Peter Dutton on Thursday challenged Anthony Albanese to call an election immediately “to put Australians out of their misery and allow a competent Coalition government to get our country back on track”. This is classic opposition end-of-year bravado. As Albanese pointed out, it’d fire a political torpedo into the New Year holidays, hardly a winning tactic. The next federal election will be upon us soon enough.

Let’s forgo the Canberra fetish of speculating about the exact election date. The prime minister hasn’t actually decided it yet, so there is no more futile activity than guessing it. We do know that it’ll be somewhere between March and May.

Illustration by Joe Benke

So how are the parties positioning for the election? The tale of this term so far is a story in three parts, as sketched by the pollster for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, Jim Reed of Resolve Strategic: “For almost the first year, Albanese was flying high.”

Until the Voice referendum. “That hit Labor pretty hard. They were seen to be distracted and less competent. The second year was the year of Albanese’s decline. It was pretty steep – he went from a net performance rating of positive 27 per cent last May to minus 11 this May.”

And the third year, so far, “is the story of Peter Dutton’s ascension. While Albanese has stayed in the minus teens, to just about everybody’s surprise Dutton has gone from a net performance of minus 21 per cent to positive 5.”

The damage to Labor from the Voice has endured and unhappiness over inflation has accumulated, while Dutton gradually has built a public perception of “strong values and strong communication”, as Reed summarises it.

“Perhaps the times suit him,” as most people suffer from inflation pressures. This, in turn, invites voters to act on the Coalition’s perceived advantage as economic manager. The old notion nurtured by the left, its security blanket that Dutton is unelectable, is now insupportable.

One critical advantage that Albanese holds? Nobody hates him. For all the reservations about his leadership, the “voters still think he’s a nice guy, they like him”, says Reed, who conducts focus groups – qualitative polling – as well as quantitative polling.

The Coalition has sorted through the anti-Albo slurs from its own focus groups and settled on two – “weak and incompetent”. From Labor’s focus groups, the party has drawn this conclusion: “Anthony is still seen as a regular bloke, a nice guy, but people want to see what he’s got to offer.”

This is very different to the 2022 election, for instance, when the then PM, Scott Morrison, was widely detested. No one wanted to hear what he might........

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