First, the maths.
The polls, apart from YouGov’s MRP poll that dropped last Thursday, were uniformly too negative about the government’s vote, but for a more understandable reason than in 2019. Back then, the polls overestimated the swing from the government. This time, they underestimated the swing to the government.
That’s understandable because federal governments typically start off with landslides and then progressively shrink over subsequent elections. The Albanese government has done something unique at the federal level: start off with a tiny majority and save its landslide for its second election.
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So all that talk about a low primary vote and preferences flows and more surprises in store with more seats in play — all that applied only to the Coalition. Its primary vote shrank below 32% across the country. Labor’s primary vote went up to nearly 35%. That smashed the models we’d all been using about what would happen. Bean, in Canberra, is an example of what we were expecting — Labor in a struggle to hold a safe seat because of a surging independent vote. But rather than being typical, it is looking like a one-off.
The other big surprise was that, far from going backwards in Victoria — where the universal belief was that seats would be lost, meaning Labor would need to pick up seats elsewhere to stay in majority government — the party had a swing to it. Much smaller than other state swings, but at 1% on the primary vote, enough to pick up seats, not lose them.
This was by no means a victory forged overnight, though: Anthony Albanese steadily rebuilt Labor’s primary vote from sub-30% territory at the start of the year — when he wrongfooted Peter Dutton by bursting out of the blocks just after New Year’s Day — to nearly 35%. And he ignored the pundits (like me) who said he seemed frozen in place and unable to counterattack: he had a strategy, one he had confidence would deliver for him, and his confidence was vindicated in spades.
Such is the magnitude of this win that some are already suggesting it has set Labor up for another two terms. That’s of course possible: the Coalition have a long, long way back from here, Labor has reversed the Greens’ erosion of its left flank, and the Liberals, hitherto united, have a difficult period of finding a new leader and new policies. But Labor’s fortunes over its first term illustrate just how quickly high levels of support can ebb away. Nonetheless, it’s enough to put Albanese up with Hawke and Keating in terms of electoral success. He now dominates the ALP; the critics who complained about him at the start of the year have had to eat their words.
The right will look for excuses. They’ll blame Trump. They’ll blame a lack of traditional Liberal policies. They’ll blame the cyclone, and Easter, and Anzac Day. They’ll blame Angus Taylor, and even Peter Dutton himself.
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Some of the blame game will be justified. Yes, Trump served up a perfect illustration of why voters should be wary of right-wing populists. But as the Canadian experience shows, you have to use that illustration effectively. Justin Trudeau and then Mark Carney instinctively knew that a patriotic, aggressive response was justified, and caught the political moment there.
Here, Albanese played a subtler hand, declining to engage in any overblown rhetoric about Trump. If anything, he was boring and banal in his reactions. But that, too, read the mood of the electorate, which was looking for assurance and steady-as-she-goes, not fractiousness and division. He firmly maintained that key policies in the sights of American special interests, like the PBS and biosecurity, weren’t up for grabs. Dutton’s attacks on Albanese as somehow not up to the job of dealing with Trump floundered.
By the end of the campaign, Albanese and his team were a little more willing to namecheck the United States as the source of bad policy ideas, but attacking Trump was still verbotensuggesting Labor had thought long and hard about where it wanted to position itself — and frame Dutton — around the chaos coming out of the United States. It was another example of Albanese’s disciplined campaigning. He has proven a ruthless political warrior who has put his opponents to the sword. The possibility of dominating a political era, as Howard and Hawke did, is now open to him.
Is this the start of a political dynasty for Albanese and the ALP?
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