An election would ordinarily have fallen due three years from the Abbott government's original election date of September 7, 2013. An inside source says Tony Abbott was considering calling a double-dissolution election early next year. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen But the prospect of an earlier poll is consistent with a widespread view within the Coalition that the government had fired its main pre-election budget artillery in 2015 in the wake of its hamfisted 2014 budget, leaving the fiscal cupboard bare for a third generous budget. Labor believed the election might have even been called later this year, as a way of holding Mr Abbott's failing leadership together, and had been preparing for that very contingency. An election in March-April of 2016 might have helped minimise such problems, allowing the government to campaign primarily on the subject of the double-dissolution at least until late in the campaign when the Treasury would issue a state of the budget report known as the Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Outlook.

Among the factors supporting the early election theory is the expectation that last year's budget forecasts of real GDP growth of 3.25 per cent in 2016-17 then rising to 3.5 per cent in both of the next two years would be revised down to something more realistic in the 2016-17 budget - thus dampening hopes of a quick return to surplus, which had been a core Coalition pledge. The suggestion that Mr Abbott's inner-circle was shaping for an early recourse to voters comes as Malcolm Turnbull brushed off renewed speculation that he might feel inclined to rush to the polls himself in February or March to take advantage of stellar popularity over the struggling Labor opposition. Mr Turnbull said he expected an election much closer to the three-year mark. "We will be going to an election next year, expecting it to be about this time, perhaps October, (because) November is getting a bit late," he said in Sydney. "I would say around September-October next year is when you should expect the next election to be."

While that stopped short of a hard-and-fast commitment, such as by naming a date as Julia Gillard famously did at the start of 2013, his comments will go some way to quelling speculation of a snap summer or autumn campaign. A double-dissolution election in which both houses are dissolved simultaneously can be granted by the Governor-General on certain grounds including where an identical bill is rejected twice in the Senate over a period greater than three months. Among the likely double-D "triggers" is the blocked legislation to reinstate the trade union anti-corruption watchdog, the Australian Building and Construction Commissioner, which aimed to "to provide an improved workplace relations framework for building work to ensure that building work is carried out fairly, efficiently and productively for the benefit of all building industry participants and for the benefit of the Australian economy as a whole". But unions saw the scrapped Howard government body as little more than a coercive mechanism for busting union power by suspending basic legal rights for interrogation, compelling witnesses, and discriminating against lawful industrial activity. Construction companies have recently stepped up the public case for the ABCC's reinstatement to encourage crossbench MPs to reject "intimidation and bullying" on the nation's building sites.