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The 48th Parliament is (almost) finalised, and my god what a strange election to work on. I’ve spent a few weeks thinking hard about why we got the result that we did, which came as a surprise to pretty much everyone I’ve spoken to.
First, the usual caveat: this is my analysis, filtered through my own biases and opinion. I’m focusing on the points I think are most relevant and addressing questions I have been asked directly.
Okay, let’s get into it.
Labor’s freak majority
First of all, Labor’s win is not only historic because of the size of their majority (seats in the House of Representatives) but also because it’s very unique. A governing party does not usually increase its majority after they have already been government. And never by this much! Usually after you’ve already been in government, the shine wears off and you lose a seat or two. That’s why commentators, insiders and the politically engaged have been talking about hung parliament and minority government so much over the past three years. In 2022, Labor only had the majority by one seat, and given that the governing party usually expects to lose a seat or two, minority government seemed like a strong possibility in 2025.
Now, Labor holds 94 seats – an 18 seat majority. I cannot stress just how wild it is for Labor to gain 17 seats and not lose a single one in their second term. With this election, the voting public has delivered a rare thing.
And that’s the frame that should apply to all analysis of this election result. This is an exceptional win (I’m running out of synonyms for “unique” already!) and so I don’t think it actually changes many of the political trends we’ve seen building over the past decade.
For example, the major party primary vote.
The biggest development in Australian politics over the past four decades has been the declining primary vote for the two parties of government (Labor and the Coalition). In the 1980 election, 91.5% of voters gave their primary vote to either a Labor (45.15%) or Coalition (46.4%) candidate. Only 8% of people put a minor party or independent candidate as #1.
This is the primary vote breakdown for 2022 and 2025 at time of writing:
| 2022 | 2025 | % change (swing) | |
| Labor | 32.58% | 34.56% | +1.98 |
| Liberal | 31.89% | 27.78% | -4.2 |
| Coalition (Libs + Nats) | 35.49% | 31.58% | -3.91 |
| Minor parties + independents | 31.93% | 33.86% | +1.93 |
In 2025 Labor bucked the trend of major party decline and actually increased their primary vote for the first time in a long ass time. It’s definitely a win, but I don’t think we should read too much into it for two reasons:
- They are still very far off the highs of pre-1980, and I think those days are just fundamentally gone.
- The primary votes for minors and indies also increased, by almost 2%.
In fact, this year more people voted for minors and indies than the Coalition. The shift away from major parties hasn’t stopped. Labor would be silly to interpret this primary vote performance as anything more than a temporary bump, and one that has only come because the Liberals did so badly.
There’s been a lot of chat about this result giving Labor a ‘mandate’ (i.e.: approval from huge popularity) to stick with it’s play-it-safe approach to policy… but I’d argue 35% is not overwhelmingly popularity at all; to look at it from another perspective, 2 out of 3 Australian voters put someone else as #1.
Side Note: The Greens
For all the doomsday talk about the Greens, their primary vote is basically flat (-0.05% from 2022). Whether that’s good, bad or neutral seems to be very much in the eye of the beholder. I find that people who already hate the Greens (which is most of the commentary published in the media) view it as a disaster; people who like or at least value the Greens role in politics see it as neutral-leaning-bad; and Greens optimists view holding the primary as a great success in the face of a huge enemy.
While I don’t think it’s a disaster by any means, it’s not a good result – the political landscape was primed for the Greens to increase their primary vote a little bit (fear of Trump, Labor sliding to the right, weather emergencies and increasing awareness of corporate interference in democracy). From what I’ve heard within the party, it’s likely down to strategies they tried that didn’t work out; sometimes you try stuff and it just doesn’t work. That’s fine, and like all parties they will take lessons from the campaign and adapt.
Why did this surprise result happen?
I think there are two big factors at play. Now that I’ve thought about things a bit, I don’t think Dutton’s unlikeability had much to do with it at all. We’ve had grim, soulless prime ministers before (John Howard says hi!) and we’ll almost certainly have them again.
1. Global instability cannot be understated
Donald Trump was a much bigger factor in the election result than a lot of analysis is saying. His insane “Liberation Day” tariffs came in week one of the official election campaign and the chaos that followed made the Coalition look like idiots for mimicking MAGA ideas and policies.
It was the association with Trump that really killed Peter Dutton and sunk the Coalition. Dutton had spent the entire parliamentary term refusing to appear on the ABC, instead spending most of his media minutes with Sky News and (presumably) exclusively reading The Australian and The Daily Telegraph. He let the hysterical shrieking of the Sky News hosts convince him that Australians give a shit about American culture war bullshit, and based on that intel decided to follow the Trump route for the election. It’s why he proposed the strange DOGE-like public service cuts and working from home policies.
Problem was, it took Dutton too long to pivot. By the time they realised and tried to distance themselves from MAGA, Dutton was already being branded Temu Trump online and Labor was reiterating the connection every chance they could. As I’ve written before, there is so much about American politics that simply does not apply here – the biggest factors being our comparatively higher baseline level of education and compulsory voting. Even Australians who are not engaged in politics expect to hear one or two general policy ideas to base their vote on. Every policy issue the Coalition had traced back to that terrible decision to import MAGA ideas, and they ended up backflipping on almost all of them.
If Dutton had never copied Trump I reckon the Coalition would have been much more competitive in this election.
The bullshit some people have said about Australia “voting against hate” is so untrue it’s almost laughable. Australia is a deeply racist and misogynistic culture; it wasn’t “hate politics” that turned people off, but the instability that Trump-style politics causes globally.
A vote for stability explains the primary vote boost to Labor, because for a lot of less engaged voters in “middle Australia” majority government felt like a safer choice than having Labor negotiate with minor party and indie MPs.
Voters in the UK and Canada recently made the same choice for stability, rather than progressive politics. Take Keir Starmer’s UK Labour government, elected in mid-2024. His party and government represents stability in contrast to the mess of the Tories, who were so unstable that Liz Truss’ Prime Ministership in 2022 was famously outlasted by a head of lettuce (45 days). Starmer doesn’t believe Labour’s election win was a “vote against hate”, which is why he has quickly dropped progressive causes like protecting trans women.
The takeaway: The #1 priority for Albanese, Labor and most voters – throughout the election and this incoming government – is “stability”. Progress is way, way further down the list.
2. The Overton Window has shifted right
‘Overton Window’ refers to the spectrum of ideas on public policy and social issues considered acceptable by the general public at any given moment in time. The acceptable ideas are very heavily dictated by mainstream media, and as the majority of Australia’s mainstream media explicitly subscribes to conservative ideology our public political discourse remains stubbornly anchored to the right. It’s so heavily weighted in that direction, that even when newer media outlets cut through and frame themselves as progressive in relation to conservative media, it ends up being centrist at best.
What does this mean for politics and this election result? Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp titles have been incredibly influential in not only election outcomes, but also leadership appointments, for decades. Kevin Rudd infamously curried favour with News Corp editors and Rupert himself, earning the endorsement of both during the 2007 election. By early 2009, News Corp and Murdoch turned on Rudd, running an aggressive media campaign against him that contributed to the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd Labor leadership that ended with Tony Abbott as PM. According to Malcolm Turnbill, Murdoch and News Corp killed his prime ministership and political career. The same could be said of Bill Shorten in 2019, who lost the “unloseable” election campaign to… Scott Morrison. Yeah.
A lot has been written about how News Corp has been much less influential in the 2020s. While I understand that argument, I don’t totally agree. They might have less sway over voters, but they have clearly influenced the Labor party itself. The current iteration of the Labor party seems so badly traumatised by the beating News Corp has given it over the past two decades (the 2019 election in particular) that it’s decided to mould itself into a party more palatable to the Murdoch media. It has become less ambitious and shifted to the right.
As I recently wrote in Crikey, Albanese is a News Corp version of a Labor leader: “[He is] as ready to act in their interests as Dutton would have been on key issues: delaying fossil fuel shut downs, killing off his own party’s proposed gambling reforms, legislating the ill-advised social media ban, and preserving the tax conditions that prop up their real estate arms.”
The strategy makes perfect sense if your goal is simply to stay in power. If Labor and the Coalition share a lot of policies, then it’s much harder for conservative media to target Labor with criticism.
So while I do think a bigger proportion of the Australian public would embrace more progressive policies, it’s irrelevant if the media and two major parties refuse to let the Overton window budge even a centimetre to the left. You can see it in the way that the media, Labor, the Coalition and some of the centrist independents portray the Greens and left-ish indies. The ideological difference is treated as either radical hysteria or juvenile student politics, when in reality the Greens proposals are fairly straightforward policies (many of which are already successfully implemented in other countries around the world).
Another dead giveaway is that Albanese and some Labor MPs were quite gracious about Peter Dutton losing his seat, in comparison to the cruel way they spoke about Adam Bandt and Max Chandler-Mather. To me, it shows that Albo views himself as more ideologically aligned with Dutton than Bandt or MCM.
The takeaway: The combination of global instability + an Overton window anchored to the right = Australian politics retreating to the centre. It’s a landscape that rejects the politics of the fringe right (One Nation) and the fringe left (the Greens, as painted by conservative media).
The centre is not neutral; centrism still represents a specific outlook and it is not inherently more “sensible” or “rational”. But it’s where Australia finds itself.
Senators to the front!
What comes next is the tricky part. The 19 member crossbench we’ve enjoyed over the past three years will shrink to 12 or 13 (pending the outcome of the recount in Bradfield, NSW). Unfortunately the opposition is also in a weakened position, and with its massive majority Labor has a full run of the House of Representatives. It truly can ignore all outside opinion and do whatever it wants; pass and block bills with no consultation.
It means how we think about government needs to change for this term. Sorry to say it, but the progressive indies and single Greens MP (Elizabeth Watson-Brown) in the House of Representatives are now more or less irrelevant to policy-making. The only scrutiny applied to legislation will have to come from the Senate. That is where progressives should be focusing their attention and energy now.
There are 76 seats in total, and the new Senate is made up of:
- 28 Labor
- 27 Coalition
- 11 Greens
- 6 independents
- 4 One Nation
So, for the next three years any hope of progressive policy-making rests solely on the Senate. To pass bills you need at least 19 Senators present in the sitting, and for a majority of those to vote in favour. Labor can’t pass bills here on its own – and that is where the big question remains. Will it seek the input and support of Greens or the Coalition in the upper house? Working with the independents will be difficult as their beliefs vary widely – the group so far includes Fatima Payman, Lidia Thorpe, David Pocock, Jaqui Lambie, Pauline Hanson and Ralph Babet.
A lot of people are hoping Labor will work with the Greens, especially now that it has a new leader in Larissa Waters (this is a good read on her). I’m not 100% sure they will take this route.
After Labor has spent the past few months demonising the dangerous ideology and “policy idiocy” of the Libs… will it now turn around and work with them in the Senate? This would be a fundamental betrayal of the renewed support for Labor. There is no world in which you can interpret the increased Labor primary as anything other than a total rejection of the Coalition. And yet…
One of the first moves the new Labor government has made is approving an extension on the Woodside North West Shelf gas project, allowing it to run until 2070. I will be an elderly woman by the time it closes. This line in the ABC’s reporting is echoing in my head: “The approval is [Environment Minister Murray] Watt’s first major act as environment minister, which will be welcomed by the Coalition and furiously opposed by the Greens.”
Will Labor enter into a ‘purple’ bipartisan alliance with the Coalition, doing a deal with the devil of its own making? More evidence points to this outcome than I’d like.
I want more than anything to be proven wrong.
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