Re-Election Landslide:
The 2025 Australian Federal Election

Introduction

Australia held a federal election on 3 May 2025 for the entire House of Representatives, which has 150 seats, and for 40 of the 76 seats in the Senate. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese led the Australian Labor Party (which early on settled for the American spelling of its name) to an historic landslide re-election victory, having first been elected in 2022 (the Australian parliamentary term is only three years). Every Australian postwar government has won re-election at least once, so the government’s re-election is arguably not news in itself.

However, the norm had always been re-election but with a swing against the government and thus a smaller majority, or in 2010 being reduced from a majority to a minority. And a minority was certainly a possibility this time but, in the end, quite the opposite happened: Labor not only gained seats – including that of Leader of the Opposition Peter Dutton – but also won a record number of 94, a gain of 17 seats. Nor did Labor lose a single seat it had won in 2022, though it was expected to do so at least in Victoria where the state Labor government was unpopular.

Australia’s Political Parties

Australia essentially has a binary pattern of partisan competition, with a moderate number of parties in its House of Representatives (its lower house). On the centre-left, the Australian Labor Party (ALP) is the country’s oldest continuous party, forming in 1901 along with the country, and based on labour parties in the various colonies at the time. Also on the left are the Australian Greens, formed as a national party in 1992 – though not winning a seat in the lower house until 2010.

The ALP’s historic centre-right opponent is an alliance of two parties called simply the Coalition. The larger of these two Coalition parties is the Liberal Party of Australia, created after World War II, and which is analogous to the Conservatives in Canada, not the Liberals. The other party is the National Party, originally called the Country Party (founded in 1922), and which is still largely rural and does not run in every state. Lastly, in Queensland these two parties formally merged into the Liberal National Party in 2008; likewise in the Northern Territory a single Country Liberal Party arose in the 1970s. That said, even when the Liberals and Nationals competed against each other (up through 1993), they did not split the right-of-centre vote to their detriment as Australia uses a preferential ballot (more on this below).

Postwar Australian politics can be divided into two eras. In the first era, during the Cold War, the conservative parties were clearly predominant, forming all governments from 1949 to 1972 and then again from 1975 to 1983. This era included 16 straight years with Liberal Robert Menzies as prime minister. In the mid-1950s, the anti-communist Catholic-based Democratic Labor Party (DLP), split off from the ALP. By directing its preferences (explained below) to Coalition candidates, the DLP helped them win seats, and kept the Coalition in power in the 1961 election, the closest in the 20^th century.

In the second era, starting in 1983, who forms government has been much more competitive with changes every decade. In part this was due to the charismatic national trade union leader Bob Hawke becoming a politician and then ALP leader. Also important was the rise of the Greens to become the main third force by the 2004 election, with Green preference votes going clearly to Labor. Labor formed governments from 1983 until 1996, then the Coalition was back in power until 2007 under Prime Minister John Howard, then Labor was back in power from 2007 to 2013, after which the Coalition governed until 2022.

The Australian House of Representatives

The electoral system for the Australian House of Representatives is single-member majority (alternative vote), introduced in late 1918 (as it was in British Columbia in the 1950s), to replace single-member plurality and ultimately to prevent a socialist party from winning due to centre-right vote splits. Historically, the non-socialist vote in Australia has usually been divided, initially between free traders and protectionists and mostly in an urban-rural sense. 

Whereas in Canada one needs only a plurality of the vote in a constituency, in Australia majority support is required. This is achieved by using the alternative vote, namely, a preferential ballot to determine the ultimate winner. Rather than just indicating one preferred choice, each voter ranks all the candidates numerically: 1, 2, 3, and so on. Failure to effectively rank all the candidates in Australia renders the ballot invalid. Then, a calculation is made of each candidate’s “first preferences” – their number of “1”s. If a candidate receives a majority, the counting stops in terms of determining the winner. However, if no candidate has a majority of first preferences, then the candidate with the least number of first preferences is dropped, and the second preferences of her or his votes are reallocated. If this redistribution does not push anyone over the 50 percent level, then the next least popular candidate is dropped, and so on, until someone reaches over 50 percent. As a non-proportional system, if a party cannot win any individual seats, it gets none regardless of its vote share.

In terms of votes, what matters in the overall outcome is not the first preferences (which are all that are indicated in Canada) but the final count. Because all candidates are ranked, one can look at the relative placement of the top two parties on all ballots – even ballots where neither is the first preference of the voter – to determine what is called the two-party preferred vote. The ALP wound up with over 55 percent of the two-party preferred vote and thus a lead on this of over ten percent, its best result since 1943. The two-party swing was thus to the ALP government, not away from the government as is the norm, and a swing of 3.15 percent at that. Reflecting the huge gap in two-party preferred vote, in terms of seats the 94 Labor won was more than double the 43 of the Coalition.

A single-member plurality system as in Canada would have seen the Coalition with some 13 more seats including that of Peter Dutton. Labor’s biggest seat gains were in Queensland, though by far the biggest two-party preferred vote swing to it was in Tasmania where the Coalition lost both its seats and was thus shut out. Coalition losses came from the Liberals, as was the case in 2022, with the Nationals essentially holding their rural seats over the past two elections. This divergence has put strains on the Coalition. Lastly, the “crossbench” (those between the government and the official opposition, as in the United Kingdom) consists of one Green, one each from two small parties, and ten independents. Most of these independents are “teals”, almost always professional women, opposed to Coalition policies on the environment and stressing integrity in politics and women’s safety and equality – but who are not economically left-wing. Holding affluent seats that would otherwise go Liberal, ultimately the teals help keep the Coalition out of power.

The Australian Senate

The Australian Senate is a key difference with Canada, as it is elected and powerful. Australia thus parallels the United States in having “strong bicameralism”. There are twelve senate seats per state regardless of population, with each senator serving a six-year term, and with staggered elections so that six senators in each state are elected every three years. The two territories have two senators each, elected for three-year terms. Crucially, since 1949, Australian senators have been elected via the single-transferable vote (STV) method of proportional representation with multi-member districts (entire states), wherein the voter ranks the candidates as in the lower house but where multiple candidates win (all those reaching a quota, with surplus votes reallocated).

As it is a system of proportional representation, it is next to impossible for one side to win a majority of available senate seats unless the results are extremely lopsided. Indeed, though the ALP gained three senators, they did not win a majority of the 40 senate seats available. And even if they had, these are combined with the ongoing senators elected in 2022, where Labor definitely did not win a majority of the senators elected then. Between proportional representation and staggered elections, it is extremely rare for either Labor or the Coalition to control a majority of Senate seats – the last time this occurred was 2004, and before that it was 1977. However, the 2025 Senate election still reflected a clear shift to the left, with as noted Labor gaining seats and the Greens holding the six seats (one in each state) they had won back in 2019. Consequently, the Greens will hold the balance of power, even with one Green senator defecting to the ALP post-election. This will make things easier for Labor, as in their first term they needed not just all the Greens but also three crossbench (independent) senators to pass legislation through the Senate.

The Election Campaign and Consequences

As they had only been in office for one-term, the ALP government had not accumulated much baggage, but it was dealing with economic challenges including no less than a dozen interest rate increases during the term (though the election campaign began with a rate cut). The main political setback in their first term was the defeat in 2023 of a constitutional referendum to create what would have been called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, a body that could make representations to the parliament and cabinet on related matters.

In 2025, Labor’s disciplined campaign stressed protecting Medicare and their pre-election budget cut of the lowest income tax rate from 16 percent to 14 percent, something which the Coalition opposed – allowing Albanese to take up the Coalition’s past mantra of “being the party of lower taxes”. Albanese campaigned smoothly and with increasing confidence, certainly better than in his first campaign in 2022. President Trump’s levelling of global tariffs also helped the incumbent government.

However, the bigger explanation for the ALP landslide arguably was the hard right, populist campaign of the Coalition. Peter Dutton spoke of copying the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency in the United States, and thus Labor mocked him as “DOGEy Dutton”. Dutton also ran a shaky, gaffe-filled campaign, with frequent backtracking on underdeveloped policy proposals. In addition, just before the election, Cyclone Alfred battered South East Queensland and the New South Wales North Coast (which delayed the election call). While many local politicians joined their communities in filling sandbags and battening down the hatches, Dutton instead attended a fundraiser at the Sydney harbourside mansion of a billionaire.

The 2025 election reduced the Coalition to a party more of older, white male voters, with less support in all other demographics – including immigrants who voted no on the Voice referendum.  Perhaps recognizing these trends, ten days after the election the Liberal Party, that is, its caucus from both houses narrowly elected Sussan Ley as its first female leader. She had been the deputy leader and was the candidate of moderates in the party. Ley’s takeaway from the election was that the Liberal Party had to reflect modern Australia and had to “meet the people where they are”, forming government “in a sensible centre”. Obviously, that had not been Dutton’s campaign. Moreover, in a clear initial blow to Ley, a week after her selection the National Party ended the Coalition, citing a lack of assurance that National policies “will be honoured in a future Coalition Agreement”. The Liberals ultimately accepted the Nationals’ somewhat watered-down policy demands, and the Coalition was formed for the new parliament after a week of upheaval. However, the willingness of many Nationals to oppose the Liberals remains, and without the spoils of government to smooth things over.

Lastly, on the other side of the spectrum the election was also a disaster for the Greens, at least in the lower house where rather than gaining seats from the record four they had going in – they were in competition for up to seven – they wound up losing all but one of their seats, as noted. The seat losses included that of their leader, Adam Bandt. The Greens positions and behaviour often alienated moderate voters; in particular, they were heavily criticized for their “extremist” pro-Palestinian stance on the war in Gaza.

Looking forward, a third term for Labor seems as certain as anything can be in politics given the scale of its victory, the fact that less than a quarter of its seats are deemed marginal, and the divided opposition including a large crossbench of independents. With the Coalition having only 43 seats, this is the first time in a long time that the Opposition has no realistic chance of winning the next election, as it would need to gain more than 30 seats in one go. If Ley makes the Coalition competitive and united, it could have a chance not in the next election but two elections ahead (presumably 2031). As of now, even that could prove to be too big an ‘if’.