Red, Blue, Green, Teal and Orange – Australia’s colourful election campaign is underway

Donald Trump has cast a long, orange shadow across the opening days of the Australian election campaign, and there’s every indication this will continue for the remaining four weeks.

It’s difficult to remember a time when the actions of a foreign head of state have been such a prominent feature of a domestic election campaign. We’d need to reach back at least a quarter of a century to the 2001 ‘khaki’ campaign, dominated by the Howard Government’s stand-off with Indonesia over the MV Tampa, and George W. Bush’s military foray into Afghanistan in response to the September 11 attacks.

Before that, it was arguably the 1972 election and Gough Whitlam’s pledge to withdraw Australian troops from Vietnam. But in both those cases, the influence of foreign leaders was related to policy decisions. In the case of the 45^th and 47^th US President, it’s his very existence that is enlivening our campaign.

Even before yesterday’s so-called Liberation Day tariff announcement, the two leaders were exchanging escalating rhetoric about who would be toughest in standing up to the Donald. The past 36 hours of the campaign have been dominated by the tariffs issue, with the analysis and fallout likely to run for days.

Under normal circumstances, calm heads would avoid talk of retaliation and fighting fire with fire, but an election campaign is not the spiritual home of calm and rational political discussion. Hopefully our leaders will stick to the moral and economic high ground, rather than trying to roll out a protectionist response that would equate to a flea bite to the US economy.

Sadly, the Trump dominance is interrupting a very important national conversation. With polls pointing to a likely hung parliament with the Greens and teals as king makers, there’s never been a more important time for voters to shine a light on all the players and understand what they’re signing up for.

Then again, debating who’s best placed to handle the President might be easier than tackling ongoing cost-of-living issues. With four weeks to go, we can only hope the extraneous noise dies down and the parties focus on the real challenges ahead, and what will impact our lives in the next term of Parliament.