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Good news from down under (Updated with link to live results) [1]

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Date: 2025-05-03

With everything going on right now, I wouldn’t blame you for not noticing there’s a federal election going on in Australia, but there is, and it’s an important one.

On the political right (but left in the picture above) is Peter Dutton, leader of Australia’s Liberal Party — our conservatives.

On the political slightly left but really pretty centrist (and right in the picture above, thank you aussielivinginbritain for noticing the typo) is Anthony Albanese, leader of Australia’s Labor Party.

The correlation between their American equivalents is not perfect, but broadly the liberals are the ‘who gives a stuff about the environment’ party who whine about wokeism and love billionaires while Labor are the party of the unions and somewhat lukewarm liberals who could do more but are more or less moving in the right direction.

(‘Broadly’ is doing a lot of work in that sentence, of course it’s much more complex than that).

After a historic drubbing in 2022 (after a long run in power), helped along by years of dysfunctional infighting, leader swapping, and their leader at the time (the benighted Scott Morrison) thinking he had a mandate to make Australia safe for the religious far right, the lesson the liberals took from that loss was that they hadn’t gone right enough, and that poisoning Australian politics with trump style culture wars was the way to win.

Reader, it was not.

Their current (but probably not for much longer) leader, Peter Dutton, former cop, former property tycoon (small t tycoon) and longstanding mate of billionaire Gina Rinehart (Australia’s richest person) ran a campaign that included transphobia, a love affair with nuclear power (steering Australia from Labor’s efforts towards green energy), opposition to work from home arrangements that benefit working mothers (he had to drop that one fast, there was such an outcry) and a lot of ranting about ‘government efficiency.’

www.abc.net.au/…

www.abc.net.au/…

www.crikey.com.au/…

www.news.com.au/…

(Side note on Gina Rinehart: She’s worth 29 billion dollars and once said Australian workers should accept a 2 dollar a day wage to be competitive with Africa. That’s pretty much all you need to know about her)

An important point of this election has been the deliberate adoption, by Dutton and other members of the Liberal party, of trump style symbology and phraseology, from ‘Make Australia Great Again’, to deliberately aping trump’s position on trans individuals and slashing government services.

(It’s worth noting, too, that Australian mainstream media is heavily dominated by Murdoch media owned outlets that favor the Liberals just as much as Fox favors republicans).

In the run up to the election the polls consistently showed a slight tilt towards labor, but so slight that it could easily go either way, with the increasing popularity of independent candidates being a definite wildcard. The smart money was betting that Labor would have to form an alliance with the Greens (Australia’s third largest ‘real’ political party, environmental and left wing), which would be no bad thing.

Well the results are mostly in, and the liberals have taken an absolute shellacking, while Labor seem to have been given a mandate by the Australian people.* Dutton has even lost his own seat — liberal party leaders have sometimes lost their seats when the government they lead lost an election, but this is the first time in Australia’s history that a liberal leader has lost their own seat while challenging the incumbent labor government. This is probably not the political legacy Dutton wanted to leave. It’s hard not to read this as a firm rejection by Australians of the Liberal Party’s increasing lean to the far right.

One last note: When the polls opened, Dutton said this election was a referendum on the Albanese government. Yup.

*It’s going to be interesting to see how many seats the Greens get this time around.

Update:

I’ve added a link to the ABC’s (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) live results, which is regularly updated:

www.abc.net.au/…

And a big shout out to Antony Green, who has been ABC’s brilliantly insightful and objective analyst covering federal elections for 36 years and retires tonight.

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