The voters’ opinions were broken down issue-by-issue, and on perhaps the chief one, cost of living, they overwhelmingly favoured Anthony Albanese. Sixty-five per cent of them went for Mr Albanese, a mere 16 per cent for Peter Dutton, and 19 per cent were undecided. The room was more evenly split on the issue of housing, with 35 per cent going for Mr Albanese, 30 per cent for Mr Dutton and a whopping 35 per cent undecided. More to come Leaders spar in Welcome to Country debate Peter Dutton and Anthony Albanese have clashed on Welcome to Country ceremonies as they face off for the final debate before Australians cast their votes on May 3. Seven’s political editor Mark Riley, moderating the debate, peppered the leaders with questions about hecklers who interrupted a Melbourne Anzac Day Dawn Service during the Welcome to Country on Friday – something both leaders have condemned. Riley asked Mr Dutton whether he will “acknowledge the traditional owners at your official events”. Mr Dutton said there’s a sense in the community that they’re “overdone” which “cheapens the significance of what it was meant to do”. ”It divides the country,” he said. Mr Albanese is asked to comment on Mr Dutton’s claims. He says that he believes the ceremonies are a “matter of respect,” and adds it’s up to the hosts of the event whether they want the ceremony. “It’s up to them, and people will have different views, and people are entitled to their views, but we have a great privilege, from my perspective, of sharing this continent with the oldest continuous culture on earth,” he said. “Then I welcome international visitors to Parliament House, you know what they want to see? That culture.” Mr Dutton then goes in on the attack and asks: “Do you think it’s overdone?” Continuing, he attacks Mr Albanese for the Voice referendum. “I think the nation was aghast when the Prime Minister spent four, $50m and sought to divide us over the voice debate on heritage and on cultural grounds,” he said. PM grilled on abandonment of the Voice Anthony Albanese was grilled about his decision to abandon the Voice following the failure of his term’s referendum. “The Voice, you told us, was important for Australia. It was important for who we are, for our standing in the world. It was a polite request from Indigenous people and you dropped it cold afterwards. Why?” Mark Riley asked. “Because I respect the outcome. We live in a democracy,” Mr Albanese said. “Do you still believe in it?” asked Mr Riley. “It is gone,” said the Prime Minister. “What is your personal view? Sorry-” Mr Riley pressed. “We need to find different paths to affect reconciliation,” said Mr Albanese. Mr Dutton eventually interjected, saying “can we get a straight answer”? Both candidates agreed that the date of Australia Day should not be changed. Copacabana, Musk, and the price of eggs As is customary with these debates, the leaders were subjected to a quick fire round, which largely includes word-association games. The first image was of Mr Albanese’s $4.3m Copacabana house. Mr Dutton said “retirement home,” while Mr Albanese said “marriage,” reminding audiences that the house was purchased with his fiancee Jodie Haydon. The leaders were also asked if they knew the price of a dozen eggs. Mr Dutton said “about $4.20, Mr Albanese said: “It’s $7 if you can find them because it’s hard to find them at the moment”. The answer was $8.80 from Coles, and $8.50 from Woolworths. Mr Albanese and Mr Dutton were also shown a photo of Elon Musk. Mr Albanese said “Tesla,” and “a very rich man,” while Mr Dutton said “evil genius”. This prompts questions on whether Mr Dutton had “distanced” himself from Mr Trump, a claim he denied. “I have not sought to be anybody other than myself, and I believe very strongly, based on my experience working with John Howard closely, he has been my political mentor and I need to make sure we manage the economy as he did.” As the quickfire section of the debate continued, Anthony Albanese was confronted with a clip of his old quote saying “my word is my bond”, regarding his promise not to change the Stage 3 tax cuts. He did, of course, end up breaking that pledge. ”Remember that? You broke your word,” Mark Riley put to him. ”I did, I changed my mind. Because I could not resile from the need to do something to help people because of cost of living pressures,” said Mr Albanese. ”So what I did is I fronted up, I went along to the National Press Club, and did not pretend we had not changed our position. And I went along and argued the case. And guess what? The Coalition voted for it.” Peter Dutton got an equivalent question regarding his own flip-flop during the election campaign on forcing public servants to work from the office. ”I’ve apologised for the decision that we took in relation to working from home,” was his clip. ”How did you get that policy so wrong?” he was asked. “We said in relation to public servants in Canberra that we wanted to go back to something like what it was before Covid, which was about 60 per cent of people at work, still flexibility for a lot of people, and I believe very strongly in flexibility in work arrangements,” Mr Dutton replied. ”We have, on a per capita basis, the highest number of public servants in the world, and the government has increased the number of public servants threefold. ”The point I was making is, if Australians are out there working their guts out at the moment, an extra job or a second job, they’re paying taxes, they expect their money to be spent efficiently. What the Prime Minister did, as he’s done with a number of other issues, is twisted and contorted it into something it wasn’t.” Dutton says he’d be fine living near a nuclear reactor Peter Dutton has said he would be fine with a nuclear power plant existing near his own home. “Would you be happy to have a nuclear plant in your suburb?” asked Mark Riley. “Yeah, I would Mark,” said the Opposition Leader. “We have a safe technology.” He pointed to other countries where nuclear power is in operation. Mr Riley asked why, if the technology “is so good”, Mr Dutton has not visited any of his proposed nuclear plant sites during the election campaign. He countered that he had visited one of the sites multiple times before the campaign started, during his tenure as leader. After a back-and-forth on energy policy, involving a fair bit of cross-talk, Mr Dutton erupted at the Prime Minister. “You will wreck the economy!” he said. “And you are doing it now. And that is why families are suffering, and why 30,000 small businesses have closed under your watch.” Mr Albanese protested that there are more total small businesses now than when he assumed office. PM not sure Trump ‘has’ a mobile phone Both leaders were reluctant to say anything critical about US President Donald Trump, large though he looms over global politics at the moment. “The relationship that I have had with the President is to have discussions, and he has stuck to the agreements we made,” said Anthony Albanese. “We can trust whoever is in the Oval Office, and we respect the views of the American people,” said Peter Dutton. There was a somewhat strange moment when moderator Mark Riley alluded to Mr Albanese’s efforts – mostly fruitless – to get Mr Trump on the phone. “Do you ever text him?” asked Mr Riley. “I’m not sure he has a mobile phone. Or Joe Biden. It is not the way it works, with any global leader,” Mr Albanese replied. “That is the way it works with you. You text people,” Mr Riley pointed out. “We do, but – global leaders, you set up, there are people taking notes from either side. It is not something that is a casual relationship,” said Mr Albanese. ”We are not good enough to have Trump’s phone number, or he doesn’t have one?” the moderator pressed again. Mr Albanese essentially repeated his previous answer. Albo’s NRL diplomacy backfires The leaders are also asked which “which country poses the biggest threat to Australia’s security”. Mr Dutton answered with China. ”If you were to believe the intelligence that I received as defence minister … the biggest concern from our intelligence agencies and our defence agency is in relation to the Communist Party of China, and they’re worried about the conflict in our region,” he said. “They’re worried about what that would do to impact on our trade, what it would do for our own security settings, and what we would need to do to respond to say, a cyber attack on our country.” Mr Albanese’s answer was a bit more complicated. He wouldn’t explicitly state whether China was the biggest threat to Australia, however agreed it was trying to increase its influence. He agreed that China was seeking to “increase its influence in the region” but said the relationship was “complex” as the superpower was also a “major trading partner”. “So what we have to do is to invest in our capability. That’s what we’ve done. $57 billion in defence assets increased, but as well, invest in our relationships,” he said. There’s a comical moment when Mr Albanese says that the $600m deal to bring PNG into the NRL was the “best example of soft diplomacy”. Riley says: “I don’t think China plays rugby league … they play ping pong”. ‘You should be ashamed’: Dutton blows up In a fiery moment, Peter Dutton accused the Prime Minister of lying after a claim, which Anthony Albanese has made throughout the campaign, that the Coalition would scrap the government’s Same Job, Same Pay laws. That is something Mr Dutton ruled out a couple of weeks ago. “That is just – I mean, that is not true,” Mr Dutton said. “Honestly. This whole campaign, it’s hard to believe anything you say. “We have a plan before the Australian people, which I believe provides solutions to your problems, the creation of which you should be ashamed of, frankly.” “You should be ashamed and you’re a liar,” Mr Riley put to the PM, paraphrasing. “Well, Peter can attack me,” said Mr Albanese. “I’ll tell you what I won’t let him do: attack the wages of working people.” He went on to argue Australians “deserve better than the pretence that everything was hunky dory” under the previous, Coalition government. “You can’t stand here telling people they’re much better off after three years,” Mr Dutton shot back at him. “If you had a good story to tell, Prime Minister, you wouldn’t be running a scare campaign. You’d be talking about your so-called achievements.” Is Mr Dutton crazy to repeal Labor’s tax cuts? There’s a pointed moment when Riley zeroes in on the Coalition government vowing to repeal Labor’s 2026-27 and 2027-28 tax cuts. “You’re going to this election … promising the people you will repeal a tax cut. I don’t know of any leader who’s ever done that. Is that crazy brave or just crazy?” Riley asks. Mr Dutton stands by his decision. “What we’ve said is that you can have the Labor option, which is 70 cents a day in 15 months time, as you point out. Or you could have a 25 cent a litre cut to fuel excise now,” said Mr Dutton, adding that the cut would equal to about $1500 a year. He also spruiks the Coalition’s one-off tax cut of $1200, which will apply once people fuel their tax return after July 1, 2026. “We’re reducing that overall tax burden on the family, but we’re providing that as an interim solution until we can fix up Labor’s mess,” he said. Mr Albanese is also grilled over Labor’s two-year tax cuts, which Riley points out equals to $5-a-week in the first year, and $10-a-week in the second. Mr Albanese defends it as “a top up” of the revised stage three tax cuts which came in last year. “We had the guts to make a tough decision, but it was done for the right reasons,” he said. “I went along to the National Press Club and said that what we are going to do is to change our policy, because we understood that people were doing it tough.”