Amy Remeikis

I think Jim Chalmers will be a really interesting player to watch there because Anthony Albanese is at the end of his career.

He's reached prime minister.

He's thinking one, maybe two elections ahead at a time.

Jim Chalmers is, you know, only in his early 40s.

He has a lot of what he hopes he has a lot of political career ahead of him.

And he has aspirations to be prime minister.

So he's thinking of a lot more elections ahead than Anthony Albanese currently is.

And I think we're seeing a lot of movement ahead.

and signals from Jim Chalmers that he is open to some of these reforms, that he's not just smacking them down, that he wants to hear what people think about it.

And that's because Jim Chalmers is thinking about perhaps becoming prime minister in three elections time.

And he would need to show that he did something now in order to basically build consent for that to happen in his future.

Look, I think it's hard to tell from one set of polls in the cycle, but you're starting to see, I think, the right reorder itself in the polls.

But it's hard to say whether or not that is going to stay because as Cos Samaras, one of Australia's leading pollsters and others have pointed out,

The major parties are really struggling to get a grasp on all the grievances at the moment, and it's very difficult to say where those grievances are going to end up the closer we get to an election.

But we do know that they are finding more support in places like One Nation than they are in the major parties at the moment.

Again, I think it's too early to say because I'm not sure whether it was traditional Liberal voters that he was after with that policy, because it's certainly not going to do anything to win back those inner city seats that the Liberal Party would need to win back in order to have a respectable pathway back to government.

I think it was signalling that the Liberal Party wants to fight on the right for these voters.

And it's something similar to what John Howard did when One Nation started threatening his base back in the late 90s and 2000s, where he essentially just said, hey, people who are flirting with One Nation, how about you come and put us second?

put us ahead of, you know, the other major parties.

So I think it's basically, it's an appeal for preferences.