Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Picture: Mick Tsikas/AAP

The Prime Minister has confirmed Australians will go to the polls on July 2 after the Senate voted down a bill to reintroduce the building industry watchdog on Monday night.

While Mr Turnbull said he would not officially call the election until after the May 3 budget, the starting gun has effectively been fired on a 74-day election campaign.

The longest election campaign in Australia’s history was in 1954, when Robert Menzies left 94 days between calling the poll on February 24 and election day on May 29.

Federal election campaigns have a dampening effect on business and consumer spending at the best of times — business leaders are groaning at the prospect of a 10-week campaign.

Flight Centre chief executive Graham Turner said this election campaign was “going to be a little bit more painful than usual”.

“From our point of view it’s going to dampen things now a bit,” he said. “Things just generally come off a bit during campaign, particularly discretionary spend in leisure, but also corporate travel will be down a bit.”

Flight Centre Managing director Graham Turner. Picture: Dan Peled/AAPSource:AAP

Mr Turner said while “it’s not a disaster or anything”, election campaigns tended to dampen consumer and business spending. “I’m sure every business is the same. It’s one of those things that comes along to make your job a little bit harder,” he said.

“You’ve got to have an election sometime, it’s just going to be a little bit more painful than usual. It’s something that’s got to happen, we’ve just got to accept that this quarter is probably going to be a bit quieter.”

He said it was difficult to quantify what the financial impact would be, but that Flight Centre would be rolling out additional advertising across TV and print in a bid to boost numbers.

“Most of the others will probably be doing the same, so it will be interesting to see if we get any return on investment,” he said.

Harvey Norman boss Gerry Harvey was more sceptical. “I’ve got retailers that say [it will affect discretionary spending] too,” he said. “But I think they exaggerate it a bit.”

Mr Harvey said he was “hoping the election has no effect whatsoever”.

“It won’t help matters, that’s for sure. In the past [elections] have had an effect sometimes and not other times, so we’ll just have to wait and see,” he said.

Harvey Norman Holdings executive chairman Gerry Harvey.Source:Herald Sun

“I won’t know the answers to that until the end of June, but there’s no reason why I should get up now and say, ‘Oh gee, this will really affect sales.’ When we get the May and June figures, we’ll be able to say that the election made no difference, or, ‘S***, that impacted our sales.’

“The answer is I don’t know what will happen. But the media is out there at the moment suggesting that it will have an effect. I don’t know what data they’ve got that would lead them to believe that. They certainly wouldn’t have any more data than I do.”

Mr Harvey said Australia had been in a “very tumultuous political situation” for the past eight or nine years and people “just want to get on with their life”.

“It just seems to be a bit of a circus most of the time,” he said.

Raine & Horne executive chairman Angus Raine said Australians were generally wary of buying or selling a home in the lead-up to a federal election.

“It’s fair to say that when the Federal Government calls an election, the campaign period — whether it’s four, six or eight weeks — can create distractions for investment markets such as real estate,” he said.

Raine & Horne executive chairman Angus Raine.Source:Supplied

“Generally, consumers tend to wait until the election is decided just in case there are any unforeseen surprises.”

Raine & Horne Toowoomba principal Andrew Lynch said a federal election campaign generally “stops real estate market activity dead” in Queensland. “Election campaigns always take the steam out of the property market,” he said.

Mike Roddy, director of client engagement and talent solutions at recruitment firm Randstad, was more upbeat about the sector. “As far as we’re concerned as what typically happens in a lot of ways is it’s business as usual,” he said.

“Maybe some businesses do adopt that sort of [cautious] mindset, but typically we don’t forecast any seasonality in any of our numbers when elections do get called.”

Mr Roddy said some businesses and government departments might put a freeze on critical appointments or contracts, but elections generally had little impact on the overall workforce plan.

“Regardless of whether a government changes or not, whatever policies get advocated will take time to bed down anyway,” he said.

frank.chung@news.com.au