Australia voted. And, boy, did it ever.

[I might revise/update this in due course; this version 09:00 am the day after. Some references to good reads added at the end.]

Australia, it might be worth repeating, has compulsory voting.

The federal election yesterday repopulated a House of Representatives in which Labor had during the 47th Parliament 77 seats, the “Conservatives” (often referred to as “LNP”) 53, minor parties 6 (including 4 Greens), and independents 11.

The federal election yesterday also repopulated the Senate in which Labor had during the 47th Parliament 25 seats, the “Conservatives” 30, minor parties 17 (including 11 Greens), and independents 4.

It can at this point — when a dozen seats in the House of Representatives remain uncalled — be safely said that the 48th Parliament will look decisively different. It currently looks as if Labor will gain at least 10 seats in the House and that the “Conservatives” will lose more than that. It does look like a landslide indeed.

A surprising landslide as it is. It sure did not look like a landslide a couple of months ago, or for that matter very recently.

Until late February Dutton (the “Conservatives’” leader and PM candidate) and his motley crew of dimwits and misfits (Sussan Ley, Jacinta Price, Michaela Cash, Barnaby Joyce) were actually serious contenders. Then … polling showed a drifting apart of the predicted two-party vote for Labor and “LNP”. There are many possible explanations for this development — Michelle Grattan has enumerated ten markers, some of them tied to Dutton’s poorly run Trumpy campaign—but it is hard to refuse the argument that Trump himself and his erratic actions ever since he re-occupied the POTUS office had his fair share in helping to defeat Dutton. While Australia and Canada are very different countries, last but not least because their location to the USA is so different, there can be little doubt that the fate of Dutton mirrors that of Poilievre. Both not only lost their elections but their seats in Parliament.

In the case of Dutton it seems a rude but overdue awakening (facilitated by himself and a formidable local opponent). There are few recent pollies in Australia that have been as opportunistic and toxic as Dutton: all the way from his Trumpian proposals to cut the public service sector and to force people back into the offices, to his (misleadingly costed) nuclear-energy proposals (about which he has been rather stumm for several months now, for good reason I presume), to his questionable personal financial situation, to his past voting patterns and policy positions (e.g., voting no on same-sex marriage, walking out on the apology to the stolen generation, driving the anti-The Voice proposal, a relentless anti-immigration stance, etc.) It could not have happened to a nicer guy. Well, ok, save maybe the Trumpet-of-Patriots guy who for the 50+ million that he spent has only 200k votes, and inconsequential votes at that, to show.

It is hard to see how the “Conservatives” will dig themselves out of the hole they have dug for themselves; they are vision-less, caught up in memories of White Australia, feeling unfailingly entitled, but are even more unfailingly incompetent, and with no clear-cut personnel alternatives. If Angus Taylor is the best you’ve got, you are in trouble.

Very much in contrast to Labor, which has a number of excellent candidates and performers in the government (and the states for that matter). As Frank Bongiorno (one of Australia’s better contemporary historians) has it, “Albanese’s government might not thrill, but it has shown unity and competence — and that’s no mean feat.” Very true, dat.

Australia votes every three years. That means, the next federal election will take place before Trump is done with his term. This has to be good news for Labor and Albanese and it bodes not well for the “Conservatives”; whoever will be in charge next will have a herculean task to rebuild the party. And that’s before the interferences that Bolt, Credlin, and others loudmouths are sure to run.

4 May 2025

CNN’s summary and lessons learned. Basically correct.

5 May 2025

The post-mortems are coming fast and furious. Here is Birmingham getting to the essence of it:

Beyond the presentation of ideology, there must be a reshaping of the party to connect it with the modern Australian community. Based on who’s not voting Liberal, it must start with women. Based on where they’re not voting Liberal, it must focus on metropolitan Australia.

It must start with the raison d’être. Why do we have a Liberal Party and how is it relevant in 2025 and beyond?

Lessons from previous failures, especially the federal failure of three years ago but also many at state levels, have not been learnt and acted upon.

And they won’t be learned given the current personnel and the right-wing lunatic media such as Bolt and Credlin. Which is good news for Labor, Greens, and in particular independents. Hume would do well to read up on her (and Loughnane’s) 2022 post-mortem.

Some interesting facts in this Financial Review article.

Also this:

Minor/major party swings

The combined share of the three major parties’ primary vote — Labor, Liberal and the Nationals — plunged to a new low, reaching 66.7 per cent as counting proceeded on Sunday.

But the fall was a one-way street. Three years after the ALP achieved its lowest primary, counting on Sunday afternoon showed that Albanese had hauled up Labor’s share by 2 points to 34.6 per cent. But the Coalition’s primary vote dropped to 31.8 per cent as support bled from the Liberals.

Some interesting facts on the success of the independents here:

In the end, incumbent independents benefited from the historic pattern in federal politics: that a good independent is a tough proposition to beat. At election time, successful independent MPs benefit from the advantages of incumbency, the ability to point to specific policy or project victories arising from greater political competition for the seat, and the flexibility to adapt more quickly to changing voter attitudes, unencumbered by any party machinery.

Zali Steggall in Warringah and Helen Haines in Indi enjoyed their third successive wins, Rebekah Sharkie in Mayo a fourth general election win (she won a competitive byelection in 2018), Andrew Wilkie in Hobart a sixth victory on the trot, and north Queensland’s Bob Katter yet another term after 50 years of parliamentary service.

At the time of writing, all of the independents who won their seats in 2022 appear to have been returned. (The exception was Kylie Tink, whose electorate was abolished last year.) The closest count is in Goldstein, where incumbent Zoe Daniel narrowly leads her Liberal predecessor Tim Wilson. Other incumbents, such as Sophie Scamps in Mackellar, Allegra Spender in Wentworth, Monique Ryan in Kooyong and Kate Chaney in Curtin, have enjoyed distinctive swings toward them. In the formerly safe Labor seat of Fowler, where the party hoped to win, independent MP Dai Le enjoyed a handsome primary vote swing of around 6% in her favour.

And Charlotte Morlock not mincing words. Indeed, the Liberal Party is still beholden to a small cohort of angry men. Women have had enough. Oh, Timmy, and Angus, and David, and … what says you?! Wanna share your nuke fantasies?

Our party membership is a colossal part of the reason that we face oblivion. While the average Australian is a 37-year-old woman, our average party member is a male in his 70s. Our party membership is just 0.0029 per cent of Australia’s population. That sounds fringe. Unless we can change the preselection process to include the broader community, we are failing to address the confirmation bias of our membership.

6 May 2025

More interesting facts here.

Pollsters have attributed Labor’s victory to an increase in support from women, younger Australians and some culturally and linguistically diverse communities.

Redbridge director Kos Samaras said middle-aged Australians in general also abandoned the Coalition.

“The votes that the Coalition lost over an eight-week period, where we saw the Liberal primary [vote] collapse by about 9%, were mainly people in their 40s and 50s who rent or still have a mortgage, and live in the outer suburbs and regions.”

Hartcher chiming in. The Liberals know they have a problem? I don’t think so. He, Timmy, tell us again about your nuclear fantasies. Oh, and you, too, David.

The federal election result carries some hard-won lessons. The overarching lesson for the Liberals is to accept that they’re just not very good at politics.

A fundamental failure: They’ve been suffering a shrinking share of women’s votes since 1996. But the evidence shows they prefer to keep the boys’ club intact even if it pushes them into extinction.

In their search for guidance after their crushing defeat on Saturday, Liberals and their media allies are turning to sources of conservative wisdom, including Margaret Thatcher. I haven’t seen any of them citing Thatcher’s 1975 observation: “In politics if you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman.”

The Liberals suffer male-pattern deafness on this wisdom. Women voters are not a minority to be tolerated. They are the majority. On Saturday, just as they did in 2022, female voters of every age preferred Labor.

The Liberals know they have a problem. Ten years ago, they set a target to achieve 50 per cent women’s representation in parliament by 2025. Instead, they preselected only 34 per cent women for Saturday’s election, very few of them in winnable seats.

7 May 2025

Yup. Major problem. The Liberals just don’t have what it takes.

“The Coalition frontbench is thin. A lot you could not put on Q&A or in a debate with their Labor opponent. They wouldn’t have the confidence or expertise.”

Shaun Carney lays the blame where it belongs.

[Dutton] was divisive and relentlessly negative. He was not inclusive. He tried to win on a platform of being unsympathetic to the concerns of women and younger voters. He derided migrants and First Nations flags. He blamed the Albanese government for a housing crisis that had, in fact, been decades in the making. Most Australians understood that it was not an instantaneous problem, that an intergenerational wealth gap develops over a long time.

He blamed the government entirely for inflation, when inflation had been unacceptably high when he was a minister and was trending down under Labor. He blamed Labor for a High Court decision that ordered the government to release illegal arrivals from detention. He blamed Labor for the decisions of the Reserve Bank. He demanded that Albanese apologise for following his convictions and giving Australians a chance to vote on an Indigenous Voice to parliament. The Liberal campaign snapped in two when Dutton summarily dropped his plan to sack 41,000 federal public servants and order the remainder of the government’s workforce back to the office five days a week. It was a sign that this was not a serious outfit.

He spent most of the parliamentary term damning Albanese as an antisemitic weakling. And yet in the campaign he complained about Labor’s “lies”, and Liberals who remain sympathetic to Dutton characterise Labor’s negative messaging about him as “character assassination”, as if Dutton were Little Bo-Peep.

8 May 2025

Chip LeGrand on The Lesson for the Liberals: Do the Opposite of what Peta Credlin says. All around good advice that.

2. Don’t watch Peta Credlin, especially.

Sky News still resembles a news channel during the day. It is when the sun goes down and Credlin and her friends come on air that the joint turns batshit crazy. If you really must watch Sky News, turn off the telly at 6pm.

9 May 2025

Crowe on the challenges Albanese faces.

This is a redemption for Labor after the knifing of Kevin Rudd in 2010 and the toppling of Julia Gillard in 2013. Voters lost faith in politics during that era. The Scanlon Foundation found that 48 per cent of Australians said in 2009 the government could be trusted to do the right thing. By 2012, it was only 26 per cent. Labor bears the blame for that coup culture.

Albanese now gets to savour the victory. He has decapitated the parties on his left and right by driving Dutton out of his seat of Dickson and forcing Greens leader Adam Bandt out of Melbourne. Labor was harangued for years by the leaders on both sides, becoming their punching bag on every issue from Gaza to housing, and now it gets its revenge.

Albanese has thrust his elbows out and shoved the Greens and the Liberals to each side. He has expanded the middle ground in Australian politics and claimed ownership of the centre — possibly for many years to come. After years of doubt about whether the centre could hold in an era of fragmenting media, Labor gets room to move and space to breathe.

Now the pressure is on the two edges. The Greens have lost members over Gaza and the intolerance of different opinions within their ranks, hardening the left. The Liberals have shrunk while their branch members mainline Sky After Dark, hardening the right. The challenge is far greater for the Liberals, a party of government, compared to the Greens, a party of protest.

The next Liberal leader worth the name will be the one who can go on Sky After Dark and tell the hosts they are wrong. Imagine this conversation: “You make an interesting point, Andrew, but that’s not what mainstream Australians are worried about right now. We’re a mainstream party, so we need to win back those Australians.”

Dutton spent much of the campaign claiming he would govern like Howard, the gold standard for the Liberals, but he never sounded like the former prime minister. He seemed constantly anxious and angry. The leader who channelled Howard best was Albanese, who was calm and disciplined throughout.

When Albanese said Australians had “conflict fatigue” his message ran parallel with Howard’s talk of Australians being comfortable and relaxed. Albanese went further than this, as well, with one of his best remarks of the entire campaign: “kindness isn’t weakness.” That was the cut-through line of the Nine Network debate.

Albanese and his colleagues are enjoying their success at the very time they talk about humility. They are not that good at hiding their gloating. And they are fighting over the spoils of the victory already. The nastiest fight is in the Right, where the Victorians demanded a place in the ministry at the expense of the NSW branch. This has cost Industry Minister Ed Husic his position, even though he was a good minister and deserved better.

This is a remorseless business. The Deputy Prime Minister, Richard Marles, is using his position at the top of the Right to elevate his Victorian supporters, such as Sam Rae, by removing the Attorney-General, Mark Dreyfus. This is another step in promoting people on the right who are loyal to Marles rather than to the old warlord, Bill Shorten, who exited in January.

Marles is on the march. He and Rae are terminating opponents in a calculated move through the party. This puts Chalmers, seen as a natural successor to Albanese, on notice.

10 May 2025

Hartcher chiming in once more. Did I mention that the Libs do not have what it takes? Independent of whether their new leader is Ley or Taylor.

Albanese was not exaggerating. The former Liberal campaign director Tony Barry of Redbridge recalls Albanese’s remark that he’s been underestimated by people his whole life, “and I’m one of them”, adds Barry, who goes on to describe the result as “extraordinary”, the Labor campaign as “brilliant” and the effect as “structural, not cyclical”.

What does he mean by structural? “For the Liberals, we’d think, ‘It’s our turn, then it’s Labor’s turn’, depending on the cycle. Now it’s almost beyond cyclical — that you are so weak, you can’t win. Even if there’s a mood for change, the Liberals lack the strength to win structurally,” he says.

“You don’t have money, you don’t have donors, you don’t have good candidates. How would you convince a quality candidate like Keith Wolahan — a successful barrister with a young family — to give up his work for two years to campaign?”

Wolahan lost the outer metropolitan Melbourne seat of Menzies to Labor after a single term. Barry offers the Liberal Party’s Victorian branch as an example of a party so institutionally weak that it can’t win against a deeply unpopular state Labor government.

…

It’s a kind of electoral alchemy. In this election, Labor won a primary vote 11 percentage points lower than Bob Hawke’s when he was re-elected in 1987. Yet Albanese won a bigger share of the two-party preferred vote and more seats than Hawke did. How?

A Labor strategist points to a campaign conducted on two levels. At the national level, Labor had a clear and consistent set of overarching themes, positive and negative. At the local level, Labor ran dozens of distinct campaigns tailored “to meet the community where they are”. This was six years in the planning, led jointly by Albanese and Labor’s national secretary, Paul Erickson.

“We won seats in inner-city Melbourne and the north-west coast of Tasmania — they couldn’t be further apart,” says the strategist. Labor took some seats, like Bandt’s seat of Melbourne, from the Greens and others, like north-west Tasmania’s Braddon, from the Liberals, with quite different local campaigns.

Apart from the bifurcated structure of the campaign, what were the main strengths of the Labor effort? Its architects nominate its theme of the future, whereas the Coalition’s campaign constantly referenced the past. Dutton wanted to know whether you were better off than you were three years ago, while Albanese offered a brighter prospect for the three years ahead. Under the “future” rubric came all its policy offerings.

20 May 2025

Natassia Chrysanthos, James Massola and Olivia Ireland reporting about what Howard called immediately a stupid move.

Littleproud announced on Tuesday the Nationals would leave the Coalition over the Liberals’ refusal to enshrine nuclear power and three other demands in a new agreement, delivering a blow to Ley just a week into her leadership.

But Ley said she was determined that the Liberals take their time to get policies right after losing dozens of seats over the last two elections. She will appoint a shadow ministry comprised solely of Liberals to rebuild the party’s offering to city voters who have deserted it.

“The shadow ministers that I appoint from that party room will be well-equipped and incredibly capable to take the fight up to Labor right up until the next election,” Ley said at a Canberra press conference on Tuesday, hours after Littleproud announced the split.

“While I have enormous respect for David and his team, it is disappointing that the National Party has decided today to leave the Coalition.”

The policy commitments the Nationals wanted in the Coalition agreement:

A commitment to establish a $20 billion Regional Australia Future Fund.

A commitment to legislate federal divestiture powers that could break up big businesses, like supermarkets, that abuse market power.

A Universal Service Obligation to guarantee telecommunications companies provide mobile coverage across Australia.

A commitment to lift Australia’s ban on nuclear energy.

She said another point of contention was that the Nationals had not agreed to maintain shadow cabinet solidarity, which binds the Coalition to holding official joint-party positions.

21 May 2025

Paul Sakkal and Natassia Chrysanthos on how the fraught relationship between Ley and Littleproud played into the separation of Libs and Nats. Apparently they do not like each other much. Gotta leave it to Ley and her Libs team: They are good at leaking. I bet that Littleproud will fall on his sword before Ley will fall on hers.

… just a week into her [Ley’s] leadership, the Nationals have ripped up the Coalition partnership for the first time in almost 40 years — a decision that was privately questioned or outright opposed by Nationals Barnaby Joyce, Michael McCormack, Darren Chester and Sam Birrell in Tuesday’s fiery party room meeting.

In public, the Nationals named Ley’s refusal to enshrine four of its policy demands as the reason they walked away from higher salaries on a matter of principle. Ley says Littleproud’s refusal to agree to shadow cabinet confidentiality — which binds frontbenchers to joint party positions — led negotiations to falter.

Privately, the Nationals’ building discomfort around net zero emissions targets was giving it another reason to leave. A sense of betrayal over the courting of Jacinta Nampijinpa Price to the Liberals fired up the party room.

But Littleproud was also ambitious. The Nationals leader had asked to sit in Peter Dutton’s chair and run question time while the opposition leader was away last term. Those requests were rebuffed because under the Coalition’s procedures, that role was reserved for Ley as the deputy Liberal leader.

Littleproud rekindled his demands for an elevated role during talks with Ley during the last week.

Separate from his four policy non-negotiables, Littleproud asked to become deputy opposition leader instead of deputy Liberal leader Ted O’Brien, according to several sources. Ley rejected the proposal.

22 May 2025

Turns out the current Nationals leader is a bit of Macchiavellian bloke, unfortunately, he is also not all that smart it seems. In contrast, Ley seems off to a good start … Natassia Chrysanthos and Paul Sakkal on how good ole Aunty became a surprise mediator in the Coalition’s separation.

‘The Coalition’s break-up has been downgraded to a break after just 48 hours. If the Liberals and Nationals reunite, they can thank Aunty. …

Nationals MPs were back on the ABC later on Thursday to mop up the events. Joyce, streaming in live to the afternoon briefing program, was asked: “Barnaby, in a word, how would you describe the past 48 hours and the Nationals decision to leave the Coalition?”

“Could have been better,” was his reply.

Labor was/is smart about the media it uses. The Libs and Nats not so much. In fact, Dutton completely misread what channels mattered. Even attacked the ABC which the Nats for a good reason never would. Aunty, after all, is the only channel in many rural areas. Crowe on Albanese taking on the ‘real’ opposition, the right-wing disinformation machine.

Dutton spent the past three years trying to dodge the major media, especially the press gallery in Parliament House, in order to avoid pesky questions about his economic policy vacuum. He avoided press conferences, dismissed print and online interview requests, ignored flagship ABC radio programs and ran away from the ABC’s 7.30 and Insiders. He launched a foolish attack on the ABC as the “hate media” and merely damaged himself. He junked the approach that had worked so well for Liberal prime minister John Howard: talk to the ABC, not to befriend the host, but to reach the audience.

Worse, Dutton had no viable strategy to use new media platforms to connect with voters. He simply wanted to talk to friends on old platforms who told him he deserved to win. One example is damning: in the final week of the election campaign, Dutton spent one hour talking to Sharri Markson on Sky News and another hour talking to Paul Murray on Sky News. There is no rational explanation for spending such valuable time on such a narrow media platform with such limited reach.

28 May 2025

The Coalition is back together after a one-week trial separation, and many interventions by party grandes and not so grandes.

Brilliant cartoon and commentary here: Facebook

29 May 2025

Adrian Beaumont Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne updates on the latest preference flows for Senate seats, and the overall two-party vote Labor vs LNP. Again, not a pretty picture for the LNP.

Six of the 12 senators for each state and all four territory senators were up for election on May 3. Changes in state senate representation are measured against 2019, the last time these senators were up for election. …

Labor’s national two party vote up to a 55.6–44.4 lead

On May 5, two days after the election, I explained that we needed to wait for “non-classic” seats to have a special two-party count undertaken between the Labor and Coalition candidates. Non-classic seats are seats where the final two were not Labor and Coalition candidates.

With the major party national primary votes so low at this election, 35 of the 150 House of Representatives seats were non-classics. Before the two-party counts in these seats started, The Poll Bludger’s national two-party estimate gave Labor a 54.6–45.4 margin and the ABC a 55.0–45.0 margin.

This week the electoral commission has been counting the Labor vs Coalition two-party votes in the non-classic seats, and Labor currently leads by 55.6–44.4. The national two-party vote is still incomplete, but the large majority of non-classic seats have now had a two-party count undertaken.

The remaining non-classic seats that are either uncounted or partially counted to two-party are favourable to the Coalition, so Labor will drop back a little, but will still win the national two party vote by about 55.4–44.6. …