SYDNEY (Kyodo) -- Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Friday called a federal election for May 3, seeking to become the first prime minister since 1998 to win a second term at the polls.

The election is expected to be a tight race between Albanese's center-left Labor Party and the conservative Liberal-National coalition, with recent opinion polls showing the two neck-and-neck on a two-party preferred basis.

With support for both major parties low, polls are showing a minority government or hung parliament as the most likely election outcomes, positioning minor parties and independent lawmakers as essential to forming government.

Speaking to reporters in Canberra, Albanese touted his government's record on providing cost of living relief and lowering inflation.

"This election is a choice between Labor's plan to keep building or Peter Dutton's promise to cut," he said, warning against his rival opposition leader's plans to reduce government spending and workers.

The decision to dissolve parliament comes after the government rushed through parliament Wednesday a bill to introduce a new round of income tax cuts from July next year, the latest in a string of preelection pledges aimed at easing pressure on voters in areas such as health care, power bills and education.

But opposition leader Dutton has vowed to repeal the legislation if elected, pledging instead to halve the nation's fuel excise tax as more immediate relief and to cut "wasteful" government spending, including by firing 40,000 public servants.

He has also proposed a controversial plan to introduce nuclear power to Australia's energy grid by transitioning old coal plants to nuclear, despite existing national and state-level bans on the technology.

Dutton served as defense and home affairs minister under former Prime Minister Scott Morrison and held a number of other ministerial posts between 2013 to 2022, the last period in which the Liberal-National coalition held government. The coalition was in power until Morrison lost the 2022 election to Albanese.

After a redistribution of electoral boundaries, Australians will head to the polls to vote for the House of Representative's 150 seats, and roughly half of the Senate's 76 seats.