Historic election result sees Labor triumph over Liberal catastrophes

Despite a less-than-stellar performance, Labor won the 2025 Election in a landslide due to the Coalition's immense failure to appeal to voters, writes Dr Binoy Kampmark.

THE DUST HAD barely settled on the Australian Federal Election on 3 May before the hagiographers, mythmakers and revisionists got to work. If history is seen as a set of agreed-upon facts, there was a rapidly growing consensus that Labor’s imposing victory had been the result of a superb campaign, sparkling in its faultlessness.

This did not quite match pre-election remarks and assessments. The government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had been markedly unconvincing, marked by dithering, shortsightedness and a lack of conviction. It had, rather inexplicably, made the conservative Coalition led by that cruel automaton, Peter Dutton, look electable.

Overall, the campaign on the part of both sides of politics was consistently dull and persistently mediocre. Expansive, broad ideas were eschewed in favour of minutiae and objects of bribery: tax matters, cutting fuel excise, forgiving some student debt, improved Medicare services and child care assistance. Issues such as the parlous reliance of Australia upon U.S. security interests, not to mention the criminally daft obligations of the AUKUS security pact, or a detailed, coherent policy on addressing environmental and climate challenges, were kept in storage.

Coalition's problems far greater than a terrible campaign

The crushing defeat of the Coalition on Saturday stemmed from its inability to let go of hateful, racist and divisive policies, of which Australia has had enough.

What did become evident in the weeks leading up to the poll was that the Coalition policy palette, which never went beyond blotches of law and order (terrorism, criminal refugees, paedophilia forefront themes), mild bribes for “cost of living relief” and illusory nuclear energy failed to appeal. Its campaign lacked the barely modest bite of Labor, largely because it had been eclipsed by such oxygen-drawing events as U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff regime and the death of Pope Francis I.

It had also misread the mood of the electorate in pushing policies with a tangy Trump flavour, notably the proposed removal of 41,000 jobs from the public sector and the establishment of something similar to the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). (Country Liberal Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price unhelpfully promised to “make Australia great again.”)

The Coalition, Dutton admitted after being accused by Labor of being “DOGE-y Dutton”, had “made a mistake” and “got it wrong”. The focus would be, instead, on natural attrition. There were also scrappy sorties on the cultural war front, featuring lashings of undesirable press outlets, such as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and The Guardian (“hate media”, according to Dutton), and the presence of “wokeism” in schools.

Flimsy soothsayers could also be found, many endorsing a Liberal-Nationals victory.

Sharri Markson of Sky News Australia beamed on 1 May:

For the first time in my journalistic career, I’m going to offer a pre-election editorial, endorsing one side of politics.

A Dutton prime ministership would give our great nation the fresh start we deserve.

With vigorous drumbeating, Markson could only see ‘our values under threat from enemies at home and abroad’ and retaining Anthony Albanese as prime minister was dangerous. With the analytical skill of an unread, hungover undergraduate, the political astrologist found the PM a victim of ‘far-left ideology’, something ‘out of step with mainstream Australia’.

Labor victory proves public rejected malicious media falsehoods

Saturday’s electoral mauling of the Coalition was a resounding rejection of media lies and distortions.

With Labor’s victory assured, the fiscal conservatives at the Australian Financial Review proved sniffy, noting that Labor’s record on the economy did not warrant another term, ‘but the Coalition has not made the case to change the government’. More explicit, with hectoring relish, was Australia’s premier shock jock of the press stable, Andrew Bolt.

Bolt wrote scoldingly in the News Corp yellow press:

‘No, the voters aren’t always right. This time they were wrong and this gutless and incoherent Coalition should be ashamed.’

Australians were set to ‘get more’ of policies that had ‘left this country poorer, weaker, more divided and deeper in debt’.

One is reminded of Henry Kissinger’s rebuke of Chilean democracy at the election of the socialist leader Salvador Allende. As one of U.S. foreign policy’s chief malefactors, he refused to accept the proposition that a country could ‘go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people’. Democracy was only worthy if directed by the appropriate interests.

Senator Price, evidently rattled by the result, returned to the Trumpian well, hoping to draw attention to claims of irregular voting in rural polling booths.

Price told the ABC:

“The AEC has been alerted to this over and over and does little with it. I urge the ABC, as a taxpayer-funded organisation, to go out and see what is occurring.”

There are other evident patterns that emerged in the vote. The old division between urban, metropolitan areas and rural and country communities has been coloured with sharpness. The Liberal Party, which must win seats in urban Australia, finds itself marginalised before its allies, the Nationals, who have retained their complement in regional and country areas. Party voices and strategists lament that not more was done after the 2022 defeat, with the Liberals refusing to address, among other things, the failure to appeal to female voters or the youth vote.

Disappointing in such stonking majorities is the assumption that minority parties and Independents can be ignored, if not with contempt, then with condescending politeness. Labor may well be soaring with the greatest return of seats in its history, but attitudes of the electorate can harden quickly. The move away from the major parties, as a trend, continues and there is no room for complacency in a new Albanese government.