The 2025 Australian Federal Election will go down as a historic election for the Australian Labor Party as they became the first ever incumbent government in their first term to increase their vote and seat count.
While the ALP achieved a 2PP primary vote share increase, the election was won by a complete collapse for the Liberal-National Coalition losing 4PP in voter share—their record lowest ever primary vote.
However, the results mask several narratives from the campaign and the election that demonstrate how on the nose politicians are.
Normally, there are only a couple of key narratives that come out of a Federal Election. This time, there was such a realignment in the political landscape, along with strong repudiations of particular narratives from the voting public, the 2025 Australian Federal Election appears to be more of a protest vote to the entire political system than one may think.
With that, let’s look through those narratives and see what lessons need to be learned.
- The Liberal-National Coalition ran their worst ever campaign in history
The Liberal-National Coalition, under Peter Dutton, never put forward a case for themselves to be considered as alternative government. Off the back of bad polling from Freshwater Research, the campaign that they ran was devoid of any meaningful philosophical standing for the election. This election should put their recent trend around embracing Big Government Conservatism to bed, as Australia has fundamentally rejected the concept in its entirety. Until the Liberal-National Coalition moves back to embracing the balance between Conservatism and Classical Liberalism, they will never win another Federal Election. Peter Dutton was always unelectable, and the Right of the Liberal Party needs to accept this. Dutton losing his own seat was the salt in the wound for the Right of the Liberal Party.
- Anthony Albanese is the luckiest Prime Minister in History
While the ALP will be crowing loudly about their gain in seats, this masks the problem that the ALP still has, being that they are still in the midst of an identity crisis. Anthony Albanese has won two elections off the back of horrendous campaigns from the Liberal-National Coalition—Scott Morrison’s consistent blunders in 2022, followed up by Peter Dutton’s even more inept performance in 2025. Remember that it was only 18 months ago that Albanese lost the Voice to Parliament Referendum and had been polling to be dragged down to a hung parliament until the election campaign formally started. From that point on, Albanese failed to really present a viable vision for the country and displayed the same directionless leadership that typified his first tenure as prime minister. The ALP won with their second worst primary vote in their history, which says a lot about how fractured the Australian political system is.
- The Australian Greens are nothing but a party of protest
Sensing weakness from the Labor Party on their left, the Australian Greens attempted to squeeze the ALP, especially on Gaza and the attempts to negotiate a position with Trump. On top of that, the Greens tried to demonstrate a populist-left agenda around breaking down the housing market and ended up demonstrating to the public that the only thing they know how to do is make more noise and hot air than a 1971 Valiant Charger with a broken muffler. The Greens lost all but one of their seats in the House of Representatives, with Adam Bandt losing his seat that he had won back in 2010. With a new leadership team coming in, coupled with a refocus back to the Senate, the Australian Greens need to accept that, unless they can moderate their views on certain issues, and expand their reach beyond the inner-city seats and the “Hippy Enclaves”, they will never be treated with the respect that they think they deserve.
- Money can’t buy you votes anymore
Australians have wised up to the cynical attempts of political campaigning and have produced a big middle finger to campaigns that spent money on what would amount to political spam. More emails, SMS, and social media money was spent than any other campaign in history and the evasiveness of the campaigning began to wear thin on constituents very quickly. All political parties were guilty of this in some degree, but the two organisations that were the worst in their complete lack of regard for the privacy were the Trumpet of Patriots (who had broken their own record for campaign spending without gaining a single seat), and Climate 200, who have demonstrated that they display the same level of cynicism to politics as Clive Palmer.
- The Civil War between Climate 200 and “Community Independents”
The 2019 Australian Federal Election was the first time that Climate 200 and the Community Independents movement came together to make moves against the establishment. However, the 2025 Federal Election has seen Climate 200 formally turn into a pseudo-political movement. Although they had expected to gain more seats in the coming years, the 2025 election saw the independent’s success backpedal.
- Trump doesn’t have the positive impact that Big Government Conservatives thinks he has
This is the second national election of a country in the G20 to occur since Donald Trump announced his tariffs earlier in the year, with Canada having their general election not long before Australia. The theme and the end result ended up being almost exactly the same: the Centre-Left Party in turmoil prior to the announcement of the tariffs, rallying when the tariffs ended up producing chaos and managing to present themselves as a relatively stable option for government, while the leader of the Centre-Right Party not only loses the election, but also loses their seat. The Trump tariffs, along with the demeanour of Trump and his closest advisors, have done nothing but cause chaos on a global scale and the net impact from all of this is that the people end up voting for the party that can give them the most stability. It was the same thing during the two world wars. It was the same thing during the Oil Crisis in the 70s and it was the same thing following 9/11. Labor managed to demonstrate that, despite their inability to present a direction for the country, they could be, at least, a stable government. The Liberal-National Coalition tried to hitch themselves as Trump-Lite, and it failed miserably.
So, where do we stand on the election results? There are two seats that are left to be counted:
- Bradfield, NSW—This is now the final remaining story of the election, and it sits on the doorstep of a lot of readers of this paper. Under AEC regulations, any election result declared with a margin of less than 100 votes triggers a full, automatic recount. Regardless of how the recount goes, this could end up in the Court of Disputed Returns. Could Bradfield end up becoming the second seat ever in Australian Election History to be overturned on a recount (the first being McEwen back in 2007)?
- Calwell, VIC—Located in the North-West of Melbourne and covering the likes of Broadmeadows, Meadow Heights, Craigieburn and Mickelham (very close to Melbourne Airport), this seat ended up with 13 seats, the most of any seat in this election, and the dilution of primary votes has made it impossible to come to a quick 2CP result. As such, the AEC is doing a full Preference Count to ascertain the final result. The current 4CP standing reads:
- Abdo (ALP) – 36.6%
- Moore (IND) – 25.6%
- Ghani (LIB) – 21.2%
- Garcha (GRN) – 16.7%
In the eyes of this analyst, the Australian public’s disillusionment of the political class has sunk to new lows, with my prediction that the primary vote share between the two major parties dropping below 2/3 coming true. Candidates of all walks of life, regardless of their allegiances, have now identified that the only way that they can win an election is to campaign on Chaos vs Anti-Chaos, confirming that even political candidates have become cynical of the greater voting population. Unfortunately, this is only going to make the situation worse for everyone involved, as it is now resulting in significant disparity between the voting intention, and the end result. This could shape the next two federal elections, as candidates start to ramp up the level of chaos that they can cause, in order to further what little of their own agenda that the voting public can stomach.
