Diary of an Election Victory: Labor’s Rise to Power
The book of action-packed political drama, starting off in early 2022 and going through the trials and tribulations of the election campaign, through to election night.
A big thank you to our Substack audience, thanks for your support – and all the best for Christmas and 2023 and beyond.
Big news! We have released out new book, Diary of an Election Victory: Labor’s rise to power, 302 pages of action-packed political drama, starting off in early 2022 and going through the trials and tribulations of the election campaign, through to election night. No need for a spoiler alert: we all know how this story ends.
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And an extra treat: we’ve published the introduction chapter below, just to get you in the mood.
Introduction: Election night, 2022
It’s 7pm on election night, and a sense of unease had set in among those who were hopeful of a change in the direction of Australia after nine years of Liberal–National Coalition governments. It had been a hard-fought six-week election campaign, and it appeared that enough material had been provided to the electorate during this time to show that the Morrison government was one of more incompetent administrations to occupy the halls of power in Canberra and was unfit for office. Scandals plagued the government for most of this parliamentary term and many promises that were announced were either poorly delivered or not delivered at all. The prime minister, Scott Morrison, had poor approval ratings and his challenger, Anthony Albanese, had run a reasonable campaign, after some earlier mistakes and stumbles.
Yet, the first hour after the polling booths closed in the eastern states suggested that Morrison was tracking towards a second unlikely and narrow election victory, and for the Labor Party, there were shades of the deep disappointments from the 2019 federal election loss that started to seep in.
The counting from the first dozen or so seats was starting to roll in from the Australian Electoral Commission and, momentarily, it appeared that Morrison was going to claim another “miracle” victory. Rationality, fed by nervousness and despair, tried to take over. Surely, the polls were different this time; after getting it so wrong in 2019, pollsters had improved their methodologies, their algorithms, their demographic analysis.
Surely, after all the poor performances and dereliction of duty over the past three years, the Australian electorate wasn’t going to re-elect the Morrison government? Morrison surreptitiously taking his family on holidays to Hawaii during the 2019/20 bushfires disaster, reluctantly returning to Australia, only to arrive on the south coast of New South Wales where he was abused by the public and few people wanted to shake his hand. The ignorance of women’s issues; the debauchery of Australia’s parliament house, where an alleged rape was committed in a minister’s office; sex workers brought into the infamous prayer room for the pleasure of Coalition members of parliament. Corruption: land purchased in western Sydney from a Liberal Party donor for $30 million, even though the land was valued at $3 million. The poor vaccination delivery, the ongoing and meaningless culture wars. Surely it was time for a change?
Election night was tense. The patchwork of results that were starting to stream in created confusing and contradicting trends and even the ABC’s psephologist and election night analyst, Antony Green, was struggling to deal with what the early results meant. Due to Australia’s different time zones, polling booths in Western Australia didn’t close until 8pm eastern standard time, and while a clearer picture was slowly emerging by that time, the votes were still coming at a slow pace and questions were being raised about which key events had influenced the vote.
How were the vocal anti-government and Trump-style protests in Victoria going to affect the vote in that state, despite the popularity of premier Daniel Andrews? The Western Australia election in 2021 wiped out the Liberal Party, reducing it to two seats in a parliament of 59. Would there be any residual electoral feelings applied to the federal sphere, over twelve months later? The Morrison government teamed up with Clive Palmer in the attempts to end Western Australian border closures between 2020–22. How would this affect the vote in Western Australia?
Despite the worry trends that appeared in the first hour after polling booths closed, election night ended well for Labor and Albanese. As the night progressed, it become more evident the Coalition would not be in a position to form government, and the trends throughout the evening suggested that it was only a question of whether Labor would win an outright majority—albeit a slim majority—or run a minority government with the support of an enlarged crossbench.
But by 10pm, it was over. The early results from Western Australia showed a major swing against the Coalition government and loss of many seats, confirming the patchwork of results from New South Wales and Victoria and guaranteed an election victory for the Labor Party. Federal elections are usually decided by the time polling booths close in Western Australia—two hours behind the eastern states—but these results from the west validated Labor’s decision to launch its campaign in Perth and, for a change, Western Australia was the state that confirmed the election result.
The Morrison years had ended ignominiously. While there was some hope earlier in the evening, the result confirmed what opinion polls had been suggesting for some time: a narrow Labor victory, more independents in parliament, and a loss of many seats for the Liberal Party. The electorate voted for change and put their trust in Labor and Albanese as Australia’s thirty-first prime minister, to resolve the many issues which had banked up over the past nine years. It was a rare election victory for Labor—only in office for around a third of the time since Australia’s federation in 1901—and it was a win its supporters will savour for some time to come.
While there are many factors that influence an election result—there’s no doubt that the poor performance of Morrison and his government was the leading factor—there are key factors that not only influenced this campaign but will change the dynamics of Australian politics for the foreseeable future.
A move away from the major parties
The Liberal Party had its worst result in decades. The Labor Party had its lowest primary vote since 1934. The National Party was relatively stable, not losing a seat. The Australian Greens gained four seats in the House of Representatives and now, there’s the largest crossbench in Australia’s electoral history. These are remarkable results and signal that there is change occurring within the electorate: while the primary vote for major parties has declined over many years—in 1949, major parties achieved 96 per cent of the primary vote; in 2022, it was 70 per cent—this election significantly translated the gain in primary votes by minor parties and independents, into seats won.
The teal independents, funded primarily through Climate 200 and the grassroots ‘Voices Of’ campaign, were the main beneficiaries of the move away from major parties. Well-funded, articulate and very capable candidates ran successful campaigns in safe Liberal heartland seats in Kooyong, Goldstein, North Sydney, Wentworth, Mackellar and Curtin. Zali Steggall had already won Warringah in 2019 and further cemented her position in the seat, as did other independents loosely associated with the teal movement, Helen Haines, Rebekha Sharkie and Andrew Wilkie.
A declining mainstream media
Australian media is among the least diverse in the world, the vast majority of media outlets are owned or managed by four entities: News Corporation; Seven West Media; Nine Media and the Australian government, through outlets such as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the Special Broadcasting Service. News Corporation is owned by the Murdoch family; Seven West Media owned by Kerry Stokes, a mining magnate from Western Australia; Nine Media is a publicly listed conglomerate, operating with ex-Liberal Party treasurer Peter Costello as its chair. Network 10 is owned by Paramount Global: its interests and approaches are different to the other key players, but its influence is still there.
The mainstream media, including the ABC, ran a highly negative campaign against the Labor Party and a generally positive one towards the Coalition, extending this negativity towards the Australian Greens and teal independents. Despite this, Labor won the election. Following on from other recent state election results, where the media has generally directed its reportage against Labor governments, Labor easily won those elections and it’s clear that the mainstream media’s ability to influence election outcomes, is not as strong as it once was.
Lack of separation of church and state
Religion has played a role in Australian political discourse, but not to the extent it does in the United States, for example. The first Catholic elected to the prime ministership was Labor’s James Scullin in 1929. This did cause some controversy but had mostly died down within the first few months of his term. His successor, Joe Lyons, was also Catholic, but there were few objections, especially given his electoral success.
The Labor Party has split twice over proxy wars related to religion—in the conscription referenda of 1916 and 1917, Catholics tended to oppose military conscription, while Protestants tended to be supportive, and the narrow defeat of both referenda caused a split in the party and expulsion of prime minister Billy Hughes. The 1956 Labor split was primarily a debate between atheist Marxism and Catholic social justice but, essentially religion has not been at the forefront of Australia politics.
Many people in the electorate were probably unaware that during their periods in office, former prime ministers Bob Hawke, Julia Gillard, John Curtin and Ben Chifley were atheists, or that John Howard was Anglican, or that Paul Keating was Catholic. Aside from Howard, who reintroduced the Lord’s Prayer to commence parliamentary sittings, appointed an Anglican bishop to the position of governor-general, and referenced Australia as a society founded on the principles of Judeo–Christianity, there was few direct references to churches and religion. Scott Morrison changed that: he openly displayed his Pentecostalism, and his time as prime minister appeared to be strongly influenced by prosperity theology.
There was a problematic relationship with his mentor and leader of the Hillsong Church in Australia, Brian Houston, who was accused of covering up allegations of child sexual assault; his personal religious values seemed to influence his actions in government: development of personal wealth, indifference to asylum seekers, homophobia, abstaining from a vote on same-sex marriage legislation, sexism, hostility to recipients of social security payments, and a commitment to the Religious Discrimination Bill, which provided legal protections for churches and religious schools to discrimination against women and the LGBTQI+ community.
The Australian electorate doesn’t tend to care too much about the religion of any politician—it’s performance that matters the most—but there was a sense of unease of Morrison’s promotion of Pentecostalist beliefs, and behaviours such as the unwanted ‘laying of hands’ and praying for people. The schism between Morrison’s promotion as a man of religion and many of his ‘un-Christian’ behaviours as prime minister was too great a gap for many people to reconcile.
It wasn’t just Morrison
Australian elections are traditionally fought over 50 or so seats, once the more obvious safe seats that are never going to change hands, are excluded. That number, of course, has started to slowly shift, with more seats being contested by independent candidates and seats that were considered safe Liberal Party seats—such as Kooyong, North Sydney, Mackellar, Goldstein and Curtin, or safe Labor seats, such as Fowler—now lost to the major parties and they might be lost for some time to come.
While it’s expected that most of the focus will be on the leader of the party, there were many other problems within the Liberal Party, which poor candidate selection being one of them. In previous elections, the independent candidate Rebekha Sharkie twice defeated Georgina Downer, daughter of former Cabinet minister, Alexander Downer, in the safe seat of Mayo. Independent Cathy McGowan defeated Sophie Mirabella in the safe seat of Indi. Zali Steggall defeated Tony Abbott in the safe seat of Warringah. These were safely held seats by the Liberal Party and better candidates in these seats would have secured victories.
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg was a poor campaigner and was not closely engaged with the community in Kooyong. Other Liberal Party members such as Dan Tehan are also poor performers. Peter Dutton comes across as a brutal roughneck, but it is a public image that he has cultivated after many years as the minister for immigration, home affairs and defence. Senator Michaelia Cash is a performative irritant and public nuisance, who seems to revel in these irritations. Sussan Ley seemed uninterested and, even one of the better performers within the party, Senator Simon Birmingham, struggled with the more complex issues during the campaign.
Candidate selection is key for any party but it’s only possible to choose from the people who come forward. The Liberal Party has been overtaken by the hard-right members, and many of the moderates have been purged from the party. This is a tragedy, not only for the party, but the Australian political system. True liberalism isn’t a process of ‘win at all costs’, attacking the disadvantaged people in the community, supporting the wealth class, fearing the other, engaging in personal enrichment and enabling corruption that favours political donors. This is a major issue that will need to change for the party.
The Liberal Party has strayed too far away from its Menzian roots and has become an illiberal rump of hardline conservatism. While Morrison must take most of this blame—as the leader—a stronger Cabinet and party structure would have ameliorated his worst excesses in government and his ignorance of long-established parliamentary protocols and precedents.
Labor won, but did they underperform?
The Labor Party ran a patchy campaign, not helped by Anthony Albanese’s earlier mistakes on day one and contracting COVID in week three. The media’s hard-nosed campaign against Albanese also didn’t help—magnifying a day one ‘gaffe’ which ultimately turned out to be meaningless, and rendered irrelevant by Australian Greens leader Adam Bandt snapping ‘Google it, mate!’ when a journalist tried to catch him out with another ‘gotcha’ question on some arcane economic statistic.
Labor though, while it won enough seats in the House of Representatives to govern—77 seats—and has received very workable numbers in the Senate, underperformed. Given the poor performances by successive Coalition governments over the past nine years, the weak state of the economy, mismanagement of the pandemic, flaws in foreign affairs policy, and the general stench of corruption, Labor should have achieved a landslide victory.
Albanese played cautiously in this campaign, with no difficult policy announcements, no radical changes, preferring to focus on convincing the electorate that he was a ‘safe pair of hands’. It’s possible to see why Labor chose this course. The 2019 election campaign offered too many targets for the Coalition to attack, and the character of former Labor leader Bill Shorten was the focus of attention, with many in the media only too happy to take aim and push issues related to likeability and trustworthiness. Albanese was not prepared to make these same errors and, in any case, the attempts by the media and the Coalition to smear his reputation fell flat and were less effective.
By not offering too much of a target and playing too cautiously, Albanese didn’t inspire the electorate in the same way that Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke or Kevin Rudd were able to but, sometimes, for a party that has been in opposition for most the time since Australia federation in 1901, perhaps it’s better to secure the victory first—irrespective of how narrow that victory might be—and then build on that to secure a platform for election victories in the future. However, Albanese has at his disposal, one of the best debut Cabinets in Australia’s history, rivaling Menzies’ Cabinet in 1949 and Hawke’s Cabinet in 1983. There are many seasoned performers in the Albanese Cabinet, with strong parliamentary and ministerial experience and a healthy combination of ambitious younger ministers who are preparing Labor for a longer term of government.
The 2022 election confirmed a shift away from the major parties and Labor is in an unusual position where its primary vote has also slipped, but it still managed to have a net gain of eight seats and form a majority government. The previous term of a Labor government between 2010–13 was rife with personality and factional issues, leadership changes, which made them an easy target for a rabid media and a maniacal leader of the opposition, Tony Abbott, who was only too happy to feed into the daily chaos and mayhem. This chaos continued after the Liberal–National Coalition returned to office in 2013, which ended up being a daily cycle of controversy, scandal or another esoteric issue that could be used to whip a frenzy in the continuing conservative culture wars.
There is a low level of public trust in politics and it will take a long time to restore this trust after a long time of voters disillusioned with a political system that they see is not working in their interests. The 2022 federal election was an important turning point. Australia has changed and this was one of the more important elections from over the past 50 years or so. The damage to Australia’s political system and the economy will take a while to repair but Australia has made what appears to be the right choice, even if it will take time for the merit of this choice to reveal itself.