LIVE: Election campaign 2025 – Anthony Albanese makes bombshell admission about Voice failure in his last major speech before Australians go to the polls

Anthony Albanese gave a wide ranging speech at the National Press Club on Wednesday afternoon in which he touched on the failure of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament.

The Prime Minister suggested he wanted the referendum to go ahead because he believed Australia should have the Voice – but that he didn’t neccessarily believe the referendum would be successful or that the majority of Australians were on board.

‘We supported a Voice To Parliament. I wanted it out of conviction. Not out of convenience,’ Mr Albanese said.

‘It’s not easy to win a referendum in this country.’

‘The Voice To Parliament didn’t come from me. It came from First Nations people who had a constitutional convention at Uluru under the former government under a process that they set up that led to that in 2017.

‘We put it to the Australian people which was their gracious request. That was something I said I would do, and we did. We also said we would respect the outcome and we have.’

The Voice would have been a spectacular legacy for Labor and Mr Albanese, but its rejection by 60 per cent of Australians at the polls has been slammed across the political spectrum as setting back Indigenous reconciliation by decades.

Mr Albanese in particular was criticised for making the Voice part of his 2022 election victory speech and not negotiating bipartisan support from the Coalition beforehand.

James Blackwell, Research Fellow in Indigenous Diplomacy at Australian National University, said the PM ‘treated the referendum like an election campaign but without the usual level of resourcing and advocacy’.

Mr Albanese has said the government will not pursue the Voice in another form, despite Foreign Minister Penny Wong saying this week that the country will eventually wonder why there was ever an argument against it.

‘What we are now working towards is practical reconciliation. How do we close the gap?,’ Mr Albanese said in his Press Club speech.

‘The truth is that every government, Labor or Conservative have not done well enough, because if we did, then we wouldn’t have the life expectancy gap, the education gap, the housing gap, the health gap.

‘We wouldn’t have first nations people having diseases that no one in this room will have to worry about. What we are doing is addressing those issues.’

Mr Blackwell is unconvinced.

‘The government’s current attempts at Indigenous policy remain exercises in seeking consent over genuine consultation,’ he said.

He called the proposed economic empowerment agenda for First Nations people a prime example.

‘Aside from the lack of codesign and meaningful engagement, such policies have been bandied about for the better part of two decades and still have not substantively moved the dial.’

In a monumentally bizarre turn of events, controversial US television personality Joe Exotic has thrown his support behind Anthony Albanese for Prime Minister.

The colourful subject of the hit Netflix documentary ‘Tiger King’ – whose name is actually Joseph Maldonado – shared a post on Wednesday.

It featured himself in a picture alongside Mr Albanese with the words ‘Albanese for Prime Minister Australia’.

‘Keep Australia safe and awesome. All my friends in Australia vote for Albo MP,’ the caption said.

The 62-year-old ran the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park from 1999 to 2018 before he was sentenced to more than two decades behind bars.

Maldonado was found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire stemming from his fued with activist Carole Baskin.

Basking is the founder of Big Cat Rescue.

Maldonado was also found guilty of breaching the Endangered Species Act after multiple tigers at his zoo died.

Despite being behind bars, Maldonado announced his candidacy for the 2024 US election as a Democrat.

Anthony Albanese claims Donald Trump will be calling him soon because the Prime Minister is confident that Labor will win Saturday’s election.

Trump earlier told a journalist while boarding a helicopter in the US that Mr Albanese had been trying to call him to discuss trade between the two countries but he hadn’t picked up.

‘They are calling and I will be talking to him, yes,’ Mr Trump said.

Mr Albanese was asked on ABC Radio this morning whether it was ’embarrassing’ that Trump suggested he was not answering his calls.

He responded that it was a ‘light-hearted, throwaway comment’ from the president and he wasn’t being ignored.

‘I assure you, I’m not staying up at night trying to ring anyone,’ Mr Albanese said.

‘We have a relationship. We’ve already had a couple of phone calls, but I assure you that my campaign is front and centre.

‘But of course, after the election, I would expect, just as after the last election, I received phone calls from leaders around the world. That is what happened.

‘I’m sure if we’re successful we will have a discussion after Saturday.’

The Australian dollar and the ASX both plunged in early April following US President Donald Trump’s announcement of trade tariffs against a slew of countries, including Australia.

The tariffs announced on April 2, which is Liberation Day in the US, sent markets around the globe into a tailspin, but Trump is since rumoured to have softened his stance.

This morning, the Trump administration announced it was moving to alleviate duties imposed on car makers and spare parts manufacturers.

The Aussie dollar had dropped to US 59cents but has climbed back to hovering around US 64cents for more than a week, and recently hit a five-month high of US 64.49cents.

It also recovered its losses against the Chinese yuan, UK pound, Japanese yen, Indian rupee and Indonesian rupiah.

It’s is still lagging against the euro at 0.56 compared to its pre-tariff position of 0.58.

The Australian share market, meanwhile, soared to a two-month high earlier this week as investors regained confidence.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong has given her first-ever podcast interview in which she said Australia will one day have an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, despite the proposal being rejected by the majority of Australians.

About 60 per cent of the country voted against enshrining the representative body in the constitution at the 2023 referendum.

It is considered one of Labor’s resounding failures after Anthony Albanese made establishing The Voice a key point of his 2022 victory speech.

Senator Wong told the Betoota Talks podcast that Australians would change their opinion and would accept The Voice like they did with gay marriage.

‘I think we’ll look back on it in 10 years’ time and it’ll be a bit like marriage equality,’ she said.

‘I always used to say, marriage equality, which took us such a bloody fight to get that done, and I thought, all this fuss.

‘It’ll become something, it’ll be like, people go “did we even have an argument about that?”

‘Like, kids today, or even adults today, barely kind of clock that it used to be an issue. Remember how big an issue that was in the culture wars?’

When Mr Albanese was asked in Sunday night’s leaders debate whether The Voice would one day be resurrected, he was guarded.

‘I respect the outcome (of the referendum), we live in a democracy,’ he said.

Pushed on his position, he added that: ‘We need to find different paths to affect reconciliation.’

Housing Minister Clare O’Neil has swiftly scrapped a plan to have 10 Chinese campaign volunteers staff her polling booths on election day.

Labor Party member Chap Chow, a Chinese-Australian who reportedly calls himself a ‘friend’ of Ms O’Neil, had organised the volunteers through the Hubei Association, which has been accused of pushing the Chinese Communist Party’s interests overseas.

The group made headlines earlier this week after Chinese-Australian campaigners for teal MP Monique Ryan appeared on a video saying Hubei Association president Ji Jianmin ‘required us Chinese diaspora to support her’.

Ms O’Neil appeared on her usual breakfast TV segment this morning where she was grilled about the plan by Sunrise host Nat Barr.

‘My staff and my office did not make requests for assistance from this organisation,’ Ms O’Neil said.

‘My team politely declined their offer of support.’

But Barr fired back asking if she was worried they were trying to ‘infiltrate’ her campaign.

‘Doesn’t it look a bit dodgy?’ she asked.