Australia election 2025 live: leaders enter final day of campaign with Albanese narrowly ahead in polls
Has either major party earned your vote? – podcast
With one day to go before the election, the polls paint a rosy picture for Labor. Governing with a majority is still a live option for the incumbent government – but pollsters have been wrong before, and a late night surprise is not off the table. So, after a long campaign which left many voters frustrated with the lack of big promises and big policy – have the major parties earned your vote?
In our Full Story podcast Newsroom edition, Bridie Jabour talks to editor Lenore Taylor and head of newsroom Mike Ticher about the choices progressive voters face as they head to the polls.
Listen here: Share
Good morning and welcome to our live news blog. I'm Martin Farrer with some of the best overnight stories before Krishani Dhanji will take you through the last full day of campaigning.
It seems like political tensions have boiled over in some areas with New South Wales police launching multiple investigations in the last week into alleged violence, intimidation, harassment and antisocial behaviour related to the election. This has included the smearing of poo across a truck carrying an ad for the Liberal party. More coming up.
A Liberal-aligned thinktank running last-minute anti-Greens advertisements targeting young voters received more than $600,000 from the coal industry during last year's Queensland election, disclosures show. At the same time, Labor and the Coalition have been accused of going to the election on a 'unity ticket' to protect fossil fuels.
In what might well be the last poll before the one that really counts, Labor has a two-point lead over the Coalition on a two-party preferred basis. The Fin Review/Freshwater Strategy poll shows that Labor is on 51.5% to the Coalition's 48.5%. If replicated tomorrow that puts Labor on track for a minority government. More campaign reaction coming up. Share
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The Guardian
5 hours ago
- The Guardian
Young Liberals urge Coalition to distance itself from Sky News and blame Maga ‘mirage' for Dutton loss
The Young Liberals want the Coalition to distance itself from Sky News and appeal to voters through a wider variety of media outlets, blaming Donald Trump-style culture wars for Peter Dutton's historic election rout. In a submission to the party's election postmortem, obtained by Guardian Australia, the New South Wales Young Liberals division said the 'fringe right' of the Liberal membership had too much influence over policy and campaign media, causing 'a mirage of the Maga movement' which turned off women and multicultural voters. The 31-page assessment, handed to the review being led by Liberal elders Pru Goward and Nick Minchin, is scathing of the campaign run by Dutton and his frontbench team, describing them as badly outplayed by Labor and out of touch with traditional Liberal constituencies. The document has not been released publicly and was provided to Guardian on the condition of anonymity. 'The 2025 election proved that being one of the loudest media voices in the room does not mean voters are listening to you,' it said. 'Viewership data shows that most Australians do not engage with overtly political commentary on traditional media, such as evening commentators on Sky News. Yet much of our party's policy agenda and media appearances during the campaign were stuck in a conservative echo-chamber.' Sign up: AU Breaking News email Labor won 94 seats, its biggest victory in decades, while the Coalition was reduced to 43 seats in the lower house. Pointing to Dutton directly, the submission said the parliamentary leader must 'front up' to a range of media outlets, including those not considered 'traditionally friendly' to the Liberal and Nationals parties. Ahead of his 3 May defeat, Dutton did the opposite. He was criticised for not regularly fronting the Canberra press gallery in the lead-up to the campaign and dubbed the ABC and Guardian 'hate media' in the final days before the poll. The Young Liberals called out senior figures for demonising Chinese-Australians and exacerbating division related to war in the Middle East. Frontbencher Jacinta Nampijinpa Price was criticised for declaring a Dutton government would 'make Australia great again,' echoing Trump's slogan just as the Coalition was trying to distance itself from the unpopular US president's policies and rhetoric. 'The Coalition must refrain from pursuing culture war issues and respect the intelligence of the Australian people by formulating nuanced, meaningful policy,' it said. On promises to voters, the submission was equally downcast. It said major policies should be announced with more lead time and accompanied by sufficient costings detail. It criticised Dutton's signature plan for development of nuclear power in Australia, and the decision to oppose Labor's tax cuts. 'Coalition policies such as the promise to cut 40,000 public service jobs, Peter Dutton's refusal to stand before the Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander flags, and a crackdown on 'woke' culture in schools all reinforced the perception of a party more interested in symbolic battles than addressing serious domestic and international issues,' it said. The opposition leader, Sussan Ley, has commissioned Minchin and Goward to assess the loss, and ordered a second review into the Liberal party's structure. One question being considered is how to boost female representation in Coalition ranks. The Young Liberals have called for a 2015 party review to be implemented, including an aspirational national target for 50-50 gender parity in parliament, but suggested Labor-style quotas could be required. 'Ultimately, the Liberal Party doesn't look like modern Australia. Australians notice, and it matters,' the submission said. Submissions to the review were due by Friday, with a report expected by the end of the year.
Spectator
11 hours ago
- Spectator
Horst Mahler, far-left terrorist who became a neo-Nazi
One of the strangest German lives in the post-second world war era closed on 27 July 2025 with the death of Horst Mahler at the age of 89. Mahler's life epitomises the fatal German tendency for much of the 20th century to embrace extremist politics of the far-left and ultra-right, since he converted from being a hunted and jailed leader and lawyer of the Red Army Faction (RAF) terrorist group, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, to become Germany's most notorious neo-Nazi, an outspoken anti-Semite and a Holocaust denier – activities for which he also spent time in jail in his old age. Even more extraordinarily, Mahler was also a one-time legal partner of his friend Gerhard Schroeder, Germany's Social Democratic Chancellor from 1998 to 2005. As a young lawyer, Schroeder had defended Mahler and other RAF terrorists and led a successful campaign to readmit Mahler to the German Bar after he was briefly disbarred. If you want a British parallel, imagine Tony Blair defending members of the Angry Brigade in his youth. Mahler was born in Silesia (now in Poland) in 1936. The family was forced to flee west in the face of the advancing Soviet Red Army at the end of the war. Mahler's father was especially anxious to avoid the Russians, as he was an ardent Nazi, and appears to have passed his ideas on to his son. At university, where he studied law, young Horst joined one of the ultra-nationalist and conservative 'bursenschaften' – elite student societies that combined drinking and duelling with sabres. He also joined the youth arm of Germany's moderately left-wing Social Democratic Party (SPD) but soon migrated to the far-left Marxist wing of the movement. The late 60s were a period of foment among West Germany's students, with frequent violent clashes between police and students protesting against the Vietnam War and against the staunchly right-wing tabloid newspaper empire of Press tycoon Axel Springer. After the shooting of the leftist Student leader Rudi Dutschke, Mahler converted his left-wing legal practice into a hotbed of the so-called 'extra-Parliamentary opposition'. His lifelong journey into illegality under the cover of the law had begun. Mahler became an active terrorist in 1968 when he organised the springing from a Berlin courtroom of Andreas Baader, an early leader of the RAF, and Baader's girlfriend Gudrun Ensslin during the couple's trial for firebombing a department store. For much of the 1970s and 80s, West Germany was convulsed by the activities of the RAF, a violent group of middle-class radicals who pursued their version of the class struggle by shooting down working-class cops, bombing 'bourgeois' symbols like department stores and US army bases, robbing banks and kidnapping and killing business leaders. They moved between their targets in fast BMWs which were nicknamed 'Baader-Meinhof Wagons' as a result. I lived in Germany at the time among such student leftists, and many a night passed in anguished debates in our communal flats as to whether the RAF's violent acts were the right way of achieving a socialist society. One morning a flatmate seized me and pushed my face against the wall lest I should recognise and betray an on-the-run RAF fugitive who had spent the night in the apartment. The thoroughly alarmed West German state responded to the challenge with crackdowns of dubious legality, but eventually the RAF militants were all hunted down and jailed. Here, some of them emulated the IRA and starved themselves to death, while others committed suicide with pistols smuggled into their cells by their lawyers. Mahler was one of those lawyers before going on the run himself with a price on his head as a hunted terrorist. He spent some time with his comrades in Palestine, undergoing military training with the PLO which almost certainly fuelled his own growing anti-Semitism. Returning to Germany, Mahler was finally caught and jailed. Hailed as a martyr by Germany's far left, by the time of his release Mahler's political views had undergone a dramatic sea change. At the funeral of a far-right activist, Mahler claimed that Germany was an 'occupied land', controlled by foreign forces in the pay of an international Jewish conspiracy. He put his new beliefs into practice by joining the neo-Nazi NPD party and defended it in court against attempts to ban it as unconstitutional. He soon proclaimed such classic Nazi ideas openly, and for the last quarter century of his life the ageing Mahler was in and out of the jails where he had spent so many years, but this time for such crimes as Holocaust denial and trying to revive Nazism. By the end of his days Horst Mahler had returned to the warped ideas he had first learned at his father's knee.
The Herald Scotland
14 hours ago
- The Herald Scotland
Smithsonian responds after Trump removed from impeachment exhibit
Smithsonian: Display restored to 2008 appearance The "impeachment" display is housed within the larger, permanent gallery called "The American Presidency," which opened in 2000, according to an emailed statement from the Smithsonian. It features information and artifacts about Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon, according to the display's companion website. Nixon resigned before he could be formally impeached. In September 2021, a "temporary label on content concerning the impeachments of Donald J. Trump" was added, according to the Smithsonian's statement. "It was intended to be a short-term measure to address current events at the time, however, the label remained in place until July 2025." The display has since been returned to how it appeared nearly 20 years ago, according to the Smithsonian statement and the Washington Post's report, which also noted that the exhibit now says, "only three presidents have seriously faced removal," omitting Trump. "In reviewing our legacy content recently, it became clear that the 'Limits of Presidential Power' section in 'The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden' exhibition needed to be addressed," the museum's statement said. "Because the other topics in this section had not been updated since 2008, the decision was made to restore the 'Impeachment' case back to its 2008 appearance." Website highlights other impeached president s The companion website for the display does not include a dedicated section for the Trump impeachments but notes in an introductory sentence, "The House of Representatives impeached Andrew Johnson in 1868, William J. Clinton in 1998, and Donald Trump in 2019 and again in 2021. In all four cases the Senate voted to acquit." It includes sections about Johnson's impeachment, including tickets and newspaper clips from the time; Nixon's Senate hearing and resignation, including testimony papers and photos from the proceedings; and Clinton's trial, with tickets and Senate question cards. 'All impeachments' coming in the future "A future and updated exhibit will include all impeachments," the Smithsonian statement said, noting that updating and renewing permanent galleries"requires a significant amount of time and funding." The Smithsonian declined to answer further questions about the change and the timeline for an updated exhibit. The controversy around the Smithsonian's change to the display comes after the White House in May pushed for the removal of art director Kim Sajet from her role as director of the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, citing her "strong support" of "DEI." In March, Trump also signed an executive order demanding the removal of "anti-American ideology" from the Smithsonian and other cultural institutions.
