll tracker the model runs thousands of simulations. The first version of this page only showed the average of these simulations – a single number. Our charts did include a credibility interval - sometimes also known as a margin of error. But highlighting just one number implied greater certainty than the data warranted. The refresh to the page puts the emphasis on the credibility interval. We are using a 95% credibility interval - there is a 95% chance that the actual support for each party is inside this range. We are aiming to emphasise that there is a degree of uncertainty to both the results of any one poll and an aggregate of polls. Why are we using a rolling average for some things instead of the same poll average model? The demographic data is not consistent. Not every pollster releases demographic breakdowns, and the ones that do don't necessarily release it with each poll. There can be months in between releases for some demographic variables, such as voting intention by level of education. But this data is still useful and should be included in some form. Given we can't model the data in the same way, we are instead using a simple rolling average to track it over time. Notes and methods The main poll tracker is based on work by Dr Luke Mansillo and Prof Simon Jackman. You can find their paper here. The model in different disciplines is called a hidden Markov model or a state space model and employs a Kalman filter algorithm that uses a series of measurements over time, including statistical noise and other inaccuracies, to produce estimates. These types of models are often used in fields such as robotics, economics and medicine to create estimates from noisy measurements. Each newly published poll is treated as a new measurement, with the model factoring in new data in the context of what has come before. The model begins with (is anchored to) the vote share for each party at the last federal election. Only polls with a defined sampling procedure, reported sample size and fielding dates have been included in our dataset. Polls are sliced over the days that they are in the field. Sample sizes are adjusted to account for non-response, with effective sample size fed into the model. The model calculates house effects for each pollster dynamically, by finding systematic differences to what would be expected, given the current average. The two-party preferred vote is adjusted to remove unknowns or nonresponses, leaving only Labor and Coalition shares. The model is run 1,000 times for each update
