As the campaign starts, something has changed with the leaders. The next five weeks will be crucial

For most of the past three years, Peter Dutton — and his cut through, lethal lines of attack — have dominated the political landscape and agenda.

Anthony Albanese has often sounded like he was having a jelly wrestle in a paper bag with his vocabulary.

But at the absolutely crucial moment in the election cycle, something has happened to both leaders. 

The prime minister simply says we build, they cut.

"Only Labor is acting on the cost of living," he said as he announced the May 3 election on Friday.

"Only a vote for Labor will keep your wages growing, take 20 per cent off your student debt and cut tax again and again for every taxpayer next year and the year after."

The opposition leader, by contrast, found himself talking about petajoules and gas reservations. Barbecue stoppers if ever there were some.

If the wholesale gas price hadn't galvanised any voters listening to Dutton's response to the budget on Thursday night, he was also promising, in positively Rudd-esque tones, to "re-tool the ADF with asymmetric capabilities to deter a larger adversary".

One word sums it up

You may already be quailing when confronting the wall of election cliches and hyperbole that has been unleashed over the past 24 hours since "the prime minister fired the starter's gun".

So we will pledge to be truly economic with them here, and only use them if they really mean something.

In fact, there will be just one: it's hard to remember an election campaign that will be so crucial.

Crucial, that is, in determining the outcome of the election.

The polls are somewhere between dead even and really close for the major parties as the formal campaign begins. The Coalition's ascendancy until the end of the last year has stalled and even reversed.

Significantly, pollsters are picking up a shift in Australia's outer suburbs away from Dutton — which may have even put Albanese in the lead in some of those areas — right at the very moment when people are starting to focus on the election and make up their minds.

If the formal campaign was not compelling for those reasons, it is compelling for this one: it begins with both sides already having given their campaign policy speeches.

Sure, there may be some hoopla launches late in the campaign, in keeping with the increasingly ludicrous practice in recent decades of having an official campaign "launch" just days before polling day. (The history of this is that the practice built up in decades past that political parties — rather than us taxpayers — only have to start paying their travel and other costs once their launches have taken place.)

But the particular circumstances of 2025 are such that the government's budget, and the Dutton reply, have effectively defined how the campaign will be fought and on what.

That's not just because of the imminence of the campaign to budget week.

What is left to announce?

The government had already fired most of its policy shots before the budget, then had to regroup to give it some sort of centre that would drive home its message that it was the party that would help on the cost of living.

It regrouped with what you might consider as a $17 billion road sign, in the form of income tax cuts to get voters' attention, then direct them to the various cost of living measures the government has announced.

Having already announced its big spending measures, it can't really afford to do a lot more, so there is just on $1 billion over four years in the budget in the form of decisions taken but not announced to be unveiled during the campaign. That is not a lot.

For its part, the Coalition had got itself into a world of pain by promising fiscal austerity, then feeling it necessary to match Labor's spending promises in areas where the Coalition's record is not great with voters: notably health.

In fact, (other than on mental health), Dutton effectively announced all Labor's policy spends in his speech in reply on Thursday night as if they were the Coalition's own — rather than just measures he was matching.

So the Coalition didn't have a lot of money to play with either.

The decision to oppose the government's tax cuts — and to announce that on budget night — left a lot of backbenchers perplexed.

Argued on the basis of fiscal responsibility, he just left the obvious attack line for the government: that the Coalition is the only party in history to go into an election promising to increase taxes.

The budget reply ended up as a campaign launch built on energy… which without a doubt is a big issue. But the Coalition is also in trouble because of a massively expensive nuclear policy which it now doesn't like to talk about.

The central promise was a halving of fuel excise for 12 months. It sounded good at first in the sense of being immediate cost of living relief. But almost immediately the claimed savings of $14 a week came under question from independent economists. And of course it won't last.

The backbench may have been equally perplexed by the emergence of the gas strategy, which had all the feeling of something that had been seized upon on days or hours before it was announced.

Policy positions announced, details forthcoming

Even on Thursday, the opposition leader sounded like he didn't really know much about how the fuel excise system worked, when asked about it by Ben Fordham on 2GB.

"During COVID, the Coalition cut the fuel excise by 22 cents, but to pay for it, the Coalition took away the petrol and diesel fuel tax credit for truckies," Fordham started. "Now, when that credit was canned, truckies really suffered. They want to know this morning, will you dump the fuel tax credits for truckers?"

"We are, and we've been clear, I think, about that and we'll provide some more detail today so the truckies won't be worse off, the opposition leader responded.

"They're at the front of our mind as well and we've thought about that in the design of what we're doing. We want to make sure that this has society, or economy-wide benefits."

Yet all he could say in his budget speech about this was that "working with industry, we will ensure that heavy vehicle road users also benefit from this measure".

This is a snapshot of where things stand as the 2025 election campaign proper begins.

With the policy positions essentially in place, we can only speculate about what on earth the leaders of our major parties will talk about for the next five weeks.

And of course they are both campaigning as if they have a real chance of winning majority government, when all the signs are that the much more likely outcome will be minority government and the compromises that must inevitably bring.

Literally anything could happen between now and May 3. 

Laura Tingle is 7.30's political editor.