Category Archives: Anthony Albanese

Donald Trump says he ‘will be talking’ to Australia’s prime minister about tariffs

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US president indicated he was aware Anthony Albanese has been pushing for an exemption to trade barriers

Donald Trump says he will speak to the Australian prime minister about trade, telling reporters he knows the Australian government has been trying to contact him.

Australia goes to a federal election on Saturday and while the incumbent, Anthony Albanese, is favoured to win, Trump could be dealing with an alternative prime minister after the weekend.

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Guardian Essential poll: Labor leads Coalition in final pre-election poll as Dutton’s approval rating slips further

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Poll also finds most Australians voting based on who will leave them better off in three years – rather than comparing situation to three years ago

Anthony Albanese holds an election-winning lead with just days left of the campaign, according to the latest Guardian Essential poll, with Labor leading the Coalition 52% to 48% on a two-party basis.

Albanese’s approval ratings have ticked up slightly since the last poll two weeks ago, but Peter Dutton’s has slipped for the fourth poll in a row, with the Liberal leader’s public standing dropping as the campaign has progressed. The Essential poll shows more people have switched their support to Labor because of the campaign over recent weeks, and that two-thirds of Australians say they’re voting based on who will leave them better off in three years – rather than comparing their situation to where it was three years ago.

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Leaders’ debate live updates: Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton meet in final election debate

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Mark Riley asked each leader what the Australian dream looks like for an average Australian in the property market today?

Peter Dutton said it “looks like a nightmare” and blamed the matter on migration:

When you bring a million people in they want a house for their kids and their family, fair enough, but what we’ve seen is Australians being displaced from home ownership, and our young Australians now, saving harder than ever, paying more rent than ever. They’re locked out of the market.

We are concentrating on supply, not just demand, because we know that’s the key going forward.

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Dutton listens to locals sharing crime stories in NT; heavy rain to hit northern NSW – as it happened

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Albanese says climate change is an “economic issue, not just an environmental one”.

He is asked about the rising pressure of home insurance for families. The prime minister responds:

We’ll continue to do what we can there. One of the things that obviously is having an impact is the increased number of extreme weather events. That’s why climate change needs to be considered to be an economic issue, not just an environmental one. Because there are economic costs to it.

Everyone who is here has been through screening … Let’s be clear about the suggestions that have been made on a range of occasions, aimed at promoting division in Australian society and in Australian debate. They’ve been made by the Coalition. They simply just don’t stack up.

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Hecklers and booers at Anzac Day welcome to country ‘must face the full force of the law’, PM says

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Anthony Albanese says disruption of ceremonies in Melbourne and Perth was ‘act of low cowardice on a day when we honour courage and sacrifice’

Anthony Albanese has condemned the booing and heckling of welcome to country ceremonies in Melbourne and Perth during Anzac dawn services as “a disgrace” and called for those responsible to “face the full force of the law”.

A small group of people booed and yelled throughout the welcome delivered by Bunurong elder Uncle Mark Brown in Melbourne. An acknowledgment in Perth was also interrupted by a person shouting obscenities.

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‘Propaganda’: Albanese mocks Russia’s ‘you have no cards’ warning to Australia

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Incendiary letter by Moscow’s envoy says Australians should be more concerned about US bases on their soil than a Russian base in Indonesia

Russian warnings to Australia that “you have no cards” to stop Russian military activity in the Indo-Pacific have been mocked by Anthony Albanese, who has dismissed an incendiary letter from an ambassador as authoritarian “propaganda”.

The unsubstantiated spectre of a proposed Russian military airbase on Indonesian territory has loomed over the past week of Australia’s federal election campaign, with the opposition accusing the government of obfuscating and dodging questions, and the government responding that the opposition had misrepresented the Indonesian government and actively fanned Russian propaganda.

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As Dutton faces a last-minute policy inquisition, Albanese seems to be on top – and he knows it

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An increasingly confident prime minister has bounced back from his campaign missteps while a nervous-looking opposition leader is running out of time to make a comeback

Two weeks until the 3 May election day, and Anthony Albanese is cracking jokes about Star Wars.

Every profile and sketch of the prime minister during this campaign – which is now past its halfway – speaks of the confidence and even swagger Albanese projects as he travels the country. It is one of the starkest differences to his 2022 campaign, which was dominated by missteps: forgetting key economic figures, then his untimely Covid diagnosis and images of being chased out of a press conference by journalists.

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Australia to advocate for Melbourne man charged by Russia after fighting for Ukraine

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Oscar Jenkins reportedly faces 15-year jail term on charges of fighting as ‘mercenary’

Australia will use “whatever avenues” it can to help Melbourne man Oscar Jenkins, who faces a 15-year jail term in Russia for fighting with Ukrainian troops.

The prime minister said on Saturday that the government would “continue to make representations to the reprehensible regime of Vladimir Putin” to release Jenkins, 33, a former teacher who fought with Ukraine’s armed forces against Russia’s invasion.

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Albanese claims victory in Vegemite fight as Canada concedes spread poses ‘low’ risk to humans

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Prime minister said his government had lobbied Canada to reconsider ruling that cafe could not import Vegemite

Anthony Albanese has claimed victory in Australia’s “Vegemite-gate” trade stoush with Canada, which has relented and allowed a Toronto-based cafe owner to sell the spread after initially ruling it did not comply with local food laws.

Speaking at a press conference in Sydney on Saturday morning, holding up a jar of Vegemite, the prime minister declared he had achieved a “win for Australian industry” after his government’s discussions with the Canadian government.

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Leaders’ debate live: PM says he has ‘no reason’ not to trust Trump as Dutton says ‘I don’t know the president’

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Prime minister and Coalition leader face off in showdown hosted by ABC. Follow live updates

Albanese says Labor didn’t commission modelling on negative gearing

Anthony Albanese said Peter Dutton’s suggestion that the housing crisis is something that developed in the last two years is “nonsense”.

Everyone watching this program knows that this has been developing for a long period of time. We have not had enough homes been built. The former government did not bother to have a housing minister for half the time they were in office. What we’ve done since we came to office, is look towards the big issue which is supply.

The experts say that what that potentially [would] do is is diminish supply, not increase it. That’s why the key to fixing the housing issues is supply.

It certainly wasn’t commissioned by us to do so.

We need to do both. We need to particularly give young people a fair crack … The key is supply. That’s why only Labor is offering a plan at this election to increase supply of housing.

That is on the supply side a very significant benefit. The second part is we reduce migration by 25%, so that we can allow the housing stock to be built up again and by doing that – as well as stopping foreigners for two years from purchasing Australian homes – we give young Australians a go.

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Peter Dutton says he will help his children with a house deposit ‘at some stage’

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Both major parties spruik housing policies, with Anthony Albanese saying critics may not have read all the detail of Labor’s plan

Peter Dutton says he will help his son with a housing deposit “at some stage”, a day after dodging questions about whether he would use his family wealth and salary to assist his children to get into the market.

Dutton on Monday brought his 20-year-old son, Harry, on the campaign trail to talk about the difficulties of saving for a home. Harry said he and his sister, Rebecca, had both been “saving like mad” to scrape together deposits of their own.

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Australia does not have enough tradies to fulfill Labor’s housing promise, experts say

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Construction industry already faces shortfall of 80,000 workers as government vows to build 250,000 homes a year for four years

Australia does not have enough construction workers and other tradies to meet election pitches to boost housing supply, experts say, casting doubt over the major parties’ pledges to address housing affordability.

Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton announced their competing housing plans this week, with both major parties seeking to increase the number of new home builds above the current annual rate of about 170,000.

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Guardian Essential poll: Labor pulls further ahead of Coalition as voters back Albanese on cost of living

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The survey is in line with other recent major polls which have all showed movements toward the ALP

Labor has pulled further ahead of the Coalition as the election campaign continues, opening up a larger lead in the latest Essential poll after two weeks of policy confusion and backdowns from Peter Dutton’s Liberals.

Dutton’s approval rating has also dipped, while more voters rate Anthony Albanese as the better leader on addressing cost of living, providing stable leadership, emissions reduction and keeping Australians safe.

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Ten things we learned from Anthony Albanese’s speech at the Labor party campaign launch

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The PM addressed a crowd of 500 people in Perth, spruiking new policies on housing and tax deductions, celebrating WA and invoking Donald Trump. Here’s what you may have missed

Labor’s election campaign launch in Perth was headlined by a $10bn housing pledge, a vow to help first home buyers and a new $1,000 “automatic” tax deduction for all workers.

It also featured a former prime minister, gags about rugby league and more than a few digs at Peter Dutton alongside Labor’s claims that he is copying Donald Trump’s political playbook.

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‘Brutal business’: Brisbane boy charged over alleged terror plot targeting Peter Dutton

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PM reaches out to opposition leader as Brisbane teenager, 16, charged with commonwealth offence

The prime minister has reached out to Peter Dutton after allegations the opposition leader was the target of a terror plot.

A Brisbane schoolboy allegedly planned an attack involving the Coalition leader in the first half of 2024 before being arrested in August, according to News Corp.

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Australia election 2025 live: Bowen says Coalition modelling on gas bill savings is a ‘scamphlet’ missing important detail

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Follow today’s news live

Health minister grilled on Labor’s $1bn mental health package

The health minister, Mark Butler, says Labor will not technically be building new mental health centres under its $1bn mental health promise.

We’re not building them. This is to fund the operations of these centres. Generally, they will rent existing premises.

They won’t be brand-new buildings. What we will do, say, in a particular area of say, north Brisbane or regional Queensland – we say we want to establish - let’s use the word establish other than build.

Head to Health – no one knew what it was, okay?

We did research. We basically, looked at how the existing services, which had started under the former government, were performing.

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Trump flags ‘major tariff on pharmaceuticals’ as trade chief says US ‘running up score’ on Australia

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US president says he will shortly announce the new tariff on pharmaceuticals but does not give any details

Donald Trump says the US will soon introduce “a major tariff on pharmaceuticals” designed to force more manufacturing giants to relocate to America, a move that could further strain relations with Australia.

His comments come hours after his trade representative, Jamieson Greer, said the US should be “running up the score” with Australia and using money generated by tariffs to address a broader $1.2tn trade deficit with the rest of the world. The US maintains a trade surplus with Australia.

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Albanese accuses Coalition of ‘gaslighting’ public over energy as Dutton touts economic credentials in first leaders’ debate

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Prime minister asks ‘how can you believe what they’ll do after the election’ as opposition leader accuses Labor of having the wrong priorities

Anthony Albanese has accused Peter Dutton of “gaslighting” Australians on key Liberal policies in a spirited first leaders’ debate of the election campaign which focused heavily on energy, health and tax policies.

Neither man made a major misstep in the Sky News forum on Tuesday evening in western Sydney, where Albanese was voted the winner in a poll of 100 undecided voters. Albanese won 44 votes, Dutton won 35 and 21 remained undecided.

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Port of Darwin operator says Albanese and Dutton are treating it like ‘a political football’ in election

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Labor and Coalition would both end Chinese company Landbridge’s long-term lease of strategically important asset

The Chinese company that controls the Port of Darwin has accused Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton of treating it like “a political football” in the middle of a federal election campaign.

Federal Labor and the Coalition have both announced that if elected on 3 May they would end Landbridge’s long-term lease of the Port of Darwin, arguing it is strategically important and should be controlled by an Australian entity.

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Is Anthony Albanese worried Jacinta Allan’s poor standing will hurt his election chances in Victoria?

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The PM has so far avoided the Victorian premier on his campaign trail. It has some state Labor MPs worrying she could be made a scapegoat

During the 2022 election campaign, Anthony Albanese waited until the 30th day to hold a press conference with the then Victorian premier, fearing Daniel Andrews’ association with Covid lockdowns.

When the two finally appeared together, Andrews didn’t hold back. He launched into an impassioned tirade against Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg, revisiting the fraught themes of the pandemic, while Albanese stood beside him, visibly uneasy. After that, Andrews largely stayed off the campaign trail.

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