Federal election 2025 LIVE updates: ASX bounces higher after wild night on Wall Street; Dutton, Albanese prepare for first leaders debate tonight​on April 8, 2025 at 6:37 am

Thank you for tuning into our live Australian election coverage today.

We will be pausing the blog temporarily, but it will return ahead of the debate between Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton.

Both leaders will take questions from 100 undecided voters in western Sydney from 7.30pm AEST.

Our political reporters will bring you the expert coverage, live analysis and fact checks.

Here are our top stories, if you want to catch up on all the political news ahead of the debate:

• Dutton vows to back women in combat after dumped Liberal candidate goes on attack.
• Meanwhile, Albanese is defiant despite global economic shock, but has refused to explain how the government is lobbying to gain an exemption from the US president’s import duties.
• Labor and the Coalition’s formal campaign launches will come just days before Australians can begin casting pre-poll votes.
• At a press conference this afternoon, Dutton told reporters a recession will happen under Labor.
• A climate protester interrupted Albanese’s press conference this morning, yelling about coal and gas investment.
• The Greens are demanding the Reserve Bank hold an emergency board meeting to slash interest rates.

Politicians and their property portfolios are under the spotlight: Anthony Albanese’s $4.3 million clifftop purchase, Peter Dutton’s many property purchases over 35 years (he bought his first home when he was 19), and this week’s revelations that 31-year-old Kooyong Liberal candidate Amelia Hamer, while renting in Hawthorn, actually owns two properties.

It seems like a good time to take a look at the properties owned by Goldstein candidates teal independent Zoe Daniel and Liberal Tim Wilson.

Both Daniel and Wilson have highlighted the housing crisis as a key focus for their campaigns.

Daniel and her husband jointly own a five-bedroom home in Hampton which property records show they bought for $1.95 million in 2013, and a three-bedroom beach house at Separation Creek, just past Lorne on the Great Ocean Road.

Daniel says the housing crisis is “a national emergency”, and at her campaign launch on Sunday, she outlined her plans for a national housing summit next year to come up with “a unified vision for a 20-year housing strategy”.

Property records show Wilson owns three properties: a three-bedroom townhouse in Sandringham which he bought with his husband for $1.25 million last year; a two-bedroom apartment in South Yarra which they bought for $1.45 million three years ago; and he also owns a house solely in Barongarook in the Otways.

There’s more on this at our live ‘hot seats’ blog here.

In case you missed it, a Liberal candidate dumped by the party has forced Peter Dutton to declare his support for women serving in combat roles after the political aspirant claimed Coalition defence spokesman Andrew Hastie shared his view that fighting units should be male only.

Benjamin Britton, who was dumped as the Liberal candidate for the NSW south coast seat of Whitlam on Sunday after disparaging women’s presence in the defence force, claimed today he was the victim of a “witch-hunt” from moderate factional forces within the party and reiterated his claims about the army.

“My position is the same as Andrew Hastie, the shadow minister for defence and the great [former Liberal senator] Jim Molan that women should not serve specifically in combat roles, specifically in the army itself,” Britton, who is a veteran, told Ben Fordham on 2GB.

But, Dutton suggested that Britton was ousted for issues beyond his views on women in combat.

“There were a number of issues, not just those made public in relation to the candidate, and we took a decision to replace the candidate,” the opposition leader said this afternoon.

Catch up on the full story here.

We spoke to 12 undecided voters in NSW, Victoria, WA and Queensland and asked them how they felt about the May 3 election, what they thought the big issues were and what the result would be.

The voters were recruited through Resolve Strategic, which conducts regular RPM polling for this masthead.

They were screened to ensure they lived in the seats that could help decide the 2025 election outcome, were not fully committed in their vote choice, and did not work in an occupation that would give them special insight into the election.

Read more about what they said here.

Earlier, Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young welcomed Labor’s election promise to inject a further $1 billion into mental health, including centres, clinics and youth specialist care centres.

“We need more support for people, particularly young people who are struggling with getting the help they need when they are in the midst of a mental health crisis,” Hanson-Young told ABC News this afternoon.

She added mental health services needed to be included in Medicare, and pushed for the Labor government to match the Greens policy and add dental cover to the scheme.

“If the leaders really want [to talk] about things that are going to cut the cost-of-living pressures for families and to deliver genuine structural reform in terms of cost-of-living pressures, putting dental into Medicare is one of the best things they can do,” the senator said.

“That should be on the table for debate between the leader of the opposition and the prime minister tonight.”

Hanson-Young added her party’s leader, Adam Bandt, should also be on the podium for the debate to canvass topics including climate action and the environment.

Global turmoil from Donald Trump’s tariff war has engulfed the election campaign.

You’d be forgiven for thinking this would offer the prime minister pause for thought about his big spending agenda.

But not Anthony Albanese, who is set to make a mantra of his new line “it’s not the time for cuts”.

He’s seeking to ram home the advantage of incumbency in times of turmoil, when voters typically stick with the devil they know.

That’s why he’s spreading fear about Dutton’s commitment to slash the public service foreshadowing a broader agenda to slash public services.

But Albanese’s nerve will be tested if Trump’s economic fallout continues to grow.

Albanese refuses to explain how the government is lobbying to gain an exemption from the US president’s import duties.

Albanese used the global economic turmoil to spruik his policy agenda on Tuesday, insisting it was not a time to cut back despite the government being in a worse financial position than before other economic disasters such as the global financial crisis.

“I’m absolutely certain that in these uncertain times, it’s not a time for cutting now; it’s not a time for the sort of retreat from policy that we’ve seen from the Coalition,” Albanese said.

Asked if Australia had made any progress with the Trump administration, which had not wound back any of its planned reciprocal tariffs in this round, Albanese said: “We’ll continue to engage constructively with the US administration.”

Find out more here.

Both sides of politics are scrambling to find the magic number of 76 House of Representatives seats required to form a government.

To help understand the numbers game that will decide the election, let’s walk through the pathways to the three possible outcomes: an outright Coalition majority, an outright Labor majority and a minority government.

Read more here.

US President Donald Trump officially unleashed chaos on the world’s financial markets.

It’s a strange time to be campaigning for election, but Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton must adjust and carry on. So how is the incredible international volatility impacting the election campaign?

Will all this disruption be favourable for the incumbent PM?

For the full analysis tune into our podcast Inside Politics, as former Labor adviser Sean Kelly discusses this disruption and why Dutton’s working-from-home backflip was the right call.

Thanks for joining our coverage so far today, helmed by Olivia Ireland. I’m Caroline Schelle, and I’ll be steering the blog for the rest of the afternoon.

In case you need a refresher, here’s what happened earlier today:

• Dutton just held a press conference, where he said a recession would happen under a Labor government and the treasurer’s comments on rate cuts back that.
• A climate protester interrupted Albanese this morning, yelling about coal and gas investment.
• The Australian sharemarket opened higher this morning after yesterday’s bloodbath, as overnight US stocks careened after President Donald Trump threatened higher tariffs.
• The Greens are demanding the Reserve Bank hold an emergency board meeting to slash interest rates.
• Dutton and Albanese will formally launch their election campaigns with major set-piece events this Sunday.
• Dutton has denied ex-Liberal candidate for Whitlam Benjamin Britton’s claim that being pulled from the campaign was a factional “witch-hunt” after he had said women shouldn’t be in combat corps.
• And this evening, Albanese and Dutton will debate each other for the first time ahead of the election. We’ll bring you all the debate news live.