After weeks of bleak headlines, some in the Albanese government can't believe they're not 'cooked'

It might be cold and grey in the south-east of Australia, and the Bureau of Meteorology tells us there is more Arctic weather on its way next week. But on Friday our prime minister was in Brisbane enjoying, despite a bad cold, what he told ABC radio listeners was an "absolutely stunning day".

It wasn't just the weather separating the prime ministerial experience from the rather bleak time he and his government had the previous week during the last sitting before the parliamentary winter break.

The sitting had been dominated by drama surrounding the defection of Senator Fatima Payman and frustration with trying to get things through the parliament.

The Coalition and the Greens were thwarting the government's legislative agenda. No-one was talking about the much-awaited July 1 tax cuts.

A week later, and Anthony Albanese was enjoying a couple of "absolutely stunning" days trying to mess with Peter Dutton's mind.

He announced the candidates for three seats around Brisbane — Ryan (held by the Greens), Forde (LNP) and Dutton's seat of Dickson (margin 1.7 per cent), where Ali France has signed up to go around for a third time to try to knock off the Opposition Leader.

"If you look at the last election, Ali achieved a swing of almost 3 per cent in this seat", the prime minister told reporters on Friday.

"This seat now has a margin of under 2 per cent. A swing of half of what she got last time will see Ali France elected as the Labor Member for Dickson as part of a federal Labor government."

For his part, Dutton — who has spent the week in the United States — was telling Nine Media that he was "just hoping that [Albanese] is going to spend more time there, as much as possible".

"I want him to meet more people. Look, I think people, you know, as they meet the prime minister, they'll work out he's not a bad person, but just that he's a bad prime minister," he said.

A run of bad news that could have 'cooked' the government

After all the bleak headlines of the past couple of weeks, Albanese's cheery optimism in Brisbane might have looked, well, a little weird.

But while the pundits all talk doom and gloom, some in the senior ranks of the government privately concede they can't believe that the polls are as good as they are, given the punishing and relentless run of bad news that has hit since they came to government.

Thirteen interest rate increases, punishing cost of living pressures: "if you had told us that was the scenario when we came to government", one government figure said this week, "I'd have said, 'well that's us cooked. You can't survive that'."

So even as government ministers and MPs desperately try to preach the gospel of tax cuts and energy relief, knowing it is the government's best shot at showing voters they are trying to help, at least some in its senior ranks take great comfort from the fact that Peter Dutton and the Coalition have not, as yet, overtaken them in any serious way in the two-party preferred vote.

Newspoll figures back that, with a state-by-state breakdown last weekend showing that while the position has closed to a tight 51/49 in favour of Labor nationally, and a 49/51 lead opening for the Coalition in NSW, to add to its lead in Queensland, the argument is that it should be way ahead of that at this stage of the cycle if it is pose any significant threat to the government at the next election, based on experiences of changes of government over, say, the past 20 or 30 years.

And yes, we are now entering that phase of the cycle where people start to take a lot more interest in polls and, also inevitably, in the likely timing of the federal election.

The government is making sure it's 'ready for an election'

The election timing speculation season officially kicks off about now, since the earliest date for a 'normal' election — a simultaneous half-Senate and House of Representatives election — would be Saturday August 3 and the latest possible date would be Saturday May 17.

When a journalist observed to Albanese in Brisbane this week that "a lot of people are saying you might be going early", he responded that "no, look, I think that three years is too short".

"I've said that on multiple occasions, but we're just making sure that we're prepared and that everything is in place. We'll make sure that our candidates are on the ground talking with people about issues of concern and we want to make sure that we're ready for an election."

Announcing Labor candidates now certainly gives them their best chance of making themselves known (as well as hopefully messing with Peter Dutton's mind).

But government figures concede that it is hard to get the tax cut message out there, after it being buried by events in the parliament. Officials estimate that around 7.1 million taxpayers will have got at least a part of their tax cut in their fortnightly pay-packet this week, with the other 6.3 million receiving it next week.

It should still be noticeable enough — $80 for most workers. But everyone knows that voters think the government should have done more.

A growing political pincer movement on the government from the Greens and the Coalition in Parliament, the spectre of a new group of independent MPs in Western Sydney, and the sense that the government has been lacklustre in responding to various crises and issues that have emerged have all fed a sense of a government in trouble.

As far as a threat to Western Sydney seats is concerned, while the government understands the anger over Palestine, it is not clear that the various forces encouraging a protest vote are organised enough to ultimately pose a risk to Labor's sitting MPs.

There's also the question of the economy. Signs out of the US this week that its central bank, the Federal Reserve, may cut rates in September is good news for those looking for rate relief here, but also a pointer to the double-edged sword that rate cuts represent: analysts say a September US rate cut would be being made because the economy is teetering on the edge of a recession.

Which is why the government's economic strategy — still very much based on a presumption that we will go to the polls next year, not this year — is focused on getting inflation back into, or near, the Reserve Bank's target range of 2 to 3 per cent rather than getting an actual cut in official interest rates.

Of course, the difference between late 2024 and early 2025 now looks likely to be a very real sense of global crisis flowing from the re-election of Donald Trump to the US Presidency.

A bit like the Canberra winter versus the Brisbane sunshine, that could be another world altogether.

Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.