Federal election 2025 as it happened: Rinehart calls for massive defence spending boost at Anzac service; Kooyong forum crashed by far-right (2025)

Politics, John Howard famously said, is governed by the “iron laws of arithmetic”. And never is that more true than during a federal election campaign, when both sides of politics scramble to find the magic number of 76 House of Representatives seats required to form a government.

But while the arithmetic remains the same as the past, Australian politics is changing dramatically. Voters are increasingly rejecting the Labor/Coalition duopoly by opting to vote for independents and minor parties.

That makes the outcome harder to predict and increases the likelihood of a hung parliament, a rarity in our nation’s history. In other words, we are living in a fascinating and volatile new political era.

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.

It’s been 23 days since Charlotte Grieve, our reporter on the ground in Bruce, started trying to interview Liberal candidate Zahid Safi.

She tried calling and texting his personal mobile, his campaign manager and Liberal Party HQ – to no avail.

Grieve sent 12 texts to Safi, one message to his campaign Facebook page, four emails to Liberal party HQ and countless calls – each time asking for an interview as part of her election coverage of the seat of Bruce, in Melbourne’s south-east.

She visited his campaign office in Berwick to find it unattended, and left her contact details at Liberal MP for La Trobe Jason Wood’s office next door. Crickets.

But today, she was told he’d been spotted at the Narre Warren South polling station around 11.30am. She dropped everything and zoomed over to meet him.

Grieve found Safi at the entrance wearing chinos and a blue shirt. As she approached Safi, a blue-shirted volunteer yelled out “hey!” to warn him of her arrival.

Safi crossed the road, and started walking in the opposition direction, but Grieve followed – camera in hand.

Read about how the encounter unfolded here.

We’re following Albanese and Dutton on the campaign trail. Here are some pictures from earlier this afternoon.

From battlers to basket weavers, Australian politics has produced a rich vocabulary to describe different voter groups.

Some are simple tags, like protest voter or disenchanted voter.

Others draw on gender, social class, occupation, cultural traits and even location.

When Australians cast their ballots on May 3, attention will finally switch from campaigning politicians to the nation’s diverse array of electors.

Read more here about some key types of voters likely to turn up at polling booths and feature in the post-election analysis.

As Albanese and Dutton criss-cross the nation, we are following where they are going and what they are pledging in each electorate.

Find out more in our interactives below.

Here is a look at the places the leaders have visited.

And below, you can see how much money they have promised for various causes.

Politics was the last thing on Catherine Buck and Joel Morgan’s minds when they locked in May 3 as their wedding date just over a year ago.

They had found the perfect venue in Sorrento on Port Phillip Bay, near Melbourne, and were excited about their autumn nuptials.

But just over a month before their ceremony, their big day’s date was overshadowed.

After hours upon hours of planning and a few hefty non-refundable deposits, there was no way around it – the couple would announce their commitment to each other while the nation committed to its leaders.

For some, sharing the date with the federal election could have spelt disaster.

Can family members put political disagreements aside? Will guests be distracted? Can everyone vote and make it to the wedding on time?

But for Buck and Morgan, who are more or less on the same political page, it was nothing to panic about.

“The election is obviously very important, but we’re only getting married once,” Buck says.

“So, it will be on our minds, but we won’t be completely obsessed with it.”

Read more here.