A victory beyond expectation: Labor’s biggest triumph

A Labor government may never have another moment quite like this and to waste it out of fear would be a greater failure than any misstep made in pursuit of bold, progressive change.

The federal election held last Saturday has produced one of the most resounding and historic victories for the Labor Party in modern political history. Although most observers anticipated a Labor win – especially given the Liberal Party’s chaotic campaign – almost no one foresaw the magnitude of the result that unfolded on the night. What began as a conventional re-election bid for a first-term government has ended as a political landslide that reshaped the electoral map, defied almost a century of precedents, and delivered a mandate to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese that few leaders have ever enjoyed.

Vote counting is still underway, but the scale of Labor’s dominant victory is clear. Labor is on track to secure between 89 and 92 seats in the House of Representatives, while the Coalition has collapsed to around 40 seats, possibly going up to 42. On a two-party preferred basis, Labor achieved a swing of nearly 3 per cent – an extraordinary outcome for a government seeking re-election – and is currently hovering at around 55 per cent of the national vote. These are not the numbers of a government just holding on; these are the numbers of a government surging forward, expanding its reach, and consolidating its power in a way that has rarely been seen in Australian politics.

The most astonishing part of this result is that it flies in the face of many historical precedents: since 1931, every first-term federal government in Australia has experienced a swing against it at its first re-election attempt. It’s a quirk of Australian electoral behaviour: voters traditionally seem to pull governments back just a little, cutting their majority, delivering a reminder that power is still conditional according to the backing of the electorate. First-term governments have still retained office, but they don’t grow their majorities. That unwritten rule was shattered on Saturday night.

Albanese’s Labor government has not only retained power, it has gained seats—potentially up to 14 seats – and has strengthened its electoral position in a way that suggests a deeper, more structural shift in the political landscape. The swing to Labor has been concentrated in metropolitan areas, consolidating its hold over inner-city electorates and making significant inroads into outer-suburban and even some regional seats. The electoral map is Labor red across urban Australia, leaving the Coalition increasingly isolated in rural strongholds and shrinking outer suburban enclaves.

It wasn’t meant to be like this: the 2025 campaign was widely derided as dull, uninspiring, and largely forgettable. Commentators complained about a lack of vision, few major policy announcements, and a campaign that lacked the energy or drama of past elections. But the election night has proven to be anything but dull. Instead, what has emerged is one of the most fascinating election outcomes in the nation’s history.

This victory isn’t just significant because of the size of Labor’s majority; it has also transformed the prime minister’s political standing. Albanese enters his second term not as a caretaker of a fragile government with a slim three-seat majority, but as the leader of a party that has been emphatically endorsed by the electorate. For a politician often characterised as cautious, managerial, or too focused on incrementalism, this landslide win could mark the beginning of a new phase – one in which Albanese governs with greater confidence, broader ambition, and an unassailable parliamentary advantage. The conditions are now in place for bold policy moves, institutional reforms, and long-term planning that rarely accompany second terms in office.

Redrawing the nation and the electoral map

Across the nation, the 2025 federal election transformed the political map in a way few elections have done before. From Perth and Adelaide to Melbourne, Sydney and Hobart, the inner and middle-ring suburbs have delivered comprehensive victories to the Labor Party. Even Brisbane – long considered a graveyard for federal Labor, and Queensland more broadly, which has remained stubbornly conservative for nearly three decades – has returned Labor members in numbers not seen since the early 1990s. It’s a political realignment on an unprecedented scale.

The conventional wisdom – pushed forward by Liberal strategists and sections of the media – has tried to frame this as a lucky fluke, the product of scare campaigns, misinformation, and voter manipulation. That narrative might help the Coalition explain its own collapse to itself, but it does not hold any water: this was no accident or a lucky win. If anything, it was the Coalition that relied on luck in previous cycles – scraping through with minority or wafer-thin majorities in 2016 and 2019 despite widespread discontent. But when one party wins close to 60 per cent of all seats in the House of Representatives – as Labor has done – and its main rival struggles to reach 25 per cent, luck has very little to do with it.

This was the outcome of a disciplined, expansive, and forward-looking Labor campaign, rooted in a solid record of governance and an electorate that broadly approved of its direction. Albanese’s government did not merely avoid the pitfalls of incumbency; it was rewarded for steady economic management, a restrained and diplomatic foreign policy, and efforts to address core cost-of-living pressures – however incremental those efforts might have been. More importantly, voters were not just asked to look backward at performance; they were also presented with a clear projection of what Labor intended to do in the next three years, and that vision resonated with the electorate – especially against the vacuous offerings proposed by the Coalition.

Elections are always relative contests but even if the Liberal Party had run a disciplined, competent, and moderate campaign, they still would have faced an uphill battle. But the campaign they did run – a chaotic mess of misinformation, culture war distractions, and rhetorical extremism – only served to show how far removed they’ve become from the mainstream concerns of voters. Blaming Labor for running an effective campaign, or for exploiting Liberal weaknesses, misses the point entirely. The Coalition wasn’t beaten by smoke-and-mirror tricks and gimmicks – it was beaten by its own inability to present a coherent, constructive alternative.

In terms of parliamentary numbers, it’s the most successful result for the Labor Party since John Curtin’s victory in 1943 during World War II. It’s better than any of Bob Hawke’s record-breaking wins, better than Gough Whitlam’s breakthrough win in 1972, and better than Kevin Rudd’s majority in 2007. Albanese has achieved something very remarkable – a governing majority that reflects the broad support of metropolitan Australia, backed by momentum in key regional centres, and a map that has decisively shifted away from the old assumptions of safe seats and immovable voting blocs.

How victory could reshape Albanese’s prime ministership

Election victories don’t just change the makeup of parliament – they change the people who lead them. Political leaders inevitably evolve through each stage of their careers: entering parliament, rising to the leadership, winning office, and surviving their first term. But winning a second term – particularly one as commanding as this – has a transformative power of its own. Albanese, who once styled himself as a cautious and steady hand, now enters his second term with a scale of authority unmatched by any Labor leader since the Curtin era. That kind of victory doesn’t just entrench a government – it redefines a leader.

Albanese has always been a politician shaped by incrementalism and pragmatism, promising to do politics “differently” through deliberation, steadiness, and moderation. During his first term, he made a virtue of caution, often frustrating those on the progressive side of politics who hoped for a bolder reform agenda. That strategy worked electorally – he’s now won two federal elections – but it also creates a dilemma: what’s next? In the days following this stunning win, Albanese reaffirmed that his government would stick to the policies it took to the election. On the surface, this sounds responsible and honest. But politically, it invites a challenge: can such a limited agenda really fill out the next three years of government?

Labor’s 2025 platform – focused on affordable housing, reforming HECS debts, improving Medicare access, boosting early childhood education, and delivering modest tax changes – could conceivably be legislated and implemented within the first half of the parliamentary term, of not before. That leaves a vacuum unless there is a deeper, more ambitious program waiting behind it. With the scale of Labor’s majority and the political capital that comes with it, this is not the time to just manage the existing structures and totter along. This is the moment when a leader with vision can begin to reshape the country in lasting ways.

There is now an expectation – not just from the Labor base, but from the broader electorate – that this government will need to do more than cautiously govern. It has to lead and a second term gives Albanese more than just time. It gives him the freedom to set a direction, to confront entrenched problems, and to leave a legacy that reaches beyond infrastructure rollouts and tweaks to social policy. If the first term was about demonstrating competence and building trust, the second must be about purpose.

It’s also a chance for political growth. During his first term, Albanese’s government expended an extraordinary amount of political capital on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum – an initiative that was great in intent but flawed in its execution. The campaign was mismanaged, poorly communicated, and ultimately divisive from other players who had ulterior motivations. While the referendum failed, and the government faced criticism for its handling of the issue, the political damage didn’t linger into the 2025 election. If anything, the electorate chose to separate that failure from the broader performance of the government.

This new parliamentary term offers a chance to learn from that mistake: to manage difficult reforms with better political timing, broader consultation, and sharper strategic thinking. Albanese now leads a more experienced, more electorally secure government that has had time to understand the functions and processes of power. The question is whether he will seize this moment to do more than he promised – or stick to a small-target mindset that, while effective electorally, might prove limiting for transformative governance.

Why Labor must use its mandate while it can

The Albanese government now finds itself in the most politically advantageous position a federal Labor administration has ever found itself in. It holds a commanding majority in the House of Representatives, with a buffer of 10 to 15 seats in its own right – and even more significantly, a vast gap of nearly 50 seats between itself and the remnants of the Liberal–National Coalition, a lead which is almost unheard of in Australian federal politics. On top of that, the Labor Party benefits from a favourable Senate crossbench, where the support of the Australian Greens will be enough to pass legislation. It’s the perfect conditions for an ambitious government that can act in the national interest.

Not only is Labor strong – the opposition is extraordinarily weak. The Liberal Party, reeling from one of its worst defeats in history, has been reduced to a dysfunctional shell of its former self, with little idea of its identity, purpose, or future direction. Right-wing politics in Australia has been decimated, losing not only its electoral grip but a cohesive narrative for its own existence. And while the crossbench has shrunk somewhat – with minor losses among community independents and the Greens – the bulk of the non-government seats remain fractured and ideologically incompatible with a unified conservative comeback.

It’s precisely this environment that makes the post-election calls for caution and restraint so tempting but, conversely, so risky. There are already voices warning against the “overreach” of John Howard’s 2004 victory and his fateful plunge into WorkChoices and other neoliberal pet projects that ultimately triggered his defeat in 2007. But this historical comparison overlooks the nature of the policies being proposed.

WorkChoices was an ideological assault on labour rights, introduced to satisfy the demands of the business community rather than the needs of ordinary Australians. It was deeply unpopular because it directly undermined job security, wages, and workplace protections. The electorate didn’t reject Howard in 2007 because he was too ambitious – they rejected him because his ambition served the few at the expense of the many.

By contrast, many of the potential reforms now available to the Labor government are not only popular – they’re long overdue. Curbing negative gearing, reforming capital gains tax concessions, rationalising the broader tax system, rethinking higher education funding, and introducing fairer arrangements for mining royalties – these are not fringe ideas. They speak directly to public concerns about housing affordability, economic fairness, and social equity. These reforms, if introduced carefully and strategically, would not represent political overreach – they would represent responsible a government responding to deeply entrenched national problems that have kicked down the road by successive administrations.

Certainly, these policies weren’t explicitly taken to the 2025 election. And yes, governments should be cautious about imposing surprise reforms that they weren’t specifically given a mandate. But there is more than one way to build consent. This Labor government has the time, the numbers, and the trust to begin a process of political persuasion – of educating the public, testing proposals, holding inquiries, consulting widely, and building momentum toward long-needed structural reform. There’s no need to jam through a radical agenda overnight but there is every reason to get started right now.

Opportunities like this are rare in politics. Power can fritter away, the political landscape does change, and the opposition will eventually regroup. The best time to deliver meaningful reform is not when your back is against the wall, but when the path ahead is wide open and clear. A Labor government may never have another moment quite like this and to waste it out of fear would be a greater failure than any misstep made in pursuit of bold, progressive change. Now is the time to govern not just wisely – but with courage.