| Well here we are. In the end the election that had been so delayed couldn’t wait to get underway. Anthony Albanese bounced out of bed in the brisk Canberra pre-dawn to take the short drive to Yarralumla, where the Governor General issued the writs for a May 3 poll. By 8am the PM was back to publicly declare the beginning of the campaign at Parliament House. But of course the campaign had already begun in January, when Albanese came back from the summer break to announce billions in roads funding for regional Queensland. And it began again in February when the RBA finally delivered its long-awaited interest rate cut, seen as the real starting gun to Labor’s re-election race. And it was supposed to begin in March, with the PM initially aiming for an April 12 polling day until Cyclone Alfred got in the way. As a result the government was forced to hand down a Budget it didn’t really want to, and yet may well have ended up being the shot in the arm it needed. Cartoonist Brett Lethbridge's take on Anthony Albanese's decision to call the election today. The surprise tax cuts delivered by Jim Chalmers — reportedly put together at the last minute — ended up being a minor masterstroke. While they were nothing if not modest, they set the agenda for the week and boxed Peter Dutton into a corner: Would he back yet another Labor policy or be a Liberal leader blocking tax cuts? And when Dutton was trying to get some clear air for his own Budget reply it was dramatically overshadowed by the “accidental” tweet from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet revealing the election was nigh. Yes, this overdue election was in so much of a hurry it was called the day before it was called. No doubt this was a genuine bureaucratic blunder but it was yet more good luck for Albanese and more bad luck for Dutton. And no less a leader than Napoleon Bonaparte is famously supposed to have said he would much rather have a lucky general than a good one. In fact there is no evidence Napoleon ever said such a thing at all but that hardly matters in politics. Whatever the Corsican pocket rocket did or didn’t say, in war it’s often luck that matters most of all. And in the declaration of this war Albo has been a very lucky general.
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