How Labor’s Election Victory Turned into a Deluge
So we did it. We destroyed the final horcrux and prevented the rise of Dark Lord Dutton. Whilst full results for all seats are not yet available, it looks like Labor is in for a thumping victory with at least 10 seats picked up from the LNP and the Greens. Whilst Labor’s won what’s been described as a ‘historic’ victory, it’s important to note that several factors contributed to the party’s success.
Labor’s Campaign
I don’t want to take it away from them; Labor ran a tight, disciplined campaign. As discussed on 4 Corners this week, journalist Louise Milligan explicitly noted how controlled the media scrum was. How tightly staged each interaction Albanese had with the public was. Despite a single pro-Pallestinian protester accosting Albo on the campaign trail this week (big slay), it’s notable that there weren’t many more of these kinds of instances on the trail. Probably not great for accountability journalism, but great for the Labor campaign pushing a clear, disciplined message.
On messaging, Labor’s was clear, entertaining and lighthearted. The party took a millennial-driven, meme-heavy social media strategy, spending more on digital media than the LNP or Clive Palmer(!). They made early missteps with weird AI slop videos, but they ironed that out quickly. Labor’s national campaign manager, Paul Erikson (or P Erikson, as he is now fondly known on social media, due to his authorisation appearing at the end of these ads) has become a rallying cry for Labor’s social media faithful since the election, which should tell you something.
As a quick aside, I think Simpsons and Star Wars memes are funny, but I do slightly despair at the coarsening of our discourse. Are our attention spans so shattered by TikTok that we’re doomed to 6-second vertical video memes rather than serious policy discussion driving elections? Rhetorical question, I know the answer’s yes.
The policy that Labor advocated was also straightforward – not ‘stop-the-boats’ clear, but clear enough. Classic Labor fare: increasing bulk-billing at GP’s, helping with cost of living concerns, building homes, modest tax cuts, HELP Debt relief, etc. The plans were sensible, costed, and resonated with the Australian public’s concerns about their cost of living. All in all, a solid campaign.
The Liberal Campaign
It also helped that the LNP ran a historically dogshit campaign. In February, it looked like the LNP wouldn’t just chip away at Labor’s majority; there was a genuine concern that they might take back government. If Labor only had a single term in government, this would buck a hundred years of Australian electoral tradition. Given the overwhelming number of incumbent government losses globally, it looked like Labor might do just that.
In just nine weeks the LNP managed to turn a four point lead into a three point national loss; the kind of bollocking I’ve never seen in electoral politics in fifteen years of watching. Dutton was a very effective attack dog in opposition during the last term, punching down on Albo is easy (and fun, I often find) but these last few weeks have showed a desperate side of Dutton. He’s excellent at making things unpopular (like the Voice Referendum) but is less good at making things popular (like his dumb potato head or bad policies).
Dutton also saw the success of the Trump campaign in America, and in November, immediately started cribbing some of the same talking points: cost of living, ‘are you better off than you were three years ago’, government efficiency, cutting the public service, etc. This strategy might’ve seemed like a winner at the time, but given how toxic and gross the first 100 days of the Trump administration has been since January 20th, this branding has seemingly bitten him in the arse. After Trump’s needless trade war, disastrous economic forecasts and illegal renditioning of people to El Salvadorian mega prisons, his approvals have unsurprisingly taken a nose-dive.
It also doesn’t help that in the last few weeks, Dutton, realising the adverse effect this was having on his campaign (after months of leaning into it), started to backpedal. But not before Jacinta Price could shriek “Make Australia Great Again!” next to him at a press conference, alongside well-publicised stories of her pictured wearing a MAGA hat. Providing a clear signal to voters that this walk-back from Trump was purely for optics.
The LNP also had the unenviable task of selling the Australian public an absolute bill of goods. With all that coal money, the IPA, and all the other think tanks carrying foul intellectual water for them, you’d have thought they’d emerge on the stage in 2025 with a series of thought-out, costed policies that would blow the socks off the Australian public. They, of course, did not – which begs the question: what were they doing for the last three years? They announced a bevvy of unpopular policies that damaged them with key constituencies that they needed to gain ground with to win, including:
- Cutting
36,000,(no wait) 41,000 public service workers - Enforcing return-to-office mandates
- Domestic nuclear power generation
This, unsurprisingly, alienated, in turn, government workers, women, Canberrans, working families, rural communities, environmentalists, and anyone with brain cells. Dutton then abruptly reversed course on all but the nuclear policy, futher alienating these cohorts and creating the impression (correctly) that he had no fucking idea what he was doing.
Presumably, these ideas were loudly applauded at the LNP fundraiser dinners filled with male, small-government, small-dicked, small-brained, small-business owners, and they didn’t decide to poll the actual favourability of any of those issues before they announced them as policy. Getting rid of WFH is about as popular as syphilis, as it turns out. It’s almost like they didn’t want to win. They know it’s a popularity contest, right?
To that point, there was also a little something at play that I like to call the ‘Dutton’s a bit of a Cunt Effect.’ He’s always been a divisive, racist, culture-war figure in Australian politics who doesn’t (fortunately as it turns out) resonate with the majority. Despite the two-party preferred polling always having the ALP and the LNP within roughly 5 points of each other, Dutton went into the vote with a negative 16-point preferred prime-minister margin against Albanese, suggesting even dyed-in-the-wool LNP voters couldn’t stomach this rancid spud.
Candidate quality on the LNP side was also substantially low this time around. There was a chance that the LNP might have been able to pick up Bennelong if their candidate wasn’t affiliated with a Chinese CCP-affiliated high roller, sparking security concerns. Or Kooyong, if their candidate hadn’t misrepresented herself as a chill chick who rents ‘just like you normals’ while neglecting to mention her property investments and $20m family trust. Yes, Hamer Hall is literally named for her grandfather.
Finally, the decision to release the policy costings two days before the election probably mattered to nobody except me, but I found it extremely underhanded and gross. Here’s a party looking to reshape this country’s financial future in ways that, if you read their proposed platform, were as radical as they were poorly thought out. They decided to oppose Labor’s tax cuts and pledge to repeal them, which Treasurer Jim Chalmers on election night called “One of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen” in electoral politics. They also, for a party that relies on its strong economic management bona fides, managed to bungle their return to surplus, suggesting a path that was worse on the deficit than Labor’s.
It was also just a fundamentally unserious policy document. The return to surplus was largely predicated on enormous assumed savings from cutting the public service, which is directly at odds with the ‘revised’ position that the LNP had put forward the week earlier that the plan was ‘never’ to cut 41,000 public service sector jobs (some of which don’t even exist yet – huh?), but simply to rely on a hiring freeze and natural attrition to thin the herd. $1.7 billion of savings in year one is a lot of public servants choosing to resign completely voluntarily.
Ignoring, of course, that in the final year of the Morrison government alone, the LNP spent $21 billion on external consultants, to artificially paper over the freeze that they had on hiring in the public sector. Needless to say, all the work that the public sector is doing wouldn’t dematerialise; it would, presumably, be outsourced again to the big four consulting firms, who would charge you a 5x multiple to complete the work. Thus, not actually saving any money in reality, but in all likelihood costing even more. They revealed themselves as cynical, unserious liars – and I’m glad I’m not the only one who noticed.
External Factors
Several external structural factors also played against the coalition this election cycle.
Millennials are now the largest voting cohort against a waning Boomer power base, giving us a larger say in who represents us on a Federal level. Given that the largest portion of LNP voters are 65+ and (I don’t mean to upset any Boomers in my readership here) are going to be dropping like incredibly wealthy flies over the next 15 years, the Coalition is faced with an increasingly bad set of national circumstances, if they’re looking to take back government.
Progressives are also nominally more popular with Millennials, which may not surprise you – who amongst us didn’t find themselves in a Che Guevara t-shirt in their youth before googling who Che Guevara actually was. What might surprise you, however, is that Millennials are also, notably, a generation that’s not getting more conservative as we age – bucking the usual trend of rightward drift, providing some structural difficulties for the LNP to overcome.
These factors don’t mean that the LNP can’t ever win again, by any means – all one ever needs in opposition is a bad recession or a juicy sex scandal (cough, Peggy Sue), and any sin can be electorally forgiven. What it does mean is that if the Liberals want to be in serious contention for national two-party politics they need to get their shit together and start speaking to the issues that their voters are interested in.
Voters are concerned about the cost of living, but not to the exclusion of everything else. Voters know that a temporary Cost of Living Tax Offset (or the CLiTO as I’ll sadly never get to call it) against a backdrop of permanently slashed government services, inaction on climate change and giveaways to big business and the military isn’t, in fact, going to make their lives better, and they’re not going to vote for it.
So while Labour ran a solid campaign, much of their success can be attributed to the missteps of Peter Dutton, the Coalition’s weak policy platform and structural demographic factors. Labor has won a substantial victory this week, no doubt, but given the major risks confronting the global economy for the next three years, they may grow to wish they hadn’t.