Back to the 1940s

Where to start? For the second time running Australia has produced a really remarkable election result, so there’s a lot to cover. Today I’m going to look at things mostly from the government’s point of view; in subsequent posts we’ll turn to the Coalition and then the Greens and others.

Let’s start by understanding the numbers – the point at which so much election commentary comes to grief. Counting is still continuing and a large number of seats are still undecided (check out Kevin Bonham for detail on the late counting), but the general outlines are so stark that the fine detail doesn’t really matter.

Labor is currently sitting on a primary vote of 34.8% (up 2.2% on 2022), as against 32.0% for the Coalition and 33.2% for everyone else. The ABC’s estimate of the two-party-preferred vote is 55.0% to Labor, a swing of 2.8%. The Labor vote (both primary and 2PP) will probably come down slightly as more postal votes are added, but we’ll take those as ballpark figures.

Making some educated guesses about the doubtful seats, Labor will finish with something like 93 seats out of 150 (up 15), with 43 Coalition (down 14; 29 Liberals and 14 Nationals) and 14 on the crossbench (down one; six Teals, two Greens and six others). As I said, don’t fixate on the detail; those numbers will probably move around a bit (Bonham is saying 91-45-14), but the basic picture won’t change.

So how does this compare with the precedents? My headline gives it away: Labor has not performed like this since the 1940s, well beyond the memory of most readers. In more modern times its best result was under Bob Hawke in 1983, when it won 75 seats out of 125 from 53.2% of the two-party-preferred vote. It will almost certainly beat both of those marks this time, although its primary vote is much lower: in 1983 it was 49.5%, and it had previously gone higher still, peaking at 50.0% in 1954 (an election that, remarkably enough, it lost).

But the difference between primary and two-party-preferred votes signals the other respect in which this is such a big win: Labor has gained a large majority despite the inflated numbers on the crossbench. In 1983 the Coalition won a respectable fifty seats, or 40% of the total; by 2022 that was already down below 38%, and it is now looking at around 29%. Previously the worst modern performance by an opposition was in 1975 when Labor fell to 36 seats out of 127, or 28.3% – the Coalition could fall below that.

In the 1940s, however, Labor won two successive landslides. In 1943, having come to office midway through the previous term, it all but annihilated its opponents, winning 49.9% of the primary vote and 49 of the then 74 seats. The Coalition reconstituted itself with the formation of the Liberal Party, but in 1946 it gained only half the required swing and picked up six seats. (There were no official two-party-preferred figures in those days, but estimates are 58.2% and 54.1%.)

Labor has now returned to those days of John Curtin and Ben Chifley. In one respect, though, it has surpassed them. No first-term government (not counting those who came in mid-term, as Curtin and later Malcolm Fraser did) has ever got a swing in its favor, since the two-party system was first established in 1910. Until now.

Fifteen years ago I published in Crikey the three things we thought we knew about the record of first-term governments: first-term elections swing against the government; despite that, first-term governments win re-election; and close elections go to the government. I suggested that the first rule might be broken that year, but it wasn’t, nor was it in 2016. But Anthony Albanese has hit it out of the park.

This takes us into uncharted territory. In other places we’ve seen governments get into trouble because they took themselves to have a sweeping mandate when only a minority had voted for them: Queensland in 2012 is a striking example. It’s fair to say that Albanese’s ambitions so far have been modest, and it would be reasonable for him to take the weekend’s result as a sign that he can afford to be a bit bolder. But it would be very dangerous to assume that the third of the electorate that voted for neither him nor his opponent is unequivocally on his side.

At the moment everything looks rosy for the government. Its opposition is in utter disarray (more about that tomorrow), and a raft of new Labor members now have the opportunity to entrench themselves. Even a crushing majority, which this one is, is no guarantee for the future, but it would take a catastrophic failure on Labor’s part for it not to be secure until 2031 at least.

The question now is how it will use that security. Hawke’s 1983 victory set Labor up for 13 years in office, in which time it fundamentally transformed Australia. Albanese seems an unlikely candidate for such radicalism, but stranger things have happened.