PARTIES have been forced to ditch last-minute policy reveals as millions of Australians choose to skip polling day.
Pre-polling centres opened from Tuesday, offering voters a chance to get in well before the 3 May election date.
Analysts expect many voters going away for the upcoming Anzac Day weekend and school holidays will take advantage of pre-polling.
The number of public holidays eating into campaigning time resulted in the two major parties bringing forward their official launches to make their election pitches much earlier than usual during a typical five-week race.
More than five and a half million people voted early at the 2022 federal election.
University of Tasmania public policy associate professor Kate Crowley said the massive uptake in early voting had “upended” how politicians roll out policies during a campaign.
“If they’ve got something that they want to have a maximum impact, they can’t reveal it at the last minute the way they used to,” she told AAP.
The significant number of people choosing to vote early would mean a “huge lost opportunity” for Labor and the coalition if they did save anything major until the end of the campaign, she added.
Despite the popularity of pre-poll voting, campaigns were still in the “learning stage” of how to respond, Assoc Prof Crowley said.
“(Pre-polling is) becoming so popular as the major parties are becoming less popular, so it’s something that they really are going to need to strategise around,” she said.
The electoral commission will have 570 early voting centres spread throughout the country for people ahead of the election.
As the trend of early voting develops, experts say a clear demographic profile of pre-poll votes could emerge over time and campaigns could be adopted to suit the shift in behaviour.
Laws passed in 2021 require early voting to begin no more than 12 days out from the election date.
The shift towards early voting was less about politicians and more about what suited people’s daily lives, Assoc Prof Crowley said.
“There might be some who can’t wait to get out and vote for their favourite politician, but that doesn’t really ring true of the Australian public, except for political adherents who are really motivated,” she said.
By Tess IKONOMOU, AAP
