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DANIEL:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Daniel James. This is 7am.

It’s only been a week, but the election campaign is already off script.

Trump’s tariffs have landed like a grenade in the middle of the campaign, sending shockwaves through the economy, and testing both leaders as they try to deal with the fallout.

As polls show Albanese is finding his stride, Dutton’s still struggling to give detail on many of his policies. Though he is clear on one thing: he’d quite like to live in Kirribilli.

Today, columnist for The Saturday Paper, Paul Bongiorno on Dutton’s missteps, Albanese’s reset and the global forces shaping the campaign.

It’s Saturday, April 5.

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DANIEL:

Paul, this week we finally saw the long-threatened Liberation Day tariffs, and for Australia that meant a 10% tariff on all products we send to the United States. So how has the prime minister reacted to this?

PAUL:

Well, I have to say that he's reacted calmly, but he's reacted in a way that he was absolutely aware that he was in, well, if not the middle of an election campaign, the beginning of a very serious election campaign, and he was fast out of the blocks on the day of the announcement. He held a full-scale news conference with the foreign minister and the trade minister, and he read a very carefully prepared response.

Audio excerpt — Anthony Albanese:

“The unilateral action that the Trump administration has taken today against every nation in the world does not come as a surprise.”

PAUL:

But in that response. He was careful not to personally attack or denigrate the President of the United States. This was all about business, not personalities, and he stuck to the core business.

Audio excerpt — Anthony Albanese:

“President Trump referred to reciprocal tariffs. A reciprocal tariff would be zero, not 10%. The administration's tariffs have no basis in logic and they go against the basis of our two nations partnership.”

PAUL:

He concluded, this is not the act of a friend.

Audio excerpt — Anthony Albanese:

“The Australian people have every right to view this action by the Trump administration as undermining our free and fair trading relationship and counter to the shared values that have always been at the heart of our two nations' long-standing friendship.”

PAUL:

As Albanese said in his news conference, it's not logic, it is politics that explains this.

DANIEL:

So Anthony Albanese said this is not how friends act but what's he going to actually do about these tariffs?

PAUL:

Well his response has to be on two levels. First of all, you might recall Trump also said that, you know, he's expecting the phones to ring. Some have said, oh, well, maybe these tariffs are an ambit for Trump to give some people a bit more here or a bit more there. So Australia will certainly and is taking up that invitation or that opening, if it's a real opening at all. But the other thing is that the prime minister came to his early morning news conference with a five-point plan.

Audio excerpt — Anthony Albanese:

“We will stand up for Australia, we will continue to make the strongest case.”

PAUL:

Which went to offering millions of dollars to our exporters, interest-free loans and other things to help them find other markets and to develop markets particularly in our region. And also a policy to buy Australian first, so yeah a multi-pronged approach to it. I guess we're trying to make the best of a very bad situation.

DANIEL:

And this happened in the first week of the election campaign, so what Dutton and Albanese do now is a real-world test of what we can expect from each of them should they win in a month's time. How has Dutton handled this moment?

PAUL:

Well, the first reaction from Dutton on Thursday morning was that he would stand shoulder to shoulder with Albanese.

Audio excerpt — Peter Dutton:

“Well I’m happy to stand shoulder to shoulder with the prime minister to make sure we send a very clear message to the Americans that we don’t find it acceptable at all.”

PAUL:

But as the day progressed, a couple more news conferences, the Dutton of old emerged again.

Audio excerpt — Peter Dutton:

“The prime minister has been weak and missing in action and that's why we find ourselves in the position that we're in today.”

PAUL:

So the villain here was not Trump imposing these tariffs, but Albanese failing to have the tariffs withheld.

Dutton claims that the prime minister hasn't been able to even get a call or a meeting with President Trump. They even suggested that Albanese should have hopped on a plane and gone immediately to Washington.

Audio excerpt — Peter Dutton:

“And he needs to do everything he can to leverage the Ambassador or others to get the relationship normalised.”

PAUL:

You know, ignoring the fact that you just don't lob on the President's door. You actually have to be invited to the White House. But he also then raised that we should have leveraged our strategic relationship, the fact that we've got the ANZUS treaty, the effect that we have got a pine gap and then as well the minerals needed for modern technology this should have all been put on the table.

Audio excerpt — Peter Dutton:

“And that's exactly what we would do and that is of huge benefit to the United States and a huge financial benefit to Australia and that that's why it's a no brainer but the prime minister hasn't spoken a word about it.”

PAUL:

Again a rather reckless suggestion. Should we try to make our strategic alliance with the Americans hostage to the whims of Trump on trade? To what extent can you have a meaningful negotiation with Trump, who operates as a New York real estate agent, you know, what are you gonna give me type of stuff? How much more would we be prepared to trade away to get Trump to drop the 10% tariffs?

DANIEL:

And it wouldn't have been an election campaign, of course, without other PMs and their thoughts on the campaign and other world matters. How have they shaped the week's debate?

PAUL:

Well, interestingly, at the beginning of the week, Malcolm Turnbull gave a key address at the National Press Club.

Audio excerpt — Malcolm Turnbull:

“So simply stated, the United States under President Trump does not share the values we've shared with every single one of his predecessors, Republican and Democrat, for over 80 years.”

PAUL:

And the basic message was you can't trust the Trump administration. We need to be more realistic about the AUKUS submarine deal as an expensive white elephant. He even joked that no wonder Trump likes it, he always likes a good deal, and this is a deal where Australia basically has been taken for an extremely expensive ride.

Audio excerpt — Malcolm Turnbull:

“Moving to another marine metaphor, there is a big whale in the bay called Donald Trump splashing around wetting everybody and creating mayhem and our political class are pretending it's not there.”

DANIEL:

Coming up after the break - Dutton dangles his feet in Sydney Harbour.

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DANIEL:

Paul, it's hard to believe it's only been a week since the election was called. What's been your overall assessment of the two leaders' performances?

PAUL:

Before the election was called, everybody in the Labor camp was worried that Anthony Albanese could not possibly turn in another campaign as badly as the one he did in 2022. But we did begin to see this year a different Anthony Albanese, and some of his firmest critics within the government have breathed the sigh of relief that Albo has ditched the habit of a lifetime and begin to tighten his act. And we've seen this in the first week of the campaign.

On the other hand, it appears that Peter Dutton has been caught with his pants down, I think he got too relaxed talking to Kyle and Jackie O on Kiss FM in Sydney.

Audio excerpt — Kyle Sandilands:

“Good morning, Peter Dutton, how are you?”

Audio excerpt — Peter Dutton:

“Morning, I'm very well, thank you, how're you? Good. You look great.”

Audio excerpt — Jackoe O:

“You look great.”

PAUL:

They sort of just lobbed in a gentle question and Dutton walked headlong into it. He was asked where he would live when he became prime minister.

Audio excerpt — Peter Dutton:

“Yeah, we would live in Kirribilli, we love Sydney and love the harbour, it's a great city and so yes, that's the answer. You've got a choice between Kirribili or living in Canberra and Lodge and I think it takes Sydney any day over Canberra.”

PAUL:

Well, Albanese and the Labor camp couldn't believe their luck. I mean, the response was tin-eared on so many levels. This is a comment coming from Peter Dutton who has put out there, and now we don't know whether it's a policy or top of head, but they've repeated it a few times that he wants to force public servants not to work from home. And he wants to cut 41,000 public service jobs because he wants efficiency, cost efficiency in the public service.

Well, the prime minister said, well, when your job is to be close to where the department of prime minister and cabinet is, and where meetings happen almost every day, that's where you need to be, unless you're going to work from home on Zoom.

DANIEL:

What sense do we have about where he's going to cut those jobs?

PAUL:

He keeps repeating he's going to cut those jobs in Canberra. Now if he cut 41,000 jobs in Canberra, he would decimate the engine room of the Australian government because the fact of the matter is two-thirds of all public servants are actually outside the national capital, but the ones that are inside the national capitol are absolutely critical to departments like Treasury, Finance, and Foreign Affairs, and of course prime minister and Cabinet.

But there was some analysis done, which was quite interesting, that if as the Liberals and the Nationals have been talking about the 41,000 new positions that Labor has brought on, then an analysis done in the Nine newspapers found that at least 20,000 of these new public service positions will come from other capital cities and more than 4,000 will come from the regions. You can see why he wants to keep attacking Canberra. It's hardly gonna win him votes if he threatens to sack literally thousands of voters in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and elsewhere.

DANIEL:

Paul, it’s only a week in. But what are the polls saying at this point? And how much are they likely to move as the campaign continues?

PAUL:

Well, the polls show that Labor went into the election far better positioned than it had been for the previous, well, 18 months. We saw a slew of polls at the beginning of the week. The most important of them was a YouGov poll released by the ABC. It's concluded that an election held last weekend would have Labor gain 75 seats. Now 75 seats is in fact one short of the 76 seats needed for a majority and providing a speaker. The poll then found that the Coalition would return 60 seats. So that's a long way behind.

Now, while Albanese has regained his own mojo personally and while he's improved his position in the polls, he like Dutton, even though Dutton on the latest polls is more unpopular than Albanese. Neither of them have set the world on fire. Neither of them are very popular leaders. There is a vulnerability there that could tip those undecided voters one way or the other.

DANIEL:

Paul, thank you so much for your analysis and for your time.

PAUL:

Thank you, Daniel, bye.

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DANIEL:

7am is a daily show from Schwartz Media and The Saturday Paper.

It’s made by Atticus Bastow, Cheyne Anderson, Chris Dengate, Erik Jensen, Ruby Jones, Sarah McVeigh, Travis Evans, Zoltan Fecso, and me, Daniel James.

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