For someone who would seem a snug fit for the unspectacular style of political leadership, Anthony Albanese has certainly left his mark on Australian political history in a short space of time: first federal government to win an opposition seat at a by-election for more than a century; first elected government to secure a positive swing when seeking re-election (the trifecta, in fact, embracing primary vote, two-party-preferred vote, and seats); first government since 1966 not to lose a seat at an election. He even established a new measure of achievement, overseeing the first loss of their own seat by a federal opposition leader.
But hang on, hadn’t Albo lost a constitutional referendum back in 2023? The alleged link between the Voice referendum’s failure and likely voting patterns at the ensuing federal election was always less than convincing. As Peter Brent has routinely pointed out in these pages, prime ministers who’ve lost referendums have remained electorally undamaged by the experience. One doubts if Bob Menzies’s loss of the 1951 Communist Party dissolution referendum gave him too many sleepless nights: he did go on to win the following five elections.
This flawed reasoning was even less excusable in 2025 because we’d been there before in quite recent times. Following the successful 2017 marriage-equality plebiscite, a number of conservative commentators predicted imminent electoral danger for several Labor MPs (notably in western Sydney) whose constituents had, in substantial numbers, followed their conservative religious dispositions and returned a No vote. Subsequent election results suggested this alleged vulnerability had been wishful thinking disguised as analysis, and the same can be said for the idea of a predictive relationship between voting in a constitutional referendum and an election. The notion should not rear its head again.
An enduring theme in Australian elections is the interplay between federal and state politics. In the case of the recent election, it was widely suggested that Victoria’s long-term Labor government (now led by Jacinta Allan) was so unpopular that it was likely to deflate the vote for federal Labor and probably cost it seats.
A little history. In the 1990 federal election, Victorian voters took out their anger at the moribund state Labor government with a swing of around 5 per cent and a loss of ten seats, a result that clearly presaged the end of that state government in 1992. No such dramatic movement was apparent in 2025: the modest swing to federal Labor in Victoria (around 1.2 per cent) was the smallest of any state but still resulted in a very respectable two-party-preferred vote of just over 56 per cent. Moreover, Labor’s small statewide swing disguised a bigger movement in the electorates that mattered, resulting in four extra seats (three from the Liberals, one from the Greens) in the Labor column.
Conservative optimists may have found consolation in that small Labor swing in Victoria, believing that the unpopular state government helped minimise damage to the Coalition. Even greater encouragement may have been found in the regional seat of Bendigo, where the Labor MP weathered a two-party swing of just under 10 per cent, this being the largest anti-Labor swing in a Labor-held seat in the nation. It happens that Bendigo’s electoral boundaries take in the state seat of Bendigo East, held by premier Jacinta Allan. Coincidence?
Still, the internal disarray within the Victorian Liberals is extreme, with a former parliamentary leader at risk of bankruptcy (and hence forfeiture of his seat) following a successful defamation suit by an upper house Liberal backbencher now seeking to recover her legal costs. It is at least arguable that the condition of the state Liberals helped ensure that federal Labor wasn’t punished for state Labor’s failings. Facing an election in November next year, Allan is entitled to live in hope that the Liberals will struggle with the “can’t govern yourselves, can’t govern the state” challenge.
In the Senate, Labor’s success in securing a third senator in each of South Australia and Victoria delivered a bare majority (thirty-nine) for the combined Labor/Greens numbers in the chamber. Optimism that Labor could win a third Senate position in New South Wales and Western Australia proved unfounded, bested by One Nation in each case.
While the history varies from state to state, in a normal half-Senate election the third spot on a major-party ticket has mostly proved a difficult one, and is consequently often allocated to a younger party member running for the experience rather than a candidate with genuine prospects. Of course, surprise winners can emerge, one such example being Fatima Payman, elected from number three on the Labor ticket in Western Australia in 2022, who resigned from the party (but not the Senate) two years later over policy differences about the war in Gaza. It is arguable that had the third spot on the WA Labor ticket been seen as winnable, Payman would not have been preselected.
In 2025, Labor managed to win a third position in South Australia, electing twenty-one-year-old Charlotte Walker. No offence is intended in suggesting that had the position been seen as winnable, a different candidate might well have been selected. For Labor’s sake, it is to be hoped that Walker subscribes to a more conventional Labor view of parliamentary solidarity than did Payman.
The third spot also provided the background for an interesting result in Victoria. Following an electoral redistribution, the Labor member for the (previously blue-ribbon Liberal) seat of Higgins, Michelle Ananda-Rajah, found her short parliamentary career potentially cut short when the seat was abolished. With Labor travelling poorly in the polls at the time, her endorsement for number three on the party’s Senate ticket — a position from which it had last won in 2007 — must have seemed like a consolation prize with no real prospect of a win. But Labor’s better-than-expected performance in the state saw Ananda-Rajah elected to the last vacancy, allowing her to extend her parliamentary career by (at least) a further six years — certainly more job security than three years in a marginal House seat.
Before this election, the last government be re-elected without losing a single seat was Harold Holt’s in 1966. As with the Liberals today, Labor was written off after that debacle as a lost cause, out of touch with contemporary society and by no means guaranteed a future. Under Gough Whitlam’s leadership, however, it came close in 1969 and won office in 1972.
Predictions of long-term government for Labor and long-term pain for the Coalition may well prove accurate this time round (and no equivalent of Whitlam can be seen in the Liberal ranks) but the actors in the political drama can’t always control the plot. Longevity is also affected by that key variable famously identified by British prime minister Harold Macmillan when asked by a journalist to name the greatest challenge for a statesman or leader: “Events, dear boy, events.” •
