Albanese to call the election on Friday for May 3

He will call the election on Friday, and there will be a standard five-week campaign before an election on Saturday, May 3.

Calling the federal poll the morning after Mr Dutton's budget-in-reply speech is a deftly calculated move aimed at taking the wind out of the Opposition Leader's sails at a moment when his message to the Australian public would ordinarily be front and centre.

Mr Dutton unveiled the Coalition's vision for Australia if he becomes prime minister - including lower energy, food and petrol prices - ahead of his budget-in-reply speech on Thursday night, which also revealed more detail on his promise to cut 41,000 jobs from the Australian public service.

He made clear his approach would be to replace the Albanese government's plan for addressing the cost-of-living crisis with a radically different approach to that unveiled by Treasurer Jim Chalmers in his pre-election budget.

After key details such as the Coalition's plan to repeal the Albanese government's new $5-a-week tax cuts and cut the fuel excise if elected made headlines on Thursday, news broke that Mr Albanese was speaking to colleagues about firing the starter's gun on the election campaign.

Speculation on the date began early in the day, when he appeared on commercial radio.

"I can confirm that I'm not calling it today, but I will call it soon," Mr Albanese told Triple M radio on Thursday morning.

"It will be in May, I can guarantee that. And it'll be called pretty imminently, I can assure you of that as well."

Voters have been subjected to a defacto election campaign for months and bureaucrats at the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet pressed the button too early on a social media post alerting the public to caretaker mode - with the post to Twitter/X swiftly taken down after being sent in error on Thursday.

The post was live for four minutes from just before 12.30pm, included a copy of the caretaker conventions and read: "The government is now operating in accordance with caretaker conventions, pending the outcome of the 2025 federal election."

Caretaker refers to the period preceding an election, and is a set of conventions that set out that while departments will continue ordinary administration matters, they will not work on major policy decisions, significant appointments or major contracts.

The upcoming vote will pit Mr Albanese and the Australian Labor Party against the Liberal-National Coalition and Mr Dutton, who will attempt to defeat a first-term government for the first time in nearly 100 years.

The Coalition has matched several of Labor's spending commitments in the pre-election period, including its $8.5 billion boost to Medicare and a $573 million women's health package.

Both parties have also agreed to extend Labor's $150 energy bill rebates for Australian households and small businesses.

Labor won a majority government at the 2022 election, claiming 77 seats and ending nine consecutive years of Coalition rule.

With 150 seats in Parliament, a party must win at least 76 seats to secure a majority. The Coalition will need to add about 20 seats to win majority government.

All eyes will be on Government House, where convention dictates that Mr Albanese will ask Governor-General Sam Mostyn to issue writs and fire the starter's gun for the official election campaign.

The Prime Minister had been previously expected to call an election for a Saturday in April, but ex-tropical Cyclone Alfred made this unviable.

The election must be held by May 17 at the latest, which left May 3 and May 10 as the other possible dates.

In Australia, elections are always held on a Saturday, and there can be no fewer than 33 days between the issuing of writs and polling day.