Donald Trump’s stinging trade tariffs may have helped Australia’s left-leaning prime minister snatch a resounding election victory Saturday, analysts say.
Unlike Canada’s Trump-swayed vote three days earlier, the US president was far from the biggest concern for voters who backed Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, academics said.
But some said Trump nevertheless appeared to have a significant impact on the governing Labor Party’s late turnaround in the opinion polls, and the emphatic election result.
After trailing three months ago, Labor overtook opposition leader Peter Dutton’s conservative coalition and led a string of polls up to election day.
Dutton’s perceived “Trump-lite” policies — such as axing public service jobs in a drive for government efficiency — had turned some voters off, said Henry Maher, politics lecturer at the University of Sydney.
“Of course, there are other concerns — cost of living, defence, health and everything else,” he told AFP.
“But if we want to understand why a good chunk of the electorate has changed across the election campaign over the last couple of months, I think that’s the biggest thing.”
Trump’s unpopular 10-percent tariff on goods from longtime ally Australia, and the financial market disruption caused by his global trade policy, may have unnerved voters, Maher said.
“In times of instability, we expect people to go back to a kind of steady incumbent,” he said.
– ‘Volatility’ –
The Australian public’s confidence in its strongest ally, the United States, appears to have evaporated under Trump.
Only 36 percent of Australians trust the United States, according to an annual poll by the Lowy Institute — down 20 percentage points from 2024.
Dutton, who lost his own parliamentary seat in the election drubbing, earlier this year described Trump as a “big thinker” and “shrewd”.
But he and Albanese both stiffened their rhetoric, insisting they would not bow to the American leader when defending Australia’s interests.
Kate Harrison Brennan, who was an advisor to Labor’s former prime minister Julia Gillard, said Dutton’s coalition had tried out policies that “looked quite similar to those in the United States”.
Trump “definitely” had an impact on the election, she told AFP.
Australians had seen the global disruption under Trump, said Harrison Brennan, director of the University of Sydney’s Policy Lab.
This, in turn, had benefited Albanese.
“He’s made that case well, that in that type of changing world and volatility, he’d bring calm but effective leadership for Australia,” she said.
Not all analysts agreed that Trump was the deciding factor.
Paul Williams, political scientist at Griffith University, said Albanese would have won even if Joe Biden was still in the White House.
– ‘Turning point’ –
The Australian central bank’s decision to cut key interest rates in February represented a “turning point” in Labor’s fortunes, he said.
“Obviously this has been a cost-of-living election, but my take is that the sting is coming out of the tail of the cost of living, because wages are catching up to inflation,” Williams told AFP.
He did not believe Dutton had lifted policies from Trump.
But the conservative leader had only proposed a few policies, such as introducing nuclear power to Australia, and had failed to explain them clearly to voters.
And he had been forced to abandon a short-lived, coolly received plan to stop public servants working from home, which would have hit women voters in particular, Williams said.
That and other shifts in the Dutton campaign’s policies opened him up to accusations that he could not be relied on to govern.
“They have not gone through a single week of this campaign where they have not flipped and flopped,” Albanese said on the eve of the election.
Undecided voters were not avoiding Dutton because he reminded them of Trump, Williams said.
“They are doing it because of Peter Dutton. Peter Dutton has lost this election because of Peter Dutton.”
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