Your federal election bingo card starts with the Bruce Highway

If you were constructing your federal election bingo card, the first thing you would put it on it at every election — for at least several of the last decades — would be “The Bruce Highway”.

The 1,700 kilometre-long artery that connects Queensland’s south-east to the far north is still, in equal measure, a lousy, often treacherous piece of road and a regular stop for politicians to announce spending decisions to fix bits of it.

One thing you can definitely say about the Bruce Highway — and improving it — is it’s not “woke”. It’s not an “elitist issue”, or even part of the “progressive agenda of affluent elites”.

Another thing you can say about it is that our current prime minister could bore for Australia on almost every inch of the road.

Anthony Albanese is a former infrastructure minister and maintains a freakish level of knowledge of intersections, roundabouts, truck laybys and overtaking lanes, and the history of funding and development proposals for them.

Woe betide the journalist travelling with him this week who sought to challenge him on some particular bit of road funding history.

Here was a man totally confident on his turf and brooking no smarty pants.

Albanese’s start to his 2025 election campaign came as Justin Trudeau’s prime ministership hit the fence and Elon Musk became the world’s biggest political oxygen thief by buying into UK politics and that of Germany.

Cue lots of reflections on how Trudeau was just the latest “virtue signaller” political leader to fall from grace, and the ominous warnings that spelt for Albanese.

Musk’s increasingly erratic interventions in European politics signalled the wild way politics might unfold in 2025.

But all of it only served to highlight how “bread and butter” has been the PM’s start to his year. The only virtues he was signalling were that a better road may in time save hundreds of lives.

Just how much will be spent?

Having agreed to break his government’s own policy of only funding roads with the states on a 50/50 basis and agreeing to stump up $7.2 billion — or 80 per cent of the estimated total cost of upgrading the road — the prime minister even got the enthusiastic endorsement for the announcement of still very new Queensland LNP Premier David Crisafulli.

For such a big announcement, everyone seemed a little vague about how exactly the spending would unfold.

The PM said on Monday that the announcement “we were planning to make was put in the Mid-Year Economic Forecast” (that is, it was accounted for in the mid-year budget update last month).

Finance Minister Katy Gallagher told 7.30 on Wednesday that the cost “will be reflected in the next budget update, as they come into those forward estimates years”.

These statements could both well be true: any road project — particularly the series of individual projects involved in fixing the Bruce Highway — takes a really long time (though Infrastructure Minister Catherine King said this week that she would like to see it completed by the time of the Brisbane Olympics in 2032).

That means there may well be some funding put aside already in the budget for the next four years, and then the rest of it will be funded “beyond the forwards”, as they say in budget land.

But as of Friday afternoon, getting clarity on just how much would be spent was rather difficult. Crisafulli says he will be bringing forward the state government’s own spending on the highway. It will ultimately be up to the state government to decide where the money is spent and in what order.

A rare, broad-based endorsement

The Bruce Highway was put on Infrastructure Australia’s priority list in 2016 and IA appears to have since assessed around 10 different projects along the highway for merit (albeit being somewhat lukewarm about some).

The Queensland government is now setting up a different advisory council to determine priorities, a council which the premier says is going to be there to “take the politics” out of decision making.

It’s all a bit nerdy and uninteresting, unless you happen to live along the Bruce Highway.

There was a rare broad-based endorsement of the decision from various Queensland stakeholders this week.

The exception was the federal opposition, which seemed to have several positions on the announcement running roughly from Peter Dutton’s reported endorsement of it (“we thought of it first”) to Angus Taylor suggesting the Coalition would want to make its own decisions and, besides, the budget can’t really afford it anyway.

For a government that’s not exactly flavour of the month in the Sunshine State, it was as good a response as you could have hoped for.

The significant part of it, though, is that it sounds like work will start sooner rather than later, meaning it is not just another one of those promises politicians make and are never heard of again.

It was equally striking that as Albanese then ventured into the Northern Territory and Western Australia, it was to announce projects — particularly in housing infrastructure and community housing — that had started or were literally going to start straight away. “Sod turning” was a regular phrase on the trail.

A PM more regularly associated with inner-city Sydney was also out on cattle stations and announcing new facilities to allow international trade from ports in the north west.

All in all, it wasn’t so much pork barrelling promises as trying to demonstrate that the government was actually doing things.

“Virtue signalling” — for which many would read the Indigenous Voice to Parliament as a conspicuous example — was nowhere to be seen.

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A different kind of signalling

What was Peter Dutton doing in the meantime? The Coalition seems to be concentrating its efforts on communicating via social media — for example, in an Instagram post from the opposition leader in which he talks through five policies he says voters might not have heard about.

These were restoring 20 psychology sessions to Medicare; a $5 billion housing infrastructure fund; rebalancing migration; more GPs to outer suburbs and “our zero emission nuclear energy policy”.

There wasn’t exactly a lot of detail.

If there was any virtue signalling going on this week, it was signalling of a very different nature as yet another tussle for the conservative control of the Liberal Party erupted, this time in NSW.

Former prime minister Tony Abbott wrote a glowing reference for repeat Liberal Party candidate (and former ALP national president) Warren Mundine to contest the seat of Bradfield on Sydney’s North Shore after frontbencher Paul Fletcher announced his retirement from politics.

The seat is widely expected to go to an independent “teal” candidate.

Abbott described Mundine as “the national hero who helped to lead the fight against Labor’s divisive Voice”.

“In the face of a green-left Labor government that’s broken promises and is in thrall to the climate cult and identity politics, we really owe it to the Australian people to demonstrate that we can be a steady, sensible, and strong alternative committed to lower taxes, greater freedom and smaller government but above all deeply patriotic and passionately Australian,” Abbott said.

It might be a message that appeals to parts of the Liberal base — though Abbott’s intervention has only further riled moderates angry over his interventions in Victoria.

But it’s not clear how the voters of Bradfield (who are already seen as likely to vote teal) will feel about a candidate backed by someone who speaks of “the climate cult”.

Laura Tingle is 7.30’s chief political correspondent.