A Labor ‘landslide’ and disaster for Dutton

Well, that was quick, about two and a half hours after the polls had closed, the election had already been called for the incumbent Labor government. But as the night went on, Anthony Albanese’s win was looking like a landslide, and Labor increased its majority in parliament. For the opposition, it was disastrous, its leader Peter Dutton has lost his seat in parliament and recriminations will surely be savage.

To talk us through the results and what it all means, we speak to chief political correspondent David Crowe and federal political correspondent Paul Sakkal.

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Episode Transcript

S1 (00:00):
From the newsrooms of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
This is inside politics. I'm Jacqueline Maley, it's Sunday, May 4th. Well,
it was quick, about 2.5 hours after the polls had closed.
The election had already been called for the incumbent labor government.
But as the night went on, Anthony Albanese's win was
looking like a landslide and labor increased its majority in Parliament.

(00:24):
For the opposition, it was disastrous. Its leader, Peter Dutton,
has lost his own seat in parliament and recriminations will
surely be savage. To talk us through the results and
what it all means, we spoke to chief political correspondent
David Crowe and federal political correspondent Paul Satchell. David, you
are not one to overuse an adjective, but you wrote

(00:47):
in your piece for Saturday night that Anthony Albanese's victory
was historic, stunning and extraordinary. Why do you use those words?

S2 (00:55):
Because it's so unusual to get a first term government
increasing its majority in this way. It doesn't happen very often.
I was talking to Shane Wright, our colleague, earlier, and
he's told me when it last happened, and now I
can't remember just because it's a blizzard of information on
election night, but it's incredibly rare. The other thing, of course,

(01:19):
is that Anthony Albanese has become the first prime minister
since John Howard in 2004 to get another term as
an incumbent, and that's also been too rare in the
last 20 years or so. Since Kevin Rudd in 2007,
we've had one term prime ministers finally getting a prime
minister who serves a second term with a bit of

(01:41):
continuity in the job, with an agenda for a second term.
He's even talking about a third term to our colleague
James Massola. All of these things make it a really
incredible night. And bear in mind, there had been talk
only months ago about or weeks ago about labor going
into minority government. And here they are with this increased

(02:02):
majority and with this mandate, when households are doing it
very tough and, you know, on other grounds they might
want to boot out a government when when the cost
of living is so bad. So on all those fronts,
it's it's really quite an incredible outcome.

S1 (02:17):
Yeah. I've just come back from the Canterbury Hurlstone Park RSL,
which is where the the Labor Party faithful gathered tonight.
And Albanese just gave his speech, his victory speech. It
was exactly the same stage, exactly the same venue, where
he gave his victory speech in 2022, where he talked
a lot about the voice, which obviously didn't get a
mention tonight. What did you think of of the speech, David?

S2 (02:42):
I thought it was, um, one of the best speeches
that he has delivered in his political life.

S3 (02:49):
Serving as your prime minister is the greatest honor of
my life.

S2 (02:57):
I think it was very inclusive. He did have, I guess,
that pointed reference to acknowledging Indigenous Australians, which, given Peter
Dutton started this or fuelled this, this debate about the
welcome to country was a very pointed reference.

S3 (03:14):
And I pay my respects to elders past, present and
emerging today and every day.

S2 (03:22):
But in every other way he was gracious towards Peter Dutton.
He made it so important at the start of the
speech to simply thank Australians for their vote. He talked
about kindness. He talked about unity, about confidence. It was
a message trying to sort of lift up Australia at
a time where global conditions are so hostile, really, to

(03:45):
liberal democracies. Now, I'm not saying that he's got the
answer and that there is this incredible second term agenda
that's going to fix everything, because I think there are
a lot of questions about that. But it was a
very good speech in that way.

S1 (03:59):
It was very optimistic. He talked about how his mother
had raised him to be an optimist and to see
the best in people, and there was every reason for
Australians to feel optimistic, which, as you say, is sort
of against the global zeitgeist. Paul, you were in the
room with the Dutton camp up in Brisbane, and you
watched the opposition leader's concession speech, which I think we

(04:20):
have to say was very gracious and refreshing, really, from him.
Talk us through the night there. What was the vibe
like in that room?

S4 (04:29):
Yeah. Well, for all the talk about comparing Dutton to Trump,
some of it fair, some of it probably exaggerated. It's
a great sign of our democracy that there was no,
no suggestion that Dutton would ever do what Trump did
and question anything about how the political process plays out.
So it was gracious. He was he was, uh, he
he was relatively upbeat for a guy who'd just been
defeated so thoroughly. The room was quite warm when he

(04:52):
emerged at about 930 in the W Hotel in Brisbane.
He was watching upstairs with his family about 10 or
15 minutes earlier. Some of his key supporters, including his
ministerial allies Steve Ciobo, Christian Porter, Michael Keenan, the campaign
spokesman James Patterson entered the room with Tony Abbott as well.
It was actually pretty light on for politicians. There weren't
many current or former MPs there, except the ones I've named.

(05:14):
He received a big applause when he rocked up Dutton,
and then was really warmly allowed to exit the room
with a long standing ovation. Well, tonight's.

S5 (05:22):
Not the night that we wanted for the Liberal Party
or for our coalition, or indeed for our country.

S4 (05:27):
He's built up a lot of goodwill in the party.
There are not many people on the moderate side, and
certainly not on the right where he sits, who have
much disdain for him. I think there was a there
was a significant rump of people who just felt really
sorry for a guy who they thought had given it
his all, but also deep acknowledgement from even his staff
and some of his close MPs who I spoke to

(05:48):
in text and calls after, who just saw the result
and realised that what they offered was totally, uh, not
up to it now.

S5 (05:56):
We didn't do well enough during this campaign. That much
is obvious tonight and I accept full responsibility for that.

S4 (06:03):
The campaign was poor. The policy offering was meek. Dutton
proved to be someone who was by the end, the
last Newspoll had him at the lowest popularity rating since
Andrew Peacock in the early 90s, so he's shown himself
to be one of the most deeply unpopular political party
leaders in a long time. And that showed tonight.

S1 (06:21):
Yeah. Okay, so the recriminations on the Liberal side are
going to be, um, going to be swift and interesting.
What does this sort of I mean, I don't know,
are we calling it a landslide? It's a sort of
huge increased majority. We don't know of what magnitude yet,
but a pretty interesting and big result. Is it all
about Albanese's personal popularity? Is it about the labor policy offering,

(06:42):
or is it more disillusionment with Peter Dutton and the coalition? David,
what do you think?

S2 (06:47):
I think the Peter Dutton factor was real, and it
was something that the coalition underestimated, because clearly they didn't
position him better going into this if they wanted to
get Australians to get to know Peter Dutton as a
as a family man and so forth, they should have
been doing more on that front last year. But really

(07:10):
it was about, I think, the core offer from labor.
And I think this goes back to something that I
know Paul's been talking to labor people about for ages,
and so have I. We all knew that labor felt
they couldn't win if it was going to be about
the last three years. It had to be about the
forward offer. And I heard that phrase repeatedly, the forward offer.

(07:32):
And that was about telling people, we're going to do
the following things for the next three years. And that's
where the liberals were, I think, complacent because labor knew
exactly what they were going to do, and they figured
it out late last year, and then they started doing
doing it in January with more money for Medicare, which
of course, Peter Dutton matched. But it was labor on

(07:54):
the front foot saying, we are hearing you on the
cost of living and we are doing the following things.
Whether it was road funding or Medicare funding, the urgent
care clinics and so forth, they were delivering something that
helped households with their finances and that just kept going
all the way through to the budget. All of those

(08:16):
things worked. Mind you can't forget that Donald Trump was
a factor because he brought this global turmoil to the
Australian election. But Labour knew that it had to offer
something to Australians, and it started doing that in a
really disciplined way.

S4 (08:33):
I'd add further to that. I agree you can't understate
the Trump factor, but domestic factors are also huge, and
some of this will be written in our long feature
story that we're writing with Matthew Nod and Natassia Chrysanthos
in coming days. So I'm giving a bit away. But
I think in hindsight, people will look at what Albanese
developed in terms of his election strategy and Paul Erickson,
the campaign boss, and realised that labor staked out the

(08:57):
center ground at this election. They own the center ground.
They pushed the Liberal Party on cost of living and
a number of other just core issues on health and
education and various other policy areas out to the side.
And Albanese commanded the center. In late October, labor people
were looking at what Trump was doing to Kamala Harris.
Paul Erickson had his election strategy laid out by late

(09:19):
October and early November, and the core of it was
a cost of living argument centered on Medicare, turned into
a cost of living issue to talk about healthcare every
day as a mechanism to say we are tangibly making
your life easier and cheaper in a cost of living crisis.
They hammered that home for months. They put economics at

(09:40):
the core of their agenda, which labor people, particularly in
kind of think tank land and on the right of
the Labor Party, have been calling for for years. They've said,
forget talking about social justice as the core of your
offering and progressivism as the core of your offering, and
make economics and living standards, the core of Labor's brand.
Albanese and Paul Erickson did that, and incredibly, in the

(10:01):
polls in recent weeks, even after a huge spike in
interest rates and people having been worse off over the
last three years in terms of real incomes, Labour is
ahead on cost of living and economic management in most polls.
That's an extraordinary result, a vindication of their strategy and
a massive indictment on the party that's meant to be

(10:21):
known as the better economic manager.

S6 (10:23):
Do you think it was also.

S1 (10:24):
A rejection of Trumpism? Because we can't. I mean, you know,
lots of people vote during the campaign that Donald Trump
was sort of like the third person in the campaign. Obviously,
he was incredibly influential in terms of the global atmosphere,
but also in terms of all of the allegations that
Dutton or members of Dutton's party were aping Trump or

(10:46):
stealing from him, or wanted to bring that kind of
politics to Australia. He did have a go on woke issues,
so-called woke issues, particularly towards the end of the campaign.
How much of this can we see as a rejection
of that kind of politics?

S2 (10:59):
David, I think we can see the election result as
a rejection of Trumpist ploys in in Australian politics, because
there have been some of those and I guess Jacinta
Nampijinpa price as the coalition's spokesperson for government efficiency, picking
up that kind of Doge theme from the US when

(11:20):
she said Make Australia great again, it clearly had the
overtones of a Trumpist line. If that was working for
the coalition, they would have had a, you know, side
by side with Peter Dutton for days afterwards. They didn't.
She was hidden after that. So that tells you how
they saw that playing out. But also, we know from

(11:41):
our own polling that almost two thirds of Australians see
the election of Trump as a bad thing for Australia.
They don't like him. And over the course of the
campaign that worked in Anthony Albanese's favor. I think of
Anthony Albanese now. Given this dynamic as an anti-Trump, I mean,
Albanese is always talking about orderly government. He presented a safe,

(12:05):
friendly kind of face, even though he has been on
the nose for so long on the cost of living.
So he was an anti-Trump.

S1 (12:12):
He even talked about kindness and respect very pointedly in
his victory speech tonight. Paul, do you see this result
as partly a rejection of that sort of anti-woke stuff
that is very much associated with the Trump agenda?

S4 (12:27):
Partly. I'd also just say that as the Canadian election
result proved Trump's erratic nature, his trashing of conservatism around
the world has flipped the script in other Western countries
and allowed centre left progressive leaders to become the Patriots,
the ones talking about kind of nationalistic Australia first Canada

(12:50):
first policies, which is something they've never been able to
do with as much authority as the conservatives in their country,
because those conservatives are now portrayed as buddies with the
US president who's having a crack at all these allies.
So it's it's we're in uncharted territory.

S1 (13:08):
Yeah. What were some of the more surprising results of
the night I want to talk about? You know, David,
I don't know if you've had much of a look
at the Greens vote. I want to talk about Tasmania,
where labor was incredibly successful. Victoria and of course, Dutton's
seat of Dickson. Let's just go first to the Greens vote.
Have you had much of a look at that?

S2 (13:28):
Yes. And it hasn't been great for the Greens. Some
of the results are very close. I haven't talked to
anybody about what's what they're seeing in Brisbane for instance
in the Brisbane seats that is. But of course these
are sort of must haves for the Greens. They did
so well at the last election. Max Chandler-mather was their
spokesperson on housing in Griffith. Stephen Bates in Brisbane, Elizabeth

(13:52):
Watson-brown Brown in, uh, Ryan. They want to hold those seats,
but they haven't done that. Great labor is is within
sight of turning things against them. Uh, I think it's
different in Melbourne, where there's concern about the labor seat
of wills, but you cannot see across the board that
this is a big victory for the Greens. It's been

(14:13):
much more interesting in terms of the teal contests and
in previously safe Liberal seat of Bradfield in Sydney. Nicolette
Buehler has won that seat. It's a, you know, shocking
defeat for the liberals and it just highlights this teal trend.
So I can't say I was surprised by that because

(14:34):
I'd been watching that seat really with a lot of interest,
and I thought there was a chance that Nicolette Buehler
could do it. But to see it actually happen and
continue that trend is really something.

S1 (14:44):
What about Dixon? Paul? Um, what what happened for Peter Dutton?
I mean, it's been several elections now when labor has
sort of said that Dixon's in contention and that Dutton
might lose his seat. There was a lot of talk
of that sort of two elections ago, but this time
it actually happened. It's quite stunning.

S4 (14:59):
Yeah, labor had been talking about this for weeks now.
They've been doing big fundraising drives, saying to people around
the country, donate because we think we can beat Peter Dutton.
Albanese spent the first day of the campaign on, I
think it's March 29th, in Dixon, and then he swung
through in one of the final days. There was a
lot of talk at the start of the campaign about
this being an Albanese mind game. He does like political

(15:21):
games and getting in the heads of his opponents. He
at the time said he really believed it was on
the on the brink of falling. Even his colleagues didn't
really believe him. But there's been a huge swing against
the Liberal Party across or the LNP in Queensland in
seats like Bonner. There were huge swings, various other suburban
seats where labor had been putting in a lot of
resources into in the last year or two, particularly led

(15:44):
by Murray Watt and Jim Chalmers, to build the brand
back there and in the city of Brisbane as well.
There were big swings, as we just mentioned, to the
to labor from the Greens. But in terms of Dixon itself,
it's hard to know about local factors. There was a
new teal independent, Ali Smith, who was really heavily backed
by climate 201 13.1% of the primary vote. At this

(16:04):
stage of counting, Dutton has lost 8% of his primary.
At this stage, Labor's only up two and a half,
so the independent clearly caused Dutton problems. Huge amounts of
money spent by labor and the climate, 200 independent and
lots and lots of Labour ministers and MPs and party
heavyweights swung through Dixon to get to gain momentum there.

(16:25):
So perhaps the voters of Dixon when the when the
when the heat. Really. Well I don't want to go
too far there but when when they maybe really thought
thought about Dutton as their candidate in a really high
profile race where it actually looked like there was a
chance of flipping it, maybe they saw something, something they
didn't like.

S1 (16:45):
Yeah, I'm not sure how much people were tuned into this,
but certainly he was asked, I think in the last
debate if he or he was asked recently if he
would be happy to have a nuclear reactor in his
own electorate, and he said yes. So I don't know
if that was that was something that people were tuned into.
Let's just talk quickly about the coalition. Paul. Um, Peter
Dutton took total responsibility for the loss. But I mean,

(17:07):
what's your sense of what happened? Was it was it
his fault? Was it was it miscommunication with the with
campaign HQ? Was it the fact that he just went
off piste and did his own thing and didn't listen
to the party? Um, the party elders. What was it?

S4 (17:23):
It's it's there's so many factors that make it complex.
And so it's clearly deep and structural. The problem in
the party to blame any one breakdown in communication or
relationship or attitude in a certain, um, cohort of his
staffing unit just seems simplistic. I mean, the party the
party is broken. Um, they've had three years in a

(17:44):
cost of living crisis to develop an economic narrative, have
totally failed to do so and have gone backwards on
an already record low primary vote with a deeply unpopular
prime minister in Scott Morrison. So it's the recriminations will
be really severe. There'll be huge questions directed towards the pollster,
Mike Turner at Freshwater, because there has been a sense

(18:07):
in the party, a real sense. I don't think a
fake false spin sense that their internal polling was better
than the national polling and that this result would not
play out. So there'll be huge questions about why that
didn't play out. The strategy of not dealing in the
same way as most political leaders in the past, with
mainstream press throughout the term, and focusing the strategy towards

(18:29):
two GB and Sky news, as David has written about extensively,
will also come under severe question after just a quick
point to finish off after the 22 result. They were
in the mid 50s in terms of seats. Their primary
vote was really low under Dutton for a period, but
the party was galvanised by the voice referendum. It lifted
them off the floor. It instilled discipline over a year

(18:51):
or even more, which was like a long campaign within
the term. And I think that in part meant that
there was no period of soul searching and real examination
of what the party stood for, its policy agenda, its
recruitment of talent, all those things that make a healthy,
vibrant political party. This result has to force that if
it doesn't, it never will. I mean, Labour went through

(19:12):
similar periods in the mid 2000 when Howard kept beating them.
They had another period of of of reckoning after Bill
shorten lost. So this happens to both sides of politics.
But there needs to be serious, serious examination of the
party and what it what it is. And there has
to be over the next few months or maybe even year,
a period where there's no no focus on opinion polling

(19:33):
and just focus on how do we get ourselves to
be a governing party again.

S2 (19:38):
The liberals have always done well when they're genuinely a
broad church, to use that old phrase. That phrase is
used so much because it's such a good phrase. They
know that that's how they succeed. And that's not really
the the best description of them right now. Well, after
this result, they're like a rump. But I think Peter

(20:00):
Dutton has been given a lot of credit for uniting
the team and keeping them all together after the 2022
election outcome, that defeat, and he did keep them united,
but he kept them united by not making them too
much of a broad church. He had a, you know,
deliberately conservative, um, approach, very conservative, I think Liberal Party

(20:23):
over the last couple of years, picking fights on culture
wars and woke agendas and so forth, and maybe that
wasn't the way to succeed. We now see what Australians
think about it. So unity came at an incredible cost
because they didn't actually have a deep think about their
philosophy and their direction in the last couple of years.

(20:44):
And really we could see that with their policy agenda
because it was relatively thin and it didn't, you know,
they complained about the catastrophe facing Australia, and then they
came up with a bit of a damp squib on
the policy front as a solution to that catastrophe. Um,
they didn't seem to have the courage of their convictions
on what they were really fighting for, because I think
they hadn't really worked out what those convictions were.

S1 (21:06):
Yeah. I mean, you've got to conclude that they just
they didn't do any work, really any proper work on policy.
They they just they had a lot of time and,
and they didn't use that time. David, you wrote in
your piece tonight that everything at this election has approved
the path ahead will not be easy. So you're not
sort of letting Albanese off the hook? What do you
mean by that, exactly?

S2 (21:28):
Well, I was remembering, um, an interview that we did with, um,
Jim Chalmers last year. Remember this jacket where he, uh,
we asked, you know, is there going to be an
election spendathon. And he said no. Well, guess what? There
was an election. Spendathon. Right. They spent a lot. Now
they say they're improving government services. And I think Australians
respond to that because they want a caring government in

(21:50):
this global turmoil that looks after them and delivers services
like Medicare. But there's been a lot of spending going on.
There are no budget surpluses in the foreseeable future. The
economy has low productivity, right? We used to worry about that.
We used to be a nation that actually paid attention

(22:10):
to that, paid attention to economic reform, to tax reform.
Are we going to rediscover that? It could take a
majority government that's safe, that's got a mandate to try
and look at some of these things. It's not an
easy job, but somebody's got to do it. And the
time to do it is when you've got a mandate

(22:31):
and a majority. So I think it's going to be
challenging for Anthony Albanese and for Jim Chalmers, because there's
so much that needs doing.

S4 (22:39):
If the big question for the coalition side now is
how do they regenerate if they can regenerate? The big
question for Albanese now is can he be bigger? Can
he be bolder? Can the nature of his government change?
One of his long time close friends said to me
the other day that if he wins with a majority,
he'll be extremely vindicated and proud of what he's just achieved.

(23:02):
And he showed that with his emotion tonight. But he'll also,
according to this person, go into what he described as
legacy mode, where he'll be thinking not just about how
to get another win. Although another win would be fantastic.
He'll be thinking about how does he go out, having
achieved big reforms now, and he'll want to do a
couple of things that mark him out, not just as
someone who's won two successive elections to be the first

(23:25):
person after John Howard, but how he's done that and
done big things. And he even though he's done some
creditable things and he calls himself a reformer, even his
colleagues think the last term was far from ideal, far
from big enough. Far from long term. Enough in its thinking.
So can he reach to change the GST deal and

(23:45):
do proper tax reform? A big new social program. Who
knows what that might be, but can he change the
nature of the government and be bigger and bolder? Will
be the big question and the big pressure point on him.

S1 (23:55):
I'm sure we'll gather again to talk about that in
the not too distant future. It's very late. You guys
have been up all day. You've done an amazing job.
Thank you for coming and talking and what a fascinating result.
Long live democracy.

S4 (24:07):
Thanks to you guys all. Bye.

S2 (24:09):
Thanks, Paul.

S1 (24:12):
Today's episode was produced by Julia Katzel. Our executive producer
is Tami Mills, and Tom McKendrick is our head of audio.
To listen to our episodes as soon as they drop,
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(24:33):
The Sydney Morning Herald websites. To support our journalism, subscribe
to us by visiting The Age or. Subscribe. I'm Jacqueline Maley.
Thank you for listening.