The Australian Labor Party has won a landslide election victory. The opposition Coalition has slumped to the lowest proportion of seats it’s ever held since the launch of the Liberal Party. In a country where voting is compulsory, the swing to Labor was strongest in affluent electorates, once the heartland of conservative politics. This is indicative of just how far to the right the Labor Party has moved. In the outer suburbs, Sydney’s west, Melbourne’s north, more generally in lower-income areas, Labor’s vote was stagnant or went backwards. This demonstrates the massive potential for a new workers’ party based on socialist ideas.
Votes are still being counted but as things stand Labor looks set to take at least 91 of the 150 lower house seats. The Coalition seat count stands at 40, while 10 seats have been won by independents and minor parties. Nine seats remain in doubt with contests dependent on the complex flow of preferences under Australia’s preferential voting system.
Liberal leader Peter Dutton lost his seat in a wipeout for the Coalition. The scramble is now on for who will assume the poisoned chalice of leadership of this party in terminal decline. To the left, it is losing votes to the Teals, to Labor, and to the Greens. The Sky after dark Murdoch commentariat meanwhile urge them to double down and drift further into the embrace of the right wing populism that has seen their vote evaporate.
The fawning Labor friendly press are waxing lyrical of Labour leader, Anthony Albanese’s new found authority in the party following Labor’s victory. However, despite the national swing of 2.1% to Labor, this election does not reverse the long term trend of declining support for the major parties. Rather, the support for Labor was a rejection of the Trump-lite right wing populism clumsily attempted by the Dutton-led Coalition. As seen in the recent Canadian election, the global turmoil sparked by the Trump administration saw a stampede of voters away from parties attempting to import US style populism.
Analysis of the areas where Labor made gains in its primary votes shows that Labor’s strongest gains were in affluent, traditionally conservative leaning, areas. The largest swing of 13.5% to Labor was in Bennelong. Previously this was Liberal Prime Minister John Howard’s north shore Sydney seat, until he was incongruously booted out of parliament at the 2007 Federal Election.
A number of previous blue-ribbon Liberal seats were retained by the Teal Independents, who present themselves as economically conservative and socially liberal. The rise of the Teals represents the rejection of the Liberal party by the affluent middle classes. They were repulsed by the petty identity politics of that party, keen for action on issues such as climate change, and not able to bring themselves to support the Labor Party.
On the other side of the equation, in lower income electorates, there was no swing to Labor. In a raft of seats in Sydney’s west and Melbourne’s north and west, the Labor vote was stagnant or went backwards. These were the seats targeted, unsuccessfully, by the Coalition. Rather, voters there looked for alternatives in the Greens, independents, or minor right-wing parties. The absence of any left-wing poll of attraction has left working class voters without any natural home. This is the vacuum into which Donald Trump stepped in the US and demonstrates the danger presented by an absence of leadership on the left.
Greens decimated
The Greens were decimated at this election, returning to their position as the balance of power party in the senate. The party held four lower house seats heading into the polls and is yet to regain a single seat. Leader Adam Bandt lost his Melbourne seat and of the three Brisbane seats previously held two have been lost, while the third, Ryan, is yet to be called. Although based on current reporting, it looks as though MP Elizabeth Watson-Brown will retain the seat on preferences. The Greens strategy at this election was ‘lesser-evilism’ personified. Their central slogan being “Keep Dutton Out!”. This result for the greens demonstrates the fallacy of so-called pragmatic lesser-evil politics. Why vote Green if they will end up compromising and passing Labor’s agenda anyway?
Much discussed has been the decades long trend of falling support for the two major parties. In 1990, 91% of people voted for either Labor or the Coalition. In 2022, that had dropped to 68%, or put another way, 32% of people voted for someone other than the major parties. In the 2025 Federal Election, despite the minor swing back to labor, the major party vote share has continued its decline to 67%.
This decline in support has coincided with a narrowing of the platform of the two major parties. Elections in Australia are increasingly fought over a small number of minor policy differences. Reporting tends to focus on the personality of the leaders and minor day to day events (e.g. Albanese “fell off a stage” or Dutton “won’t help his kid buy a house”).
This is the logic of a capitalist system where both parties fundamentally support the status quo and have no vision for a better society. Campaign strategists look to the areas each party is seen to hold a natural advantage and neuter any attack. Labour launches an $8.5 billion medicare policy and the Coalition matches it within a single news cycle. Likewise, when the Coalition signed the AUKUS deal Labor committed to it before anyone could say “national security”.
Labor and its supporters attribute their success to an effective campaign. The campaign was effective in undermining the Greens and saw attacks on the Liberals over their nuclear policy. This meant a policy to keep using coal and gas for as long as possible. Labour also whipped up scare campaigns over Medicare and other Liberal cuts.
The Australian Labor Party has reached the peak of an identity crisis that started in the 80’s under the leadership of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. The Hawke and Keating governments introduced the neo-liberal agenda adopted by Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US. Those reforms, importantly the introduction of the Accord between government, business, and the unions, ushered in a period of declining working class power. This has resulted in productivity gains going to the rich while working class living standards decline. Labor views the Hawke-Keating years as some of their most successful, while the reforms introduced in that period go against the very principles that the Labor Party was founded on.
For socialists – where to from here?
The question for socialists, trade unionists, and activists, is where to from here? The Labor government is no friend of working people. The cost of living crisis has hit working class people hard. Living standards have gone backwards by 14 years due to inflation being consistently higher than wage rises, including under the Albanese Government. There are crises in housing, education, healthcare, aged care, and childcare. Labor has done nothing of substance to address climate change. The anti-worker industrial relations system, implemented in the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years, remains in place. And the dangerous trend of increasingly repressive legislation that criminalises protest remains.
The only answer is for trade unions to break with Labor and start the task of building a new party based on socialist ideas. Socialists and activists must look for opportunities to stand left-wing socialist candidates as an alternative poll of attraction for workers. A socialist party could put forward ideas to change our society so that the wealth created by working people is directed to benefit all, not the billionaires.
A basic programme for a new workers party would start with an immediate raise in minimum wages on all awards. All anti-union legislation must immediately be scrapped, including limits on the right to strike. Likewise, all repressive anti-protest laws must be repealed. Massive investment in good quality housing is required, including a massive expansion in the provision of public housing and rent-controls on the private market. Funding for Medicare must be expanded with dental brought into the public system. The aged-care system should be brought into public-ownership with workers paid properly and standards introduced to ensure accountability and quality of care. The child-care system should be likewise brought into the public realm and away from the profiteers in the private market to ensure quality of education and decent rates of pay. There should also be urgent action on climate change to transition to renewable energy and fund investment in industry to develop green alternatives to fossil fuel reliant processes.
All this could be funded by bringing the largest companies into public ownership and using the obscene wealth generated, for the benefit of all. These are companies such as the Commonwealth Bank, BHP, Westfarmers, Atlassian, Transurban, Woolworths, Woodside, and QBE. Just the top 10 companies in Australia are worth over $1.2 trillion. Imagine the better world we could build with that; Labor surely can’t.