Both major political parties are using three-word slogans in the lead-up to the 2025 Australian election, setting up a battle between Labor's vision for a stronger future and the Coalition's desire to return to a perceived better past.
If you haven't got the messages yet, you will. Labor has been “building Australia’s future”. The Coalition wants to get the country “back on track”. Australia may not be in the official throes of an election campaign. But the parties’ persistent use of three-word slogans tells a different story and sets up a clash that pits a prosperous past against a stronger future. By last week’s end, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had repeated Labor’s catchphrase more than 15 times.
“This week, we’ve been travelling across Australia talking about building Australia’s future,” he said in Kununurra on Thursday. Both parties have hit the hustings with their campaign slogans, even though an election has not been called yet.As Albanese seeks to be the first Labor leader re-elected since last century, he cannot create momentum for change – there’s no “It’s time” or “Kevin07” to capture Australians’ imagination. Instead, with a wide-ranging slogan that portrays it as responsible, forward-looking and constructive, Labor hopes a weary electorate gives it another term. The Coalition, on the other hand, wants to seize on voters’ yearning for better days. It’s banking on Australians comparing their lives now to three years ago and feeling unhappy. That’s driving a more emotive route than previous years’ pledges of a “strong new economy” or “stability, jobs, growth”. The opposition’s vow to get the country “back on track”, whichPolitical slogans can be incredibly effective. The catchphrase “if you don’t know, vote no” was successfully deployed in both the 1999 republic and 2023 Voice referendums to capture voters’ uncertainties. Others can be a disaster. The Coalition’s 1990 play that “the answer is Liberal” was easily shot down by Bob Hawke’s retort – “it must have been a bloody stupid question” – and consigned to mockery in history books. With each party entering 2025 with a rallying cry that plays to their strengths, the contest will be won by the message that resonates most. “It will come down to believability,” said Andrew Carswell, Scott Morrison’s former media chief, now with consultancy Headline Advisory. “You can make the argument that the Labor Party have had three years to build a better future. The question is: have they succeeded? And that’s what the Coalition will be asking.”Labor knows the Coalition wants a referendum on whether the government has done enough. But it wants to fight over who has a better plan for the future: an area in which Labor thinks it has an advantage, given Dutton has announced no major policies outside his nuclear power pitch. Political marketing expert Andrew Hughes said Labor’s slogan told a story of progressive change and allowed it to highlight its policy record. “It’s all working towards building something. It’s positive. It’s hope. And we always love hope in politics,” he said.It also hints at how things could go wrong by changing course. “You don’t want to change a builder halfway through ,” Hughes said. At the same time, Labor will capitalise on voters’ trepidation about Dutton by painting him as risky. Labor thinks the Coalition’s slogan offers an opportunity because it alludes to taking the country backwards. “We’re the builders in Australia, the Labor Party,” Albanese said on Thursday. “They’re the wreckers, which is why the first word of their slogan is ‘back’. They just want to go backwards and take Australia backwards.” Morrison’s former principal private secretary, Yaron Finkelstein, said it was a classic strategy. “You do not want to be an incumbent government in 2025. Voters are very grumpy … Labor is in a situation where they know that voters aren’t rushing to re-elect them, so they have to heighten the cost of the transaction,” he said. “You might be attracted to the idea of change, and Labor’s job is to try and create a sense that the cost will be too high.” Labor needed to make sure Australians didn’t just relate Labor’s slogan to heated political topics of construction or housing, Hughes said, and Albanese is aware. “When we talk about building Australia’s future, it’s not just bricks and mortar,” the prime minister said last week. “It’s Medicare, it’s aged care, it’s childcare, it’s education.” Albanese, touring Australia last week, said “building Australia’s future” meant building Medicare, aged care and childcare.The other risk was it sounded too long term. “People generally want more immediate delivery on government promises,” Hughes said. “The cost-of-living has dragged on and on, and they want something right now to make their lives better.” That’s where the Coalition will sweep in. Its simple, positive slogan – “let’s get Australia back on track” – is paired with a negative message that the country “can’t afford three more years of Labor”. Campaign strategists point to polling, including this masthead’s Resolve poll, which showed 54 per cent of voters had a negative outlook about the nation’s future in Decembe
AUSTRALIA ELECTION LABOR PARTY COALITION FUTURE SLOGANS
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