News update for Thur 1 May 2025

Your trusted guide to the top independent news and views of the day...

May 01, 2025

2 days until the May 3 federal election

Welcome to your TrueNorth news update where every weekday afternoon we share curated articles from Australia’s independent news media sector.

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TODAY’S BREAKING NEWS UPDATES: See all the breaking news of the day through The Guardian here - Amy Remeikis for The Australia Institute here - and through 6 News here

BREAKING NEWS:

Niki Savva: Who will win the Australian election 2025? Peter Dutton has led one of the worst campaigns in living memory - The SMH/Age

In the final, critical days of the campaign, rather than zeroing in laser-like on cost of living, the economy or something remotely connected to a policy, Dutton ignited not one but two self-indulgent, whining culture wars – one against Indigenous people and the other against the “hate media” of the ABC and The Guardian.

These risky, Trumpian devices expose Indigenous people and journalists to abuse in an increasingly hostile environment. Both sides report a heightened level of aggro on the hustings.

Then Labor and Liberal campaign workers revealed that dozens of volunteers from the religious group Exclusive Brethren – deliberately kept quietly on the periphery in previous campaigns – have been handing out for Liberals at polling booths in marginal seats in Victoria, NSW, Queensland and Tasmania.

Liberal campaign strategists privy to private polling – claimed the idea to deploy the Brethren sprang from inside Dutton’s office.

Also read >

Honest Government Ad | How To Vote 2025 - The Juice Media

📌ICYMI: this is satire, NOT official electoral advice.

Australians are warming to minority governments – but they still prefer majority rule - The Conversation

Minority governments have been part of Australia’s political history since Federation.

In the country’s early decades, Prime Ministers Edmund Barton, Alfred Deakin, Chris Watson, George Reid and Andrew Fisher all led without commanding a majority in the House of Representatives. Since the second world war, majority governments have become the norm at the national level, underpinned by the two-party system of Labor and the Liberal-National Coalition.

Minority government has been rare, with the notable exception of Julia Gillard’s Labor government from 2010 to 2013. However, at the state/territory level, minority governments are far more common.

‘The status quo is broken’: the independent women who could make history on May 3 - Women’s Agenda

Independent candidate for the seat of Cowper on the NSW mid-north coast, Caz Heise, could make history this election.

If she wins in Cowper, she would become the first woman to ever hold the seat and the first person from outside of a political party to do so. The latest polls indicate she’s more likely than not to take the seat from the Nationals’ Patrick Conaghan in what is her second tilt as an independent.

Heise has spent over 20 years at the forefront of the mid-north coast community (from Port Macquarie to Coffs Harbour), working as a nurse, midwife, healthcare leader and disaster coordinator. She says her campaign this time around has built on the momentum she had first established in 2022 and the appetite for change in the community is strong.

“People are seeing things that other independents have done that we want here,” Heise tells Women’s Agenda.

Emma Shortis: Donald Trump has cast a long shadow over the Australian election. Will it prove decisive? - The Conversation

Donald Trump is everywhere, inescapable. His return to power in the United States was always going to have some impact on the Australian federal election. The question was how disruptive he would be.

The answer is very – but not in the ways we might have thought.

As soon as Trump was elected president, the political debate in Australia focused on whether Prime Minister Anthony Albanese or Opposition Leader Peter Dutton would be best suited to managing him – and keeping the US-Australia security alliance intact.

Initially, at least, this conversation was predictable.

It’s the economy, stupid. But who are the better managers? - Michael West Media

The economy in general and the cost of living in particular have been two of the main themes of the election campaign, with both major parties claiming to be the better managers. Alan Austin reports on what the IMF and the ABS have to say.

The latest half-yearly report from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) shows Australia climbing most global rankings, reversing the slide under the Coalition.

The IMF allows global comparisons by showing outcomes for 117 countries from 2016 to 2024 on twenty indicators. These include budget deficits/surpluses, tax revenue, government spending, national debt and net financial worth. It also shows projections through to 2030, although those were made before Trump’s tariff wars. So we shall see.

Aged care reform in 2025: An agenda for the next Australian Government - Pearls and Irritations

As the first of the baby boomers turn 80 this year, the major parties are on a unity ticket sharing an ideological commitment to the private market and a commitment to make older people pay more for their aged care. Neither party has the details right.

Nearly four years on from the Aged Care Royal Commission, older people and their families are beginning to experience some improvements in the quality and safety of residential aged care. The Albanese government has substantially increased funding, a new funding model has largely stabilised the residential aged care sector and mandated staffing ratios and care minutes are leading to improved staffing and better quality care.

Why Grace Tame will never go into politics - 7am Podcast

There’s one question Grace Tame is asked all the time: when is she going into politics? And her answer is always the same – never. Like many younger Australians, Tame is disillusioned with the two-party system, which she says serves a dwindling minority of morbidly wealthy players rather than the general public. But as Australia heads into an election where Gen Z and Millennials outnumber Baby Boomers for the first time, she thinks it’s a chance to move beyond the two-party games. Today, 2021 Australian of the Year and director of the Grace Tame Foundation, Grace Tame, on advocating for change outside of politics, and why this election is a chance to fix democracy.

Listen to the 7am Podcast

Greg Jericho: By getting tangled up on inflation and exaggerating numbers, Peter Dutton has blown the opportunity he was handed - The Guardian

Cost-of-living problems are real – there’s no need for the Coalition to use even bigger numbers.

On Wednesday the ALP cleared the last real economic hurdle before Saturday’s election. Inflation remained steady at 2.4% and underlying inflation fell below 3%. Because Peter Dutton had made such a big deal about that measure, he now looks bereft of an argument.

A good campaign really should be able to see what is coming. It was clear to anyone with an understanding of economics that when the March quarter CPI figures were released, underlying or “core” inflation would definitely be lower than the 3.3% figure in the December quarter.

Also read > Voters deserve to know what election promises cost. So why has the Coalition left its costings to the last minute? - Kylea Tink for The Guardian

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Ed Coper: MAGA-inspired outrage machine has a new target in this election - The SMH/Age

Groups like Advance Australia – the same Advance that drove the misinformation-laden No campaign against the Voice – are joined by groups like the astroturf “Australians for Natural Gas”, “Nuclear for Australia” or “Energy for Australians”, and “Coal Australia” (at least that last one says what it is on the tin).

Then there’s Australians for Prosperity, run by former Queensland Liberal National Party MP Julian Simmonds, funded by the coal lobby in Queensland and currently spamming teal seats with anti-teal disinformation. It is based on the anti-renewables precursor to MAGA, Americans for Prosperity.

Researchers in the US have linked these sorts of anti-renewables misinformation campaigns back to fossil-fuel donor and think-tank networks like the Atlas Network. In Australia, Atlas members include the Institute of Public Affairs and Centre for Independent Studies. Unsurprisingly, our anti-renewables movement walks, talks and quacks just like its global counterparts.

These networks are not grassroots, they are deep-pocketed.

Also read >

Bernard Keane: Will Pauline Hanson be a kingmaker? - Crikey

The growing support for One Nation likely means a less cohesive and secure Australia. But the media is focused on the lower house, where the flow of preferences is suddenly crucial.

The normalisation of One Nation as part of the political furniture of Australian elections is an impressive achievement amid the coarsening of politics over the past quarter century.

The placing of Pauline Hanson and her party last on how-to-vote cards was one of the great moral issues of the late 1990s, and roiled the Liberal Party, dividing it between moderates like Peter Costello, who knew ugly xenophobia when he saw it, and pragmatists like John Howard, who wondered how Hanson could be used against Labor.

Also read > Against the flow - Beware of claims that supporters of small right-wing parties will overwhelmingly preference the Coalition - Peter Brent for Inside Story

ABC chair is ostentatious over old-hat comic - The Politics

Kim Williams damaged not only his role but also his and the national broadcaster's reputations when he went into bat for a pushy, passé pub act.

So is it a hanging offence? Technically, perhaps not. But his problem is something different. ABC staff will consider that he hasn’t lived up to the high standards he demands of them. He wants them to stay in their lane; he strayed outside his. Williams risks being a “do as I say, not as I do” leader. He may have wounded himself terminally over a comedian who made blue, funny-at-the-time jokes in his Australiana pun-fest about a female party guest who could go “outback” with “the fellas” because “she’s probably seen a cockatoo”. Boom boom!

The pity is that the ABC really needs serious leadership now. There might be a feeling of relief about the way the Coalition has performed in this campaign. We won’t know for sure until the weekend is done. But Peter Dutton ripped off the mask this week when it comes to the ABC.

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