If the current election campaign feels long and sluggish, that may be because there have been few meaningful announcements.

The 2025 election campaign is scheduled to run for 37 days. This makes it roughly average for campaigns over the past thirty years.

However, public holidays and long weekends can shape campaign behaviour and impact voter engagement. The 2019, 2022 and 2025 elections all coincided with the Easter long weekend as well as ANZAC Day. (No federal elections from 1996 to 2016 coincided with a nationwide long weekend or public holiday.)

Public holiday dates over the Easter long weekend vary from one state to another, but as political scientists have shown, the four-day interruption to the campaign sees lower public interest, reduced media coverage and the voluntary suspension of some campaign activity.

With public holidays and long weekends excluded, 2025 is the shortest campaign of the past thirty years at just 32 days of proper campaigning. That includes polling day. It also includes the 22 April 2025, a day on which the major parties suspended their campaigns as a sign of respect for the late Pope Francis.

The law gives the prime minister some discretion in how long the election campaign runs after the House of Representatives is dissolved, but it must run for between 33 and 68 days in total and polling day must be a Saturday.

Beyond that, the timing is up to the PM in consultation with the Governor-General.

The general trend over the past 20 years has been for shorter rather than longer campaigns. The chief exception was 2016. The then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull pursued a double dissolution in the hope of winning extra Senate seats (he ultimately lost three). Constitutionally, a double dissolution had to be called by 11 May, but the election cycles of the two houses would fall out of sync if polling day occurred before 1 July. The result was an election campaign closer to the maximum length.

And while the formal election campaign is restricted by law, politicians can – and do – start campaigning ahead of any election announcement. Another reason why this election might feel long is because the major parties started campaigning in earnest in January.

In fact, a PM could announce their preferred election date on the first day of each parliament – and give everyone advance notice so they can plan their lives around the date. In 2013 Julia Gillard announced in January her intention to hold an election on 14 September. However, this was seen as a mistake that threw away the advantages of incumbency.

Control over election timing gives PMs a tantalising opportunity to place political expedience over consistency, predictability and fairness. Parliamentary agreements for three-year fixed terms, which the Australia Institute has proposed in the Democracy Agenda for the 48th Parliament, would do much to remove the partisan advantage and opportunism from election timing.