In a tight Australian election a Chinese app could make a difference

SYDNEY - When the Labor Partys Jerome Laxale won the Sydney seat of Bennelong from the Liberals at the 2022 election, votes from Chinese Australians angry about then-prime minister Scott Morrisons spat with Beijing were instrumental in his victory.

Now Mr Laxale and other politicians are using social media including Xiaohongshu, a Chinese lifestyle app also called RedNote, and other campaign strategies to appeal to Chinese communities who will again be a crucial bloc in the upcoming election.

If you want to communicate with your electorate, you need to go where your electorate are and some of them are on Xiaohongshu, said Mr Laxale, who has handed out 30,000 red envelopes with QR codes to his personal accounts on Xiaohongshu and another Chinese app, WeChat.

Labor has only ever won Bennelong twice, added Mr Laxale, who took the Chinese-heavy seat by a margin of just 1 per cent in 2022. Weve never held onto it. If Bennelong do choose me, it’d be history.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, battling a plunge in popularity and polls showing a neck-and-neck race, will be counting on holding seats like Bennelong at the May 3 election.

But opposition leader Peter Dutton is also pushing to secure the support of Chinese Australians, many of whom abandoned the Liberal-led conservative coalition government in 2022 over Mr Morrisons strident criticism of China during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The rupture in bilateral ties - with Beijing imposing trade sanctions on A$20 billion (S$16.9 billion) worth of Australian goods - has been largely repaired by Labor, with trade now flowing unrestricted.

But with cost of living pressures biting and the economy growing at a crawl, that may not be enough to save Mr Albanese.

Chinese swing

Mr Dutton launched his unofficial election campaign in 2025 in the seat of Chisholm in