PM and opposition leader campaign in Perth – as it happened (2025)

Here are the main stories on Saturday 12 April:

• Jacinta Nampijinpa Price said she wanted to “make Australia great again” during an election campaign appearance with the Liberal leader, Peter Dutton, in Perth, but denied trying to channel Donald Trump;

• Prime minister Anthony Albanese also held a campaign event in Perth, a day before Labor’s official launch;

• Albanese pledged $60m to expand Perth ferry services during an announcement with the WA premier, Roger Cook;

• Dutton described himself as a “pussycat” compared with his family, after recent alleged threats against him;

• Tanya Plibersek, the environment minister, said Americans don’t want “a Big Mac tax” and “no one likes to look on as the two biggest economies in the world play chicken” as US tariff dramas rage on;

• But Plibersek played a straight bat to questions about whether she could succeed Albanese should Labor lose the 3 May election; and

• Dutton described the teals as “a con job”.

Enjoy the rest of your Saturday afternoon, and we will see you here again tomorrow.

Easter might be approaching but Albanese has to skip a Bunnies match

Anthony Albanese says he is so focused on campaigning that he “won’t even be going to the Bunnies” later today, a reference to his beloved South Sydney Rabbitohs playing an NRL game in Perth, this afternoon.

Roger Cook is going on his behalf, Albanese says, and he plans to lend a cap the WA premier.

The prime minister finished his press conference by saying he will return to WA before the campaign ends.

Albanese highlights what he thinks is strange behaviour by some Liberal candidates

There’s another interesting parallel to the US election in some of Albanese’s comments about Coalition candidates.

He didn’t use the word “weird”, as Kamala Harris and Tim Walz did to describe Trump and his allies during their 2024 campaign, but Albanese made a point of highlighting what he thought was strange behaviour by some Liberal candidates.

We mentioned earlier that he called one candidate “a cooker”.

Regarding the Liberal candidate for Bennelong, Scott Yung, being the subject of a complaint by a school principal for handing Easter eggs to children outside a public school, Albanese said:

Who doesn’t know that you can’t hand sweets to children who are not yours outside a school?

Does anyone here not know that’s not what you do? No wonder that principal … put in a complaint.

These people are just … across the country there are incidents like this.

PM says WA Liberals ‘too busy fighting’ each other

Anthony Albanese was asked why WA had become a stronghold for Labor, both in state politics and at the 2022 federal election.

He said:

The truth is the WA Liberals used to have significant figures, Mathias Cormann, Julie Bishop.

But the WA Liberals are now too busy fighting amongst themselves to fight for the people of WA.

Albanese not worried voters will lose election focus because of public holidays

I’m just going back to the Albanese press conference, which was held shortly before Dutton’s and only a few kilometres away in a different part of Perth.

When asked about whether voters might be distracted during the campaign by public holidays, Albanese said he did not wait for the campaign to begin to announce policies that outlined his vision for the country.

He tried to contrast this with the Coalition, who he said had few policies, and had backtracked on some of those it did have, including in relation to making public servants return to the office.

Peter Dutton has joined a party rally in the Mount Pleasant Bowling Club in the Perth seat of Tangney.

The opposition leader is among friends here with a sea of blue Liberal shirts and a number of the local candidates running for Labor-held seats.

Michaelia Cash revs up the crowd of supporters, introducing Dutton as the next prime minister of Australia.

Dutton tells the crowd 3 May will be a “sliding doors moment” saying:

“When we look here to the west on election night … we’re going to be looking for you to bring the election home. It is going to be tight.”

Price is then handed the mic where she makes a reference, perhaps unintentional, to a familiar Donald Trump war cry:

Unlike the Albanese government, who try to subsidise the way out of a crisis that they’ve created in this country, and we have incredible candidates right around the country that I’m so proud to be able to stand beside and to ensure that we can make Australia great again, that we can bring Australia back to its former glory, that we can get Australia back on track.

The leader and his colleagues then serve a sausage sizzle for the party faithful outside on the lawns.

Laming in high court bid over AEC fines

Former Liberal MP Andrew Laming has appealed a $40,000 fine for Facebook posts that did not have authorisations, arguing that the fine should reflect the number of posts made, not how many people saw them.

Laming was initially fined $20,000 after being taken to court by the Australian Electoral Commission for three Facebook posts. The federal court found his posts on the “Redland Hospital: Let’s fight for fair funding” Facebook page in the months before the 2019 federal election did not carry his name and town or city, as required for proper authorisation.

The fine was doubled on appeal with the full federal court in 2024 finding 28 people had seen the three posts.

Laming appealed to the high court and in a hearing on Wednesday – for which the transcript was released on Friday – Laming’s counsel, Nick Ferrett, argued against the fine being determined on the basis of each time a communication reaches a recipient, because the number of people who see a Facebook post is outside the user making the post’s control.

Ferrett said:

The best you can say in that scenario is that the person who is uploading it, particularly if they are savvy about social media, will have an idea of the number of people who might look at it. That is [the] best you can say about it.

But it is out of their control how many may look at it, and that sort of comes back to the point about whether what parliament really meant was to make people liable for circumstances, which are entirely out of their control, to vastly raise the possible maximum penalty.

Tim Begbie, counsel for the AEC, used the example of a fictitious billionaire candidate, arguing that counting one communication for a single fine, regardless of how many people it reached, would be a very low fine to issue:

If a billionaire candidate wanted to promulgate to half of Australia, over the course of the AFL grand final, messaging that was attacking opponents without any identification of where that messaging was coming from, that might be a very powerful communication strategy, and it might be a very cheap one to add $25,000 to whatever the cost of running those ads was, if it meant having a meaningful impact on candidates getting elected, and that means, if it involved a meaningful impact on the free voting choices of each elector that watched the grand final.

The court reserved its decision.

Laming did not contest the 2022 federal election, after losing preselection.

Labor latches on to Senator Price’s ‘make Australia great again’ quote

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Victorian Labor have already posted the clip of Price saying “make Australia great again” on X, along with the caption:

Breaking: Jacinta Price said the quiet part out loud. We can’t risk the DOGE-style cuts and the Americanisation of our healthcare, education and essential services. But under Peter Dutton that’s exactly what you’ll get.

Peter Dutton asked if MAGA message helpful to Coalition’s campaign

Just one more “make Australia great again”-related comment that is worth including from Peter Dutton’s press conference in Perth.

Dutton was asked directly: is that a message that you think is helpful to the Coalition at this point in the campaign?

He responded:

You’ve got families out there at the moment, and we’ve spoken to them here in WA, who can’t afford to pay their power bill, who can’t afford to pay their insurance bill … they’re making decisions at the moment about whether they insure their house or not, right?

So let’s just deal with the reality for people. I really think that if we want to make their lives better and we want to get our country back on track, we have to change the government.

Dutton then referred to Price, who provided this answer:

If I said that, I don’t even realise I said that, but no, I’m an Australian and I want to ensure that we get Australia back on track. Absolutely.

After Price puts her shoulder to the wheel on cultural heritage laws, touching on defunding the Environmental Defender’s Office and Labor apparently being beholden to “radical fringe groups”, Dutton finishes the press conference by saying: “that’s exactly why Jacinta Price will be in a cabinet that I lead”.

Jacinta Price says Department of Government Efficiency ‘not an ode to Donald Trump’

Jacinta Price is asked about her role as the head of government efficiency, another seemingly clear nod to Trump made before he became wildly unpopular (given its similarity to the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency). She says:

Let me just clarify. The Department of Government Efficiency, it’s not a department. It’s got nothing to do with the department. In fact, it will sit in Prime Minister and Cabinet. And just to clarify, it is not an ode to Donald Trump.

So let’s be very, very clear. The media, you’re all obsessed with Donald Trump. We’re not obsessed with Donald Trump.

Peter Dutton seems particularly keen for reporters to ask more questions of Price, who was seen as a highly effective spokesperson during the voice referendum.

She says she will consider “waste” in the Albanese government if Dutton is elected.

Among the things she rails against are “socialist enclaves in remote communities”, grants about decolonising breastfeeding, and a “reset” of school curriculums which are “teaching people that Indigenous Australians are victims and that white Australians are oppressors”.

Dutton claims Anthony Albanese is ‘anti-WA’

Peter Dutton pivots from a question about some issues with preselected candidates into an attack on Anthony Albanese.

Dutton says Albanese won’t be photographed with the Victorian premier, Jacinta Allan, (who Albanese did a media event with on Monday) but that, somewhat conversely, Western Australians should know that far more popular premiers Mark McGowan and current leader Roger Cook were not running in the federal election. He said:

Anthony Albanese won’t be photographed now with Jacinta Allen in Victoria. They used to be joined at the hip and behind the scenes they are joined at the hip.

The prime minister’s been a leader of the left of the Labor party for his entire adult life and so when people see … the real Anthony Albanese, which I think they’re starting to see, they see somebody who is anti-WA, they see somebody who is not lived up to the promises that he’s made.

Dutton says a vote for the teals is a vote for the Greens, which is a vote for Albanese. A bit hard to get your head around but there it is.

He was asked: “Allegra Spender [is] paying social media influencers to promote her cause. Has she crossed a line?”

He responds:

Look, I just think when it comes to the whole teal movement the whole thing is a con job.

And that’s why people are now seeing through the teals, they’re Greens in disguise. And if you vote for a teal, you’re voting for a Green, which means you’re voting for Anthony Albanese.

The teals will only support Anthony Albanese in government. That’s the reality. So a Labor-Greens-teal government is a disaster for WA. It’s a disaster for the economy. It’ll mean interest rates go back up. And I just don’t think Australians can afford that.