Speculation around an early election has been swirling ever since whispers about a guillotine motion to end the sitting year began to circulate.
As the number of bills slated for urgent passage through the Senate on Thursday ballooned and retiring MPs launched into their emotional and very lengthy valedictory speeches, political insiders were increasingly speculating that a March election could truly be on the horizon.
Speaking to media in Canberra on Friday, in a bit of a celebratory farewell for the year, Finance Minister Katy Gallagher fuelled the fire of speculation, drawing attention to the frantic pace with which the government had moved its legislative agenda forward.
With the addition of a 32-minute sitting of the House of Representatives on Friday morning, before MPs broke for their summer snooze, the government’s urgency to pass bills before the end of the year was more than apparent, and more akin to a Black Friday sale than a standard legislative process.
“The PM made it clear that he wanted to see legislation get through the Senate, and we were able to do that – so I took those instructions seriously,” Gallagher said, calling the result “extraordinary”.
“At the end of the day, we passed 31 bills yesterday and 45 bills through the week, which I don’t think it’s quite the record, but it’s certainly right up there,” the minister added.
These passages were made possible by the use of a so-called guillotine motion, a parliamentary tool that allows the government to sharply cut down political discourse and accelerate the passage of legislation.
While the guillotine motion may have been a win for Labor, it ironically left financial advisers feeling somewhat sidelined.
Namely, in a last minute agenda tweak, the motion saw both Financial Services Minister Stephen Jones and his counterpart Luke Howarth struck from the annual Financial Advice Association Australia (FAAA) Congress, where they were meant to appear on Friday.
This led to whispers in the halls of the Brisbane Convention Centre, where advisers quietly questioned the true motives behind the guillotine motion. While the motion’s purpose is typically to expedite legislative processes, many in the adviser community speculated that there may be underlying reasons for its use beyond mere efficiency.
In fact, during the session originally set to feature both Jones and Howarth, George John, the FAAA’s senior manager of government relations and policy, suggested that 15 or 22 March were the likely candidates for the upcoming election.
“If we take our learnings away from having such a congested schedule this time of year and this close to a federal election, it probably points towards yesterday actually being the last sitting day of the parliamentary term,” John said.
“There’s two weeks scheduled in February. I think a lot of people are coming to the conclusion that we will not be seeing those.
“The government has done a lot of work to move forward on all of those bills. You don’t sit through 36 bits of legislation if you don’t have to.”
The minimum period that a government needs to allow after calling an election is 33 days, but it could stretch out to as many as 68 days, though usually it falls somewhere in the middle.
According to John, Australians may actually get a rude awakening just after Australia Day, with the possibility of an election call shaking up their summer holidays.
“They could call the election on January 27, which is a Monday, the day of the public holiday where the Prime Minister could visit the governor-general,” he said.
While there are plenty of uncertainties, it’s safe to say the Albanese government is bracing for its own potential political guillotine.
The swift passage of around 30 bills has been a clear attempt to secure some form of political armour, hoping that this legislative push will shield them from the looming threat of an angry Peter Dutton and his opposition team.
However, the question remains – will this strategic manoeuvre ultimately pay off, or will the rushed process act as a guillotine?
(Howarth is understood to have made a last-minute trip to Brisbane, arriving just before lunch and keeping his interactions with advisers limited to informal, one-on-one conversations. InvestorDaily understands he opted not to address the group collectively, seeking to be fair to Jones by avoiding any formal remarks.)
