LIVE: Election 2025 – Anthony Albanese makes hasty exit surrounded by staff after Fatima Payman heckler taunts him outside polling booth

The PM was heckled by a senate candidate for Fatima Payman’s new party during a visit to a pre-polling booth in the electorate of Banks in southern Sydney.

Emanie Darwich (pictured, below), who is standing for Senator Payman’s Australia’s Voice party, shouted that the PM was ‘complicit in genocide’ over the conflict in Gaza.

‘You are a hypocrite to the Australian Labor party!’, she shouted.

‘What happened to Labor Friends of Palestine! You are the establisher of Friends of Palestine, yet you don’t want to speak out!’

Albanese served as the secretary for the Australian Parliamentary Friends of Palestine in the early 2000s.

Sky News reported that the PM’s staff ‘created a bit of a barrier’ between him and the heckler as he made a hasty exit.

Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has echoed Dutton’s calls, saying she believes Welcome to Country ceremonies are ‘absolutely overdone’.

The Opposition Indigenous spokeswoman said she would ‘maintain it for significant events’ when foreign dignitaries are visiting.

‘But speaking to the everyday Australian Indigenous and non-Indigenous, there are those that shut off every time the plane lands, I keep my headphones in, because this is Australia,’ she told The Australian.

‘We all belong to this country.’

Peter Dutton’s ‘getting Australia back on track’ campaign was briefly derailed after his media bus became stranded during his final election push.

The bus, carrying journalists, photographers and cameramen, became stuck after leaving a hotel in Martin Place on Monday.

It mounted a small concrete median strip separating the road from the bike lane outside the hotel.

Read more about the unfortunate mishap below:

The Opposition Leader said on Sunday night he believed Welcome to Countries were ‘overdone’ – and has since named four places where they should not be performed.

One of those involved was an avowed neo-Nazi.

Dutton on Monday clarified when and where he thinks Welcome to Countries are appropriate.

A reporter asked whether he thought it was ‘overdoing it’ for Qantas to read out an Acknowledgement to Country whenever a plane landed.

‘I think that is over the top,’ Dutton responded.

Asked whether he thought Anzac Day was an appropriate time for a Welcome to Country, Dutton said ‘no’.

‘It is ultimately for the organisers of the events, and they can make the decision based on their membership and what their board wants to do, and that is a decision for them, and I respect that,’ he responded.

‘But listening to a lot of veterans in the space, Anzac Day is about our veterans, about 103,000 Australians who have died in the service of our country.

‘I think if you are listening to their sentiment, and we are respectful of that sentiment on Anzac Day, I think the majority view would be that they don’t want it on that day.’

To clarify: Dutton thinks a Welcome to Country is appropriate for the opening of Parliamant but not on Anzac Day, on planes, at the footy or at the start of work meetings.

During Sunday night’s leaders’ debate, Dutton said: ‘I think other Australians think it is overdone and cheapens the significance of what it was meant to do, it divides the country, not dissimilar to what the prime minister did with the Voice.’

The ABC reports that over 5,000 Indigenous Australians served across the first and second World Wars.

‘I’m not sure he has a mobile phone,’ a baffled Albanese responded.

‘It is not the way it works. With any global leader.’

‘We are not good enough to have Trump’s mobile number or he does not have one?’, he asked the PM.

Albanese insisted that he would never directly message the US leader.

‘When we have discussions, we have note takers on both sides, we have them in secure rooms, you don’t have (text) discussions with global leaders,’ he added.

It was a bizarre answer from Albanese to suggest Trump doesn’t own a phone, given everyone knows Trump is terminally online, firing off rants into the early hours on his Truth Social platform.

A photo taken on April 24 (pictured below) shows Trump using his phone on Marine One at Leesburg Executive Airport in Leesburg, Virginia.

And now the US President’s first-term chief of staff Mick Mulvaney has shed light on how Trump prefers to communicate – and it flies in the face of Albanese’s comments.

‘He (Trump) absolutely has a cell phone,’ Mr Mulvaney told Sky News on the Monday

‘By the way, the more important answer from Prime Minister Albanese was, “when we talk, there’s note takers and everything”.

‘That’s not how Donald Trump works. Donald Trump wants to talk to people like ordinary people. He wants to talk like you and I talk on this program.

‘He doesn’t want a bunch of intermediaries. He wants to have a normal conversation.’

Mr Mulvaney said that the world leaders who do well with Trump ‘are the people who realise that and treat him like a normal person and don’t go through official channels with note takers and interpreters’.

The PM was grilled on Monday morning by 2GB’s Mark Levy.

The radio host asked the Labor leader if ‘Australian people deserve some respect from you, Mr Albanese, when it comes to the lies that you,ve been telling through this election campaign?’

Albanese insisted he was ‘putting forward a positive program’.

But Levy accused him of running a ‘Mediscare’ campaign.

The PM claimed Dutton has ‘form’ when it comes to cutting Medicare.

‘When he was asked about wanting to abolish bulk billing, he said, “I wanted to make primary care sustainable”,’ Albanese said.

‘He is on the record for more than a decade, including just last night, for saying that primary care isn’t sustainable if trips to the doctor are free.’

You can listen to the wide-ranging interview here.