Welcome To Albanese Country

In this extended episode, we analyse the historic 2025 federal election, where Anthony Albanese led the Labor Party to one of the most decisive victories in Australian political history – winning up to 92 seats, achieving a 3% swing, and securing 55% of the two-party-preferred vote. We explore how Labor broke new ground in metropolitan seats across Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and beyond, while the Liberal Party collapsed under Peter Dutton’s disastrous leadership – becoming the first federal Opposition Leader to lose his seat. With a massive lower house majority and a favourable Senate, we discuss what Labor can do with its unprecedented political capital, the implications for progressive reform, and why this election marks not just a change of government, but a generational shift in Australian politics. We also assess the setbacks faced by the Australian Greens and the mixed results for community independents, the rise of the Muslim Vote, and what the future holds for a fractured conservative movement.

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Song listing:

1. ‘Good Stuff’, The B-52s.
2. ‘Atomic Moog 2000’, Coldcut
3. ‘Spitfire’, Public Service Broadcasting
4. ‘Confessions Of A Window Cleaner’, Ed Kuepper.
5. ‘Stranger in Moscow’, Tame Impala.
6. ‘Humiliation’, The National.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This episode of New Politics was released on the tenth
of May twenty five and produced on the lands of
the Wongle and Gadigal people.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
Hello to our audience, and hello to you, David. And
what an election result. I'm still in a little bit
of a shock about all of this. A few people
said that we should have recorded this post election episode
on the Sunday morning after the election, but David, I
just think we would have been lost for words, not
because we wouldn't have had anything to say, but we

(00:39):
were still in a state of shock on Sunday morning.

Speaker 3 (00:42):
No one got it right, not even us. My two
major things were that they were either going to get
an increased majority by two or three or maybe four seats.
I could see a path where the minor parties would
force Labor into a minority government, although that did seem
less likely. But nobody saw that Labor would end up
with a landslide. And nobody saw the extent I think

(01:06):
of the Liberal Party in particular, and when they talk
about coalition voting down, it's the Liberal Party that collapses.
The Nationals I think, hold their seats or they lose one.
And we're still waiting on the pre polls.

Speaker 2 (01:22):
Well, we are still waiting on the pre polls. But
there was a call from our audience to release the
post election podcast as soon as possible, but it was
probably best to wait to see how all the dust
settled this week.

Speaker 3 (01:35):
Yeah, and the dust is still settling.

Speaker 2 (01:37):
Well, that's right. But in this episode, we've got an
action packed episode coming up. We look at the winners,
the losers, the independence, how the campaign was won or loss,
and what the future looks like for the next parliamentary term.
So yet again, David, we've got another action packed.

Speaker 3 (01:52):
Episode coming up and I can't wait.

Speaker 2 (01:55):
And just so reminder that New Politics is produced by
independent media. You can listen, in, share, subscribe and support
New Politics for Patreon and substack. It's just five dollars
per month, or you can donate directly at our website
at newpolitics dot com, dot are you and of course
all of this is a good way to support independent journalism.

Speaker 4 (02:18):
Here it here. It was a vote for continuity at
a time of global uncertainty. Anthony Albanesi, clinching a second

(02:43):
consecutive three year term, was Australian Prime minister, the first
to do so in twenty one years.

Speaker 5 (02:51):
My fellow Australians. Australians have chosen the Australian Labor Party
as their government. We did not need a bag or
borrow or copy from anywhere else. We do not seek
our inspiration overseas.

Speaker 2 (03:15):
The election was decided last Saturday, and it was one
of the most comprehensive Labor victories in federal history. And
while almost everyone agreed that it was an election that
Labor was expected to win, very few people expected this
to be such a big win for Anthony Albanezi and
for the Labor Party. Now the voting is still going on,

(03:35):
but Labour has won between eighty nine to ninety two seats,
with the opposition scraping through to around forty seeds, possibly
getting up to forty two seats. The Labor government has
also received a swing to it of almost three percent
and getting around fifty five percent of the two party
preferred vote. Now, David, this type of result just isn't

(03:58):
meant to happen to first term governments. There's always a
swing against the first term government at its first attempt
at re election and they've always lost seats. And this
goes back all the way to nineteen thirty one. Now
it's never been enough for them to actually lose that
first election. That's one thing that seems to be always guaranteed.

(04:18):
First term governments always get re elected, but they always
lose seats and have a swing against them. But that
just did not happen in this election. And there was
a lot of talk about the election campaign being one
of the least inspiring that we've ever had, but the
election itself, it ended up being one of the most
fascinating elections in Australian history and it's definitely the best

(04:39):
election victory for the Labor partying. I think it's just
something that will be remembered for a very very long time.

Speaker 3 (04:47):
If you look at the electoral map and the aph,
the Parliament House side has this really good map that's
updated when necessary a course of the electorates. Now, when
you look at it from the whole of Australia, there's
lots of lots of blue, but that's because seats like
Jurac and O'Connor in Western Australia take up the whole
of the state. When you look at the city breakdown,

(05:08):
Melbourne has one blue, the rest of it is red
and gray. For Independent Sydney has three blues, a couple
of independents, and the rest is red. Adelaide is all red,
Perth is all red. Lingyari, which is basically the whole
of the Northern territory is all red. Far North, Queensland
is red. This is in a sense not surprising. Queensland

(05:31):
is a labor state. We've pointed out before that Queensland
is vastly more a state labor seat.

Speaker 2 (05:38):
Oh that definitely at the state level, it's definitely a
Labour seat, even though they've got an LMP government at
the moment. But yeah, the Federal Labor Party has been
in electoral graveyard for almost thirty years.

Speaker 3 (05:50):
Yeah, and they've got about half of Brisbane by the
looks of things, the Far North, which is extraordinary. Tasmania,
with the sole exception of Andrew Wilkie's seat of Clark
and he romped it in Tasmania is all read, which,
again for a small, rather insular state, is remarkable. Labor

(06:11):
has pulled off a masterpiece of seat winning where the
problem lies, I think, and I don't want to sound
like I belong on sky after dark Hair as far
as I can tell, because I've been watching everything which
I normally don't do. But I've been wanting to get
a sense of what is the media saying. So I've
been watching a bit of Sky News on YouTube, and
I've been listening to the ABC's political podcasts, and I've

(06:34):
been listening to what the commercial stations are saying. What
Labor has to be mindful of is that two thirds
of the country didn't vote for them. That's partly the
modern death of the party, that the parties are shedding
primary voting, and while society is moving on from that model,
I think that's part of it. Having said that, you

(06:54):
can't take anything away from the campaign, Labor and it
was flawless, pretty much flawless, and we're shown to be
flaw us in its execution. Because I've seen so many
bad liberal campaigns where they go on to win that
I wasn't convinced that that was going to be a
factor till the proof was in the putting.

Speaker 2 (07:10):
And you did watch a lot of media over the
election weekend, and so did I. But I noticed that
there were quite a few suggestions from the media and
from the Liberal Party itself that this thumping victory by
the Labor Party, and you mentioned before that they only
had one third of the primary vote, but they've actually
picked up around sixty percent of the seats, so that

(07:31):
still is a massive victory. But there were suggestions that
this is a lucky result and it was all based
on Labor lies and scare campaigns. Well, you know, the
Liberal Party can believe that if they want to, but
this is not a lucky result. A lucky result is
what the coalition got in twenty sixteen and the twenty
nineteen elections. That's what you'd call lucky. But when a

(07:53):
party wins about sixty percent of all the seats and
their opponent wins about twenty five percent of the seats,
well that is not a lucky victory. That's the result
of a far superior campaign. It's an assessment of what
the Labor government has done in office and it's an
assessment of what it hopes will achieve over the next
three years. That's how the Labor Party won. And politics

(08:16):
and elections in Australia, I guess they're always going to
be a relative contest. And my feeling is that even
if the Liberal Party had run a good campaign, I
don't think they would have won the election anyway. But
ultimately they ended up running a really terrible campaign and
you know, would you call that luck. It's not the
Labour's fault that the Liberal Party ran such a bad campaign,

(08:38):
So that might explain the one side of result, but
not the election victory itself. So this ultimately, like it
is a massive win for Anthony Albenezi. It's a repudiation
of negative politics. It's a repudiation of the stupid cultural
wars that the Liberal Party kept on trying to push,
and it's a big win for positive politics. Anthony Alberanezi

(09:01):
opened his victory speech with acknowledgement of country and had
all of his confidence on display.

Speaker 5 (09:13):
And I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land of
which we made.

Speaker 3 (09:24):
And I pay my.

Speaker 5 (09:25):
Respects to elders past, present and emerging today and every
day today, the Australian people have voted for Australian values,

(09:45):
for fairness, aspiration and opportunity for all, for the strength
to show courage and adversity and kindness to those in
the at Australian's a writer for a future that holds

(10:07):
true to these values, a future built on everything that
brings us together as Australians and everything that sets our
nation apart from the world.

Speaker 2 (10:24):
So David, it is a big win for the Labor
government and it's Labour's best results since John Curtin in
nineteen forty three. It's bigger than any of Bob Hawk's
victories or GoF Whitlam or Paul Keating or Kevin Rudd.
And it certainly doesn't get much better than this.

Speaker 3 (10:40):
Does it not if you're a Labor supporter. And even
though you know we.

Speaker 2 (10:44):
Well we are looking at the Labor Party first, we
will look at the Little Party later on. Don't worry
about that.

Speaker 3 (10:49):
But I also want to say, even though if I'm
being critical of the party, I don't want to take
anything away from the victory they won. They won fair
and square, and they won comprehensively, and they one against
a hostile media and an elector at that's hurting, and
they were able to prosecute their case in such a
way the stuff that might have cost other government's seats didn't.

(11:12):
And hopefully they'll start to address that type of stuff
now that they have what they see as a mandate,
and they certainly have a mandate in the Lower House.
There's no question of that. It was well fought and
from a campaign perspective, well deserved victory.

Speaker 2 (11:27):
And I think we also have to look at how
this election result will change Anthony Albanesi and political leaders
go through a lot of changes. They become a changed
person once they walk through the doors of Parliament and
become a member of parliament. Once they've become the leader,
they actually change as well. And once they've become a
prime minister. It's almost like they've become a different person.

(11:49):
Once you start racking up election victories. I'm sure you
become a different person yet again, and I don't mean
totally different, but they change their political qualities as well.
And now that Anthony Albanese, he has won two federal elections.
During the first term, he did say that he'd be
a cautious prime minister and made a virtue of that.
And since the second election victory, which is now less

(12:13):
than a week old, so we can't expect too much,
he's already said that he's only going to act on
the issues that the Labor Party took to the election,
and you're left wondering how was that going to fill
up the next three years. They could probably legislate all
of these things that they've talked about the housing programs,
changes to hex Medicare, early education, those minor tax cuts

(12:35):
that are on offer. That could all be legislated and
over and done within six months. But then what do
you do. The labor government has now got a lot
of political capital, and you can't just hang on to
that just so that you end up being a long
term government. You have to achieve your political agenda and
make a case for social and political change.

Speaker 6 (12:57):
Now.

Speaker 2 (12:58):
During Albanese's fee, a lot of political capital was wasted
on the Voice to Parliament campaign, not because it wasn't
a worthy issue, but because they botched that campaign so badly,
and as it turned out, that didn't cost the government
at all. But they've probably got more experience about how
to manage political issues during a parliamentary term, and they'll

(13:20):
probably get better at it.

Speaker 3 (13:22):
I'd say, I think that they actually learned the lessons
from that campaign, and I think it's a terrible shame
that that was how they learned those lessons. In losing
that so badly, it gave of course the coalition a
sense of false confidence, and I think they also learned
the wrong lessons from that campaign. It came back to
bite the coalition Labor learned from the Voice campaign, I think,

(13:45):
in how to run an effective campaign, or at least
in what not to do. The Liberal Party learned the
wrong lessons and thought that that same approach would win again.
The difference is a referendum, you just have to talk
enough people into being unsure of about voting for change.
With a federal election, you have to convince people that
the change is necessary if you're in opposition. Otherwise, why

(14:08):
would you change the government? And that's the question they gave,
and was the answer they were given, why would we change?
And in fact your campaign was so inept it made
the fake tradees look like something that would win under
normal circumstances. And instead of just winning because the electorate
was different, then why would you vote for a Liberal
party that didn't even have a terribly likable leader and

(14:29):
a not terribly likable front bench. There were no stars
on the front bench that would make normal people think.
By normal, I mean that the center of politics, Oh,
that Susan Lai makes a bit of sense when she speaks,
or Angus Taylor, he's honest and clearly not dodgy. It
was like the Labor of the nineteen eighties, except they'd

(14:50):
learned that it's not the nineteen eighties anymore, and it's
not even two thousand and seven anymore, that great campaigns
have to resonate, have to mean something, have to be positive,
have to be competent, No major gaffes. The best they
could come up with is that he didn't kiss Tenua
plebis coret a work do and he fell off the stage.
How many steps does the Prime minister walk up every day?

(15:11):
You're going to trip up one of them eventually, Whereas
the Coalition would announce a policy in two days later
say oh, we didn't really mean it. I'm going to
live in Sydney. Why you're from Queensland and you're supposed
to be a proud Queensland or what's happened there? It
was just exactly what not to do.

Speaker 2 (15:28):
Oh, it's absolutely and ultimately well, all of this has
resulted in probably the most politically favorable situation a Labor
government will ever be. Now, we could argue about whether
it's all about a far superior Labor campaign or a
terrible Liberal Party campaign, but ultimately this has resulted in
the best political situation of Labor government is ever going

(15:51):
to find itself in and they've got a large buffer
of their own creation. They've got a seat majority of
between ten and fifteen seats, and you just need seventy
six for a parliamentary majority, and they've probably got up
to ninety two seats, and then beyond that there's an
additional buffer between them and the Coalition caused by the Crossbench,
and although there have been some seats lost by the

(16:14):
Community Independence and by the Australian Greens, that buffer is
still quite large. There's almost fifty seats between the Labor
Party and the Coalition, so that's absolutely, absolutely massive, and
the Labor government has also got a very favorable center,
just needing the support of the Australian Greens to pass legislation.

(16:35):
So obviously that's not as favorable as having complete control
of the Senate, but that's more favorable than what they've
had in the past. And the Liberal Party has become
this dysfunctional rump that needs to redefine itself if it
wants to survive. And essentially right wing politics in this
country has been decimated and a lot of people have

(16:57):
been saying, well, Labor, we've got this very strong position,
do not go for over each look at what John
Howard did after the twenty oh four election, where they
had a thumping majority and also had control of the Senate,
went for over each with Work Choices and all of
those right wing pet projects. They ended up losing the

(17:18):
twenty oh seven election after everyone said that they would
be in office for another ten years. Now, all of
that is correct, I'd say that you never know what
might be around the corner. You know, I'm pretty sure
the sun's still going to rise tomorrow morning, But a
couple of weeks, sime a couple of months simeon. You
just never know. But you always have to guard against overreach.

(17:38):
But a lot of the things that John Howard wanted
to introduce and didn't introduce were quite terrible. Work Choices
was the right wing neoliberal attack on working people. A
lot of other things that they introduced were just right
wing garbage that were supported by the business community but
not by the electorate. But most of the things that

(17:59):
labor could introduce, you know, limits on negative gearing, capital gains,
tax reform, reform of the taxation system in general, higher
education reform, mining royalties, these would all be popular and
would end up being far more acceptable to the electorate
than something like work choices. And sure all of these

(18:19):
changes were not offered at the election, but you know,
do you really want to wait another three years before
some of these measures come in. I don't know. You know,
governments do need to be careful about what they introduced
and the timing of all of these issues, but this
is the time to do it. You rarely get opportunities
like this in politics, and you just have to maximize
this opportunity as much as possible.

Speaker 3 (18:41):
Work choices came from nowhere. He didn't talk about it
in the election campaign. They hadn't really It was sort
of this vague philosophical thing, and so when he bought
it in, it was not something that you'd expect, even
though it was something you'd absolutely expect.

Speaker 2 (18:58):
But I think there are those two issues that it
wasn't expected, it wasn't announced, and it wasn't politically palatable.

Speaker 3 (19:05):
And yeah, and labor needs to fix foreign affairs, not everywhere.
Our relationship with Indonesia and South Pacific is really good.
Our relationship with China is on the positive side of things.
For a country where there's a bit of tension orcus
has to go, we just have to dump it. It's
costing a fortune, and that money that's going to no

(19:27):
submarines is money that could be spent in things that
people I think want labor to do. Health. The eight
extra billion dollars in Medicare is terrific, but what if
it was eighty billion, That'd be even better. It's Middle
Eastern policy supporting a genocidal government. Now, I thought that
that might have a bit more of effect in seats

(19:48):
with high Middle Eastern It didn't. But you can't rely
on this stuff not to buy it. Labor needs to
get a consistent policy. It either supports palastine own as
per the Labour Charter, or it doesn't. It needs to
get a consistent policy university system. Jackie Lamby wanted to
bring in a review over vice chancellor's salaries in universities.

(20:13):
On the face of it, it was a good thing,
although a couple of senior academics I spoke to suggested
that it was probably more a way of kicking into
the university than actually bringing in meaningful reform. Now, with
Jackie Lamby's seat in doubt, we may not hear any
more of this, But now it would be the time
to remove Jason clare as Education Minister. Put him somewhere
else and bring in someone who can actually approach the

(20:36):
massive problems in the university sector, which includes overpaid vice chancellors,
underpaid lecturers, courses that give no inherent value.

Speaker 2 (20:46):
Like as The key issue would be just looking at
equity at all of these different issues, like whether it's
orcus or whether it's you know. To be honest, I
don't think many people would be that concerned about the
salaries the vice chancellor's actually received. It cutting it back
to a more equitable level, Well, that's equity. You're getting
equity in that sort of situation. And I guess that's

(21:07):
what the Labor government should be looking at and applying
like the rule of equity across all of these different issues.
They're not going to get any blowback from the Liberal
Party or the National Party or the Coalition that they're
just too far behind. My point is that this is
the time that you apply all of those labor values
across the board. Doesn't matter what it is, you just
supplied as much as possible. Yeah, I hope I'm not

(21:29):
sounding like a raving socialist, but.

Speaker 3 (21:31):
That's what we were called obvious labor members or Labor
voters the other day. No, we're called obvious Greens voters
the other day. That's interesting because we get a bit
of feedback that we're anti Green, so maybe we just
do self loathing votes. I vote for the parties I
most disagree with. Again, the party is right to be celebrating.

(21:53):
This is a historic victory, I think unprecedented. We can
look at forty three, forty six, eighty three, two thousand
and seven, twenty nine, and none of them are quite
as good. And I think labor should start to think
about using its political capital in good ways. I suspect

(22:14):
it's going to take more than a term to fix
the housing issue. But if they start bringing in public
housing and start that building, and by the end of
this term, a lot of that problem will be alleviated,
probably not with the people they wanted to be alleviated with.
And I think this is one of the issues with
the housing problem, is that they're trying to appease those
who've done well from housing without trying to help those

(22:35):
who haven't done well in housing. In that interview you
did with Purple Pingers, he said, study after study after
study after study shows the public housing solves the problems.
Everything else is just a band aid or a panacea,
and labor could do the hard work and earn the
political capital and maybe lose a few votes in the
upper middle class, which they were probably never going to
keep anyway, but be remembered as a reforming, compassionate government.

(22:59):
At some point, you've got to start looking at your legacy.
Peter Dutton now has no legacy or not one worth,
repeating Anthony Albanez, he has a chance to really cover
himself into the labor pantheon. You've got to start being
a little bit bolder, not too much. But you don't
want to be like the Blair government in Britain, where
I will be radical next term. We're still consolidating. We'll

(23:21):
be radical next term. Tony Blair is now persona non
grata amongst a lot of political figures on both sides
of politics. Everything comes at a price.

Speaker 2 (23:30):
Well, if your bank account is full, you've got to spend.

Speaker 3 (23:32):
It, or you save it for the rainy day, knowing
that they'll always be a rainy day. But now would
be the time to boost the economy, to go through
and become a labor government.

Speaker 6 (23:48):
This is new politics with Eddie Jokovic and David lewis
the best podcast on Australian politics and news commentary. You
can support us through Patreon and substack, and also find
us at newpolitics dot com dot au.

Speaker 2 (24:35):
If there's going to be a historic win for one
side of politics, that means that it's likely to be
a historic loss for the other side. And that's exactly
what happened to the coalition on Saturday night.

Speaker 7 (24:46):
Well tonight, it's not the night that we wanted for
the Liberal Party, or for our coalition, or indeed for
our country. But we've worked hard every day over the
course of the last three years to do our best
for our amazing country of the The honors of being
the leader of this party is that we have met
people from every side, every corner, the length and breadth
of this country, and there are many amazing stories. Now,

(25:09):
we didn't do well enough during this campaign. That much
is obvious tonight, and I accept full responsibility for that.
Earlier on I called the Prime Minister to congratulate him
on his success. Tonight it's an historic occasion for the
Labor Party and we recognize that I congratulated the Prime
Minister and which Tea and Jody and Nathan all the

(25:30):
very best. And I said to the Prime Minister that
his mum would be incredibly proud of his achievement tonight,
and he should be very proud of what he's achieved.
Thank you. It's not our night, as I point out,
and there are good members, good candidates who have lost
their seats or their ambition and I'm sorry for that.

(25:56):
We have an amazing party and we'll rebuild.

Speaker 2 (26:00):
The Coalition recorded its worst loss ever, its lowest primary vote,
its worst two party preferred vote ever, and the worst
tally of seats won on a pro rato basis. The
National Party, as it always does, it seemed to hold,
but all the damage was done by the Liberal Party,
and it had the worst leader ever to run at

(26:22):
a campaign. It also ran the worst campaign ever. It
lost around eighteen seats, and to top it all off,
Peter dunn't became the first incumbent opposition leader to lose
this seat at an election in federal history. Now, the
Liberal Party, it's lost most of its seats in inner
metropolitan areas and most outer areas. It lost so many
urban seats that it's almost become a second regional political party.

(26:45):
After the National Party. But as far as election losses go,
it does not get much worse than this. You know,
we should never write off her political party day over,
but it's just really hard to see them coming back
from this.

Speaker 3 (26:59):
It won't be the next election. The swing is way
too big now. It was mathematically impossible from the last election.
But the hope that they would have had, I thought,
was to position themselves for twenty twenty eight. That's gone.
The earliest they could consider even perhaps having everything go
in their favor is twenty thirty one, and I think

(27:20):
it might even be twenty thirty three. I've said fairly
consistently that the next Liberal Prime Minister probably isn't even
in the House yet, and with the losses of Wallahan
and Archer that's even more likely. The Liberal Party kept
listening to its own advice and the advice of its
media sickophants, and kept moving to the right, and kept

(27:41):
moving to the right, and kept moving to the right.

Speaker 2 (27:43):
And then kept on saying that we've got to move
further to the right yet again.

Speaker 3 (27:47):
Yeah. Now, I will note, as far as I can tell,
that argument has somewhat stopped a lot of the far
right wing analysts like relatively far right wing analysts like
Paul Murray and Peter Kredle are actually saying, and I
think this is absolutely correct, They've got to focus back
on the city. The Liberal Party was formed as an

(28:07):
urban and suburban party for the middle class, aspirational middle
class in nineteen forty four, and it had always really
been that, and that's why the coalition has always been
a bit uneasy. Paul Keating said, the city slickers and
the country bumpkins. Keating had a beautiful turn of phrases
we all know, but yeah, basically the spibs from the

(28:28):
country and the spibs from the city getting together, the
agrarian socialists and the free trade capitalists. It's been a
remarkable coalition in terms of its consistency, but in moving
further and further to certain national positions, the Liberal Party
lost its heartland. And I'm not just talking Kuyong and
Deacon and Wentworth and mckella and Bradfield and those seats

(28:54):
been along. They lost those aspirational seats where on the
outskirts of Sydney and Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane where they
didn't always win, but when they were winning elections, they
got them and when they lost elections, they didn't lose
them by much. It seems they've got Goldstone back, and
Kuyong was close. And we'll talk about Goldstone a bit later.

Speaker 2 (29:15):
They might give them a false sense of security because
you know, for me, this seemed like a flush the
drain election. You know, not maybe not drain the swamp,
but definitely flushed the drain, you know, flush that stench
of the right wing brand of politics started off by
John Howard in the nineteen nineties when the Liberal Party
pushed out most of the moderates from the party and

(29:37):
then they became a capital C conservative party. And you know,
sure they've had success for most of this time. They
were in office for twenty of the twenty six years
between nineteen ninety six and twenty twenty two. But you know,
we did talk about this a couple of weeks ago
that what has started off was John Howard has now
ended with Peter Dutton, and you know, they dished out

(29:58):
a whole pile of inc computent right wing rubbish and
cultural war crap and expected to win just by turning up.
But for me, this style of politics is over. That's
what the big message of the twenty twenty five federal
election is the Liberal Party probably thought, well, we still
won those elections in twenty sixteen and twenty nineteen with

(30:20):
poor campaigning. They might have thought that twenty twenty two
might have been a slight aberration and a bit of
a repudiation of what they had to offer, and they thought, well,
that's okay, our brand of politics civil works, let's dish
it out some more. But the big issue is that
they did not listen to what the twenty twenty two
election said to them, and the message was that they

(30:43):
had to be more progressive, they had to be more inclusive,
appeal to women, just become more decent people instead of
behaving like arseholes, and they ended up after the twenty
twenty two election, they just ended up doing the complete opposite.
And for me, they're still not getting the messages. Rita
Pannahee from sky On News having a quick chat with

(31:03):
Tina McQueen, who until recently was the national vice president
of the Liberal Party.

Speaker 8 (31:11):
Tina, what is the danger of the higher ups within
the Liberals, the authorities within the Liberals listening to this
very poor advice and veering further left and again becoming
labor light. The Liberals don't win when they're labor light.

Speaker 4 (31:27):
We've seen that in Wa, we've seen.

Speaker 8 (31:29):
That in Victoria, and yet this is what's been proposed federally.

Speaker 9 (31:34):
It's just crazy. You know, when Duntan and we were
all on that Trump train, which I'm still on if
we had a stood firm by that, but as I said,
the federal executive got spooped by the or we can't
upset the immigration you know, we can't say anything bad
about welcome to country.

Speaker 2 (31:53):
All this is ridiculous.

Speaker 9 (31:55):
They were spooked, absolutely spooked. Instead of going harder and
standing on those bold policies that the people respect, they
backed off them. And that's where people lost respect for
Dunton and became very confused as to what his policies were.
It's just a shame that he was hijacked by that
executive and the left of the party and to taming

(32:17):
things down. It was ridiculous and that's why we've got
the result we have.

Speaker 2 (32:22):
So David just doesn't seem like there's much listening going
on there at Sky News certainly, but everything is wrong
with the Liberal Party at the moment. Now, that's just
not at the federal level. It's at the state level
as well, and we talked about it before. They're still
in office, or they're in office in Queensland, Northern Territory
in Tasmania. But fundamentally the party's not working at the moment,

(32:46):
and all of that focus on the culture wars, the
lack of policy development, the lack of ideas, attacking the
left in, attacking indigenous people, all those race issues, attacking migrants,
fear campaigns on China, the fear of outsider is now.
You know, they might point to the fact that they've
picked up the seed of Goldstein from a community independent

(33:08):
and possibly cou Yong that's looking unlikely, and retaining the
seed of Bradfield that's more likely. They could point to
all of that as a sign of progress, and I
think that might give them a sense of oh no,
you know, the culture Wars are actually not quite over.
We can still win seats with this terrible strategy that
we've got, But it's just giving them a false sense

(33:29):
of security. If your future depends on someone like Tim
Wilson remaining in the Liberal Party, well that's not much
of the future to build on. You know, no one
really knows what the Liberal party stands for anymore, because
it's pretty obvious that it stands for not very much
at all.

Speaker 3 (33:45):
It stands for the enrichment of its What it sees
is it's elite members.

Speaker 2 (33:49):
Oh sorry, I forgot about it. That's what they still
represent at the moment.

Speaker 3 (33:53):
But the thing is, and okay, yes, the wealthy, like everyone,
deserve a seat at the table and deserve representation. We
live in a democracy and all voices should be heard.
Blah blah blah, yes, yes, yes, all of that. When
you're a general party, if you're not listening to everyone
and taking everyone's case seriously, is suddenly no longer a

(34:16):
major party. You're a minor party. The seat of Goldstein
baffles me in that. Had the Liberal Party run a
decent candidate, I might say, okay, because as far as
I know and I know people in Goldstein, Zoe Daniels
was a very good local member, and my formula is
if you've been a good local member, they tend to

(34:36):
win their seats back. Tim Wilson was a terrible local member.
He behaved appallingly in his last stint, using Parliament House
for all kinds of inappropriate practices and actions, got no
major legislation passed, was pretty much sacked from every job
he had pre parliament. I don't know how he got
any votes at all, let alone came close, but there

(34:58):
it is. The rumor is he's trying for treasury Shadow treasurer.
Good luck with that, because the higher up the chain
you go, the more scrutiny you get under. I don't
know how much scrutiny he can withstand given his past actions,
but we'll see.

Speaker 2 (35:14):
And there's also not much left in the leadership circles
for the Liberal Party and the contest has been narrowed
down to two candidates and that's either Angus Taylor he
was the Shadow Treasurer and Susan Lay she was the
Deputy Liberal Party leader. And there have been some suggestions
that Tim Wilson could also put up his hand as well,

(35:35):
but you know, did they really want to go there?
And as far as I'm concerned, they just have to
start with what they should have done after the twenty
twenty two election, and that's to have a total reassessment
of what the Liberal Party is. It's now a conservative rump.
There's twenty seven seats held by the Liberal Party and
they just have to stop being that conservative rump, and

(35:57):
this will be very hard for them to do, but
they just have to drop their links with the Institute
of Public Affairs, stop using Sky News and News Corporation
as a sounding board for policy ideas, and they just
have to do that. I don't know if they can
do that, because it would be like making the Labor
Party drop their relationships with unions and they would just

(36:18):
never do that. But it's just what the Liberal Party
has to do, and maybe not even think about winning
the twenty twenty eight election at all. You referred to
that before, maybe twenty thirty one or twenty thirty four.
They just have to get all the basics in place
and maybe at this stage it doesn't really matter who
the leader is. And we always thought that Peter Dunton

(36:39):
was just going to be a placeholder and he probably
thought that as well, and that was always going to
be the case until he started believing all the things
that he was being told by Sky News that he
was going to be the next Prime Minister number thirty
two or whatever it was, and now he's completely out
of Parliament. But for the Liberal Party, it's just going
to be a lot of hard work over the next

(37:00):
five or six years, maybe even more, and even then
it might not pay off for them. It's just a
question of whether they're up to doing that hard work
or not.

Speaker 3 (37:08):
When Menzies formed the Liberal Party, it was formed in
forty four, lost the forty six election quite badly, but
won the forty nine election, and won the forty nine
election quite comprehensively. It ran a very strong campaign. It
was a slightly deceptive campaign over public ownership of banking,
but it was a strong campaign, and he had a

(37:30):
very talented front bench. The forty nine Menzies front bench
is considered one of the most talented of the Australian Parliament.
And Menzies then was able to stay in government, or
the Liberal Party was able to stay in government till
nineteen seventy two. For better or for worse. When you're
looking at a choice between Angers Taylor and Suzanne Lay,

(37:52):
it doesn't really speak long term rebuildability. So they've gone
from one placeholder, and Dunton really was a placeholder. You
just happened to survive a lot longer than perhaps he
should have, and certainly perhaps that everyone was expecting him to.

Speaker 2 (38:08):
But my point is that it doesn't really matter who
the leader is at this stage, they have to forget
about leadership issues whatever, because obviously every party needs to
have a leadership team in place, the leader and the deputy.
I'd suggest to them, look forget about all of that,
just do all the background work. Everything else will sort
it out. If you just forget about trying to win
the next election or even the one after that, just

(38:29):
get all your fundamentals in place. If it's Angus Taylor
and Susan Lay who are the leaders in twenty thirty
one or twenty thirty four, good luck with that. If
that ends up being the case, well that's what you
run with. But you just got to get a lot
of the basics into place if you want to have
electoral success in the future.

Speaker 3 (38:46):
And what the Liberal Party hasn't done in years is
good policy work. They clearly did very little policy work,
and that they did do wasn't thought through, wasn't terribly effective,
didn't reflect even their own voters needs, aspirations and desires.
One thing too, is that they've started the blame game.

(39:09):
Peter Dutton has been rather exempt from that. I guess
they're being a bit kind because he lost his seat,
because he'll be a very easy one to blame because
he's not there anymore.

Speaker 2 (39:19):
That's what I should be doing. I should be blaming
him because he's not there.

Speaker 3 (39:22):
But there was a lot who came out, or there
was maybe not a lot, but there was a lot
of noise about how unsuitable Angus Taylor, and they were
rightly saying, Holy Hughes springs to mind as having said
this explicitly that there was no work done on serious
economic costings or policies, which was one of the factors.

(39:44):
So the blamers started within their circle. I mean, you
could go back and blame Nick Minchin for realizing that
Joe Hockey had overplayed his hand, and Minchin was then
able to put Tony Abbott in as Liberal leader, and
from there things went downhill. It wins a term in
government and it's a disastrous turn. The party behaves like

(40:04):
feral spoiled brats from Malcolm Turnbull, to his credit, did
try and make the party more moderate, although he was
probably the wrong person to do it. At least he
saw where the issues were and then gave us Scott Morrison.
And Scott Morrison was utter an absolute disaster that they
voted for Peter Dutton all and didn't try and correct

(40:27):
him and didn't try and guide him to being a
better or more appropriate leader of the party. That they
listened to Sky News, in the Australian and the right
wing media rather than listening to a plurality of views.
There's a lot of blame to go around and they
shouldn't lump it on one or two people. Those one
or two people deserve the blame, but they're not the

(40:48):
only ones.

Speaker 2 (41:11):
It wasn't a very good night for the Australian Greens
in the four Lower House seats that they hold, or
they did hold, they had swings against them of between
one to four percent. They lost three seats, including Adam
Bant's seat, and we suggested last week Dave that the
federal election could possibly replicate what occurred in the Queensland
state election last year, and it ended up being a

(41:32):
repeat of that. It's almost a case where this might
be out of control for the Australian Greens. When there's
a big swing on it doesn't really matter whether it's
to the l and P or to the Labor Party.
The Greens will suffer. Now there might be other issues
going on. They did play hardball on housing where they
were seen as obstructionists on government's housing policy, and even

(41:56):
if that resulted in better policy, they ended up getting
the political blowback for that obstruction. They will have all
of their senators returned and the vote in the Senate
pretty much remained static. So given the swings that occurred
to the Labor Party in the Senate, I think that
was a good result. They will have the full balance

(42:17):
of power in the Senate, which means that the Government
just needs the Greens to have their legislation passed rather
than trying to go to other people for that to happen.
But the Greens will just have to use this power
more strategically and more effectively, otherwise I'll pay for it
in future elections. And I think that was the big
lesson for the Australian Greens in this election.

Speaker 3 (42:40):
They do very well all of their senators in New
South Wales. I think they even grow their Senate count
and their appeal to the youth might not quite have
translated to the lower House, but it's certainly translated to
the upper House. Yeah, they maintain in an election that
was all Labor and Labour's day. The Greens do maintain

(43:03):
their position and end up in a better sanatorial position.
They can't be subverted. Now the government is going to
have to think about how does this legislation get us
through because the abstractionist thing worked for a bit, but
after a while it's not going to work. People will
start to ask, well, where do they keep obstructing? Are
they just a bunch of So the Greens, if they

(43:25):
play their cards right, is in a very good position
to make a difference, and a positive difference in the
type of ways they want to make that difference.

Speaker 2 (43:34):
Well, the leader in band he did lose his seat
in Melbourne and that is a big blow and it
has to be a big blow if your leader actually
loses their own seat. And they might be in a
good position overall politically, but I still think that they
need to do a bit of soul searching. They can't
just say, oh, well our primary vote held up, we
lost seats, so everything's going to be fine. Well that's

(43:56):
not good enough that you know the Labor Party or
the Liberal Party, they'd never say that, and they never say, oh,
look at our primary vote. We lost all of our seats,
but primary vote is still looking good. It's about the
seats that you've actually won, and if you've gone from
four seats in the Lower House are having just the one,
that's just not a very good result. And a lot
of people have pointed to Max Chandler Mai as being

(44:18):
irritating and generally leading that process of blocking legislation on housing,
and that probably would have had a big effect in
this election. But I still think that it's more about
the big swing that favored the Labor Party more than
anything else. So they just have to work out a
way of dealing with these sort of situations or dealing
with these sort of electoral events where there's a swing

(44:39):
either way, because you don't want to be in a
situation where you run a really really good campaign but
end up losing seats and losing votes from all the
mayhem that's created around you that you can't really control.
And I just suggest that for this parliamentary term, and
for purely political reasons, these training Greens just have to
work more closely with the Labor government and ensure quick

(45:01):
passage of the government's legislation and sure stonewall a little bit,
and try and get more of what you want and
try and improve the legislation, but holding up legislation for
six months, and they did that twice on housing legislation,
so that's a year effectively, and then getting a political
beating over it. That's probably not the best approach anymore.

(45:23):
I think aligning themselves with a successful Labor government, if
that's the way that it turns out, I think that
will benefit the Australian Greens in future elections.

Speaker 3 (45:33):
One of the things that the Greens has is probably
the most honest of the parties as far as I remember,
and I don't think it's changed since I saw this.
No Green has ever faced aikak in any of the
states or any of the corruption agencies. You can't say
that about all of the other parties, and the Greens

(45:55):
to attract a very idealistic membership, and I suppose all
parties do, but Labor and Liberal have a structure where
you join young Labor Young Liberal and you learn, to
a greater or lesser extent, the art of political compromise,
what's worth winning, what's worth losing and if you're losing this,
does this loss cause you to win something greater in
the future. That type of stuff. The Greens don't really

(46:17):
have those types of mechanisms. So I think their ability
to play hard ball is compromised by the fact that,
apart from stonewalling and digging their heels in and being
seen to be obstructionist, is going to be comments. And
we welcome the comments. This is the perception. This isn't

(46:37):
necessarily the reality, and it's perception that matters. The Greens
have got to try and show themselves that they can
compromise without compromising themselves. Okay, we will let this legislation through,
but we're going to put in something that means a
lot to us down here, and we might like this
bit of legislation terribly much, but that's offset by the

(46:57):
fact that we've managed to cut emissions here, or create
a new national park, or stop a dangerous development or whatever.
I think they're starting to learn that. I watched Insiders
for the first time in years, but Samantha made them
made the point that the Greens held their primary vote,
but it was the liberal collapse that cost them Max
Chandler Mather's seat, and I think it's what's cost Adam

(47:20):
banned his seat.

Speaker 2 (47:21):
Yeah, I guess that's the point. If there's a big
swing either to the liberal National Party, which is what
we saw in Queensland last year. If there's a labor swing,
which is what we saw in the federal election, the
Greens vote drops off. They're the losers out of big swings.

Speaker 3 (47:36):
The other thing too, the Liberal Party in Victoria at
a state level is such a disaster that even the
supposed unpopularity of the Allen government wasn't enough to see
the basically the Liberal wipeout in Victoria. Yeah, Max Chandler Mayther.
The first assumption that people were making was, oh, that's
what being alloudmouth does. But he managed to retain his vote,

(48:00):
he didn't lose very much. He just couldn't get the
preference flow going his way. And again that's what happened
to Adam Band. He needed preferences from both sides, but
he only got them from one and the Greens. I
think you're going to have to hire some kind of
Maybe Anthony Green, now he's retired, might do the odd
consultancy work. Maybe he can explain to them how you

(48:20):
don't have to rely on preferences from both major parties,
that you can there's a third or fourth part, because yeah,
that's going to be the problem and I'm not sure
that they'll get back into the Lower House soon if
the Liberal Party vote doesn't improve for them.

Speaker 1 (48:38):
This is New Politics, available through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon,
Audible and YouTube, and also available to support it Patreon,
Substack and at our website New politics dot com dot au.

Speaker 2 (49:03):
The Community Independence did reasonably well on the night Allega Spenders,
Alie Stegel, Helen Haynes, Kate Cheney, Sophie Scomps. They all
held their seats. It's not clear at this stage if
Monique Ryan will hold the seat of Keyon, but it's
looking more likely and the seed of Goldstein has gone.
They might pick up an additional seat in Canberra as well.

(49:25):
So it wasn't a wave of success. In twenty twenty two.
There was an anti Morrison effect that resulted in all
of those new Community Independence and I thought that the
anti Duton effect would have improved their positions overall. But
it might just be a case whereas the seat by
seat proposition and based on who the actual independent candidate is.

(49:46):
The seat of Bradfield didn't end up going to the
independent Nicolette Buller in the Senate. David Pocot won his
seat in the Act, so Overall, the position for the
community independence is still pretty strong. The Muslim vote also
got some traction. They didn't actually win any seats, but
their candidate's got around fifteen to twenty percent of the
primary votes in the seats that they did run in,

(50:08):
so that might be a springboard for electoral success in
future elections. The primary vote for the major parties, as
we predicted, it did continue to go down. It just
went down by one percent, down to sixty seven percent.
So there's still a lot there for the independent candidates.
Not as big as the result in twenty twenty two,

(50:29):
but there's enough opportunities for independent candidates in future elections
to see their numbers grow.

Speaker 3 (50:35):
Given that a third of the vote went independent. I
don't think that vote's disappearing, and I've gone through the
existential reasons why this is. I think before that the
major parties are based on a model that's right out
of date. I said earlier. The result in Goldstein baffles me.
It might not have if it'd not been such a

(50:58):
poor candidate. If it had been standard liberal person who
he hadn't heard of before, and they scraped through only
by seven hundred votes, I might have been able to
find reasons that made sense to me as to why
a good local member like Zoe Daniels would lose. But yeah,
Zally Stegel isn't going anywhere. Aligre spender did a lot
of work in her campaign and she's not going anywhere.

(51:20):
Monique Ryan. I think Monique Ryan will win and she
won't be going anywhere after then. It's a shame Nicole
Bowler didn't do better than she did. But the Liberal candidate,
Jassel Captarian ran a good local campaign and will hopefully
be a good local member. Will find out soon enough

(51:41):
whether she's reflective of the way the party is going
to go or whether it's just more of the same.
And of course the Liberal Party threw a lot of
money at this election in these seats. Die Lee, who
I said wasn't going anywhere in Cabramatta, was returned and
she claims she only spent a tenth on her campaign
that the Labor Party spent to unseat her. It was

(52:03):
an election I think that was fought on local issues,
but I think it was also an election that looked
at the figure of Peter Dutton and the rabble that
the Liberal Party had become and said no thanks, because
even though I said two thirds of people didn't vote
for Labor, two thirds of people didn't vote Liberal either,
and I think that's important to remember. And whereas the

(52:24):
Labor vote was able to translate into a peaceful transfer
of power in a democratic system, the Liberal vote looks
like it's going to kill the party altogether.

Speaker 2 (52:48):
We've also had that question from our audience about what
the big issues were during the campaign that influenced the
result of the election. Or was it the result of
a very good Labor campaign. Was it the result of
a very bad campaign for the Liberal Party, A good
prime minister, bad opposition leader, good luck for the Labor Party,
bad luck for the Liberal Party. Was that the influence

(53:09):
of Donald Trump, the economy, the record of the Labor
government and what they offered for the future relative to
the Liberal Party. I guess the answer is, well, it's
probably a combination of all of those factors. But we've
talked about this before. It was still about the perfect
campaign by the Labor Party. Almost nothing went wrong for
the Labor Party, almost everything went wrong for the Liberal Party.

(53:31):
Labor worked hard the Liberal Party, didn't, you know. Aside
from all of these issues, I think the other issue
is that the twenty twenty two federal election was a
change of government election, but the best way to assess
the twenty twenty five election is that it's a change
of politics election and this is the one that will
have far reaching effects.

Speaker 3 (53:52):
Yeah, I think so. I don't know that the Labor
Party will continue in its current form for much longer either,
and it's hard to see that from a position of triumph.
But the philosophical underpinnings and the organization of the Labor
Party is also an older and perhaps anachronistic model now

(54:12):
as it is for the Liberal Party. It's an election
that we'll be writing about in one hundred years time
as to how it changes things in the way that
we write about the twenty nine election or the Petrov
election or the eighty three election, that it didn't just
change the government, it changed how we did things.

Speaker 2 (54:30):
But we saw that the Labor Party is a very
good campaign machine in this election. I guess that's a
follow on from the twenty twenty two election, and they
had Paul Erickson as their campaign director in twenty twenty two,
who was there again this time around, and they've got
some very good MPs. It's got a lot of depth.
Now the Labor Party, they've got a lot of numbers.

(54:50):
This is the largest federal caucus of around one hundred
and twenty five members. They'll have to find a big
enough room to fit them all in for all of
their meetings. And a lot of people are going to say, well,
you would say that, wouldn't you. You guys are Labor
Party supporters, and I think, as you mentioned before, David,
were last week we were accused of being Green supporters.
A couple of months ago, we were accused of being

(55:12):
Liberal Party supporters. You know, we still haven't been accused
of being National Party supporters, but you know, there's always
time for that to happen. But it's just that, whichever
way you look at it objectively, this is the result
of having good campaign, as a good story to tell,
and being able to have all of those issues that
we talked about before flowing in your favor and on

(55:32):
every issue, you know, on health, on education, economy, national security,
even Donald Trump and international affairs, every single issue flowed
in the favor of the Labor Party. And it's not
like these things just happened automatically. The Labor Party made
these things flow in their favor through having a good campaign.
It's always going to be the case that the winners

(55:54):
will say that their campaign and their techniques were far
superior and were absolutely brilliant, without revealing exactly what was
going on behind the scenes and how shit scared they
might have been of losing. But that's pretty much what happened.
It was a far superior campaign and fast dealing with
the issues in a far superior way, and for the

(56:15):
Liberal Party and for the National Party it was the
exact opposite. Nuclear power is still a big problem for
them and they still want to push through with this
big losing policy, and you know, with the Nationalism Tim
Wilson saying that they will keep going on with the
nuclear power policy. And they couldn't make a case for
any of the policies that you'd normally expect to see
from a Liberal Party or any of the issues that

(56:38):
you'd normally see the Liberal Party campaigning on. They had
poor campaigning techniques, They focus on the wrong issues that
no one really cared about. They had a diabolical leader
in Peter Darton, and you know, maybe the election wasn't
lost during the campaign. The twenty twenty five election campaign
or the twenty twenty five election was lost. On the

(56:58):
night of the twenty twenty election, when the Liberal Party
learned absolutely nothing, that's probably when this election was lost
for the Liberal Party.

Speaker 3 (57:08):
Yeah, I think so. In the article that we did
on Monday, I also point to the Voice and I
said at the time that no matter how the Voice went,
it would be the end of Peter Dutton because he'd
either have to agree with it and isolate a lot
of his support base, or disagree with it and be
seen as a racist. And again I'm not saying he
is a racist necessarily. I don't know the man. I've

(57:30):
never met the man. It's a perception. It was really
a pyrrhic victory for him. That's going to take a
long while for the party to protest too, that you
can lose elections in the future from what you do today.
And when the glow of victory has dimmed for Labor,
they probably should look in and see what time bombs

(57:50):
have we set for ourselves in this victory that we
can stave off and build on the victory, which is
something the Liberals never did. They just assume that they
would be returned to power, I think, which explained the
lack of policy, which explained the lackluster performances, which explained
the lack of care of how to craft the image
of your leader. And it turns out Peter Dutton had

(58:11):
it in him. His campaign speech was quite incredible. It
was very nice, it was very well done. It seemed genuine,
it seemed heartfelt. If you can fake sincerity, you've got
it made. But I do believe he meant it. If
we'd seen even a glimpse of that person over the
last three or four years, they wouldn't have won. There
was no way they were going to win this election,

(58:31):
but he might have put them into the type of
position where they can win for the next one.

Speaker 2 (58:55):
And just looking at the future, because David, we always
like to look at the future and we're very, very
positive people. But I think this is a very big
opportunity for the government to implement a true Labor agenda.
And I guess we've talked about this quite often today.
There is a massive amount of political capital for the
Labor government and for Anthony Albanesi, and you know, quite

(59:17):
often elections flush out that residual dislike of a prime
minister and Anthony Alberanes he was certainly unpopular in those
opinion polls over the past eighteen months or so. But
as we suggested last week, those opinion polls might have
been wrong as well, and in hindsight, there might have
been an excuse for Anthony Albanesi to be so cautious.

(59:38):
In his first term of government. He only held majority
by three seats. It was a first term government, and
he wanted to build up the trust and confidence within
the electorate in a federal labor government. And that's all
been achieved now. But there's no point in building up
this high watermark and just keeping this high watermark up
for the sake of it. Politicians have to use politic

(01:00:00):
call capital and exercise the power that they've been given
wisely from the electorate. Otherwise, well, what's the point of
having that power and that authority.

Speaker 3 (01:00:09):
I don't think Anthony Abernezi has been ever been that
terribly personally popular. Kevin Rudd. They dumped Kevin Rudd when
he'd gone from the unsustainable eighty two percent to sixty
four percent. John Howard said at the time he'd love
to get, you know, fifty five percent. To dump your
leader at sixty four percent was just electoral suicide, which

(01:00:31):
it was. Anthony Abernese isn't a Bob Hawker, a Kevin
Rudd type person who's going to get extremely high approval
ratings consistently, and I don't think he wants to be that,
and I think he sees the danger in that. And
of course it's very hard under the rud laws to
remove a prime minister. You've got to get two thirds
of the caucus, and if you get to that stage,

(01:00:54):
you generally don't want to have a show of like
a unity and all of that. So I think the
Angel with Labor is overestimating its individual popularity as opposed
to its electoral popularity, which are two different things. They
can assume that they will lose some seats in twenty
twenty eight, and that's natural, and I don't mean that

(01:01:17):
there'll be so many poor performers that they lose their seats.
I think that the pattern is that you do best
in your first election and then you get another bump in
your third or your fourth, if you're like you to
get that far. It's not usually that in your second
you get such a big bump. So you'd think that
the strategists will start to think about well, we're going

(01:01:38):
to lose some how do we minimize the loss and
maybe even gain seats that we can offset against those
losses and hopefully win those anyway. But it is an
advantage that Anthony alban EASi isn't a wildly popular leader
like Bob Hawk, like Kevin Rudd, because that brings its

(01:01:58):
own problems.

Speaker 2 (01:01:58):
In Well, maybe that's the inherent check and balance that
comes into the situation that is not overly popular like
those previous figures, and that might end up being a disadvantage.
But I also think that for the Labor government, it's
not going to be enough to say, oh, well, this
is what we propose at the twenty twenty five election.
We've got a mandate just to do that, you know,

(01:02:20):
and nothing more. And I've just never felt a political
party or a government they proposed something at the time
of the election and then that's still going to be
suitable three years later. You've got to be a lot
more flexible than that, because times change, the world changes,
the economy changes, and I realize that the Labor government
has to be careful with overreach. That's what we've talked

(01:02:41):
about quite a lot today. But that's where your political
narrative comes into it, explaining things in the right way,
bringing the electorate with you. And if you do this correctly,
you can implement good, positive change and social change in
the interests of the community. And Labour's got this massive majority,
you know, it's got a favorable center. The mainstream media

(01:03:03):
is pretty much ineffective in being able to prosecute change
on behalf of big business and conservative interests. The influence
of Gina Reinhardt on the Liberal Party where that's gone completely,
that's you know, her influence on the Liberal Party on politics,
that's a joke. Now you've just got to ignore that.
And you've also got an opposition that's close to useless

(01:03:25):
and probably two or three terms away from being able
to return to office. So unless something remarkable happens, that
there's at least another six years of Labor government, and
during that time it will be possible to make long
term and much needed reforms to many parts of society schools, education, mining,

(01:03:46):
the media, the economy. And we've made this point so
many times today, David. You know, I'm sorry if we
keep repeating it, but you just do not get these
source of chances very often in politics. You know, once
every fifty or sixty years, you rarely get some as
unelectable as Peter Dunn in a campaign, and then that
person is replaced with someone like Angus Taylor or Susan Lay.

(01:04:07):
You know, you don't often have your opponents in such
a poor position that they're unlikely to offer any resistance
for the next four or five years. And you've also
got a Liberal party that is so resistant to making
the changes that need to be made for them to
become more politically viable. So this is the time. You know,
you're not going to get a more favorable situation in

(01:04:28):
politics than what the Labor Party is facing at the moment.
You just have to take up that opportunity. Yeah, you know,
I'm sorry if I'm sounding like a broken record, but
it just has to be repeated.

Speaker 3 (01:04:38):
Fortune favors the bold, grasp, the nettle carp adm, kick
out the jams, whatever you how you want to phrase it.
Labour's got an unprecedented chance to push Australia to be
the progressive, open, multicultural, prosperous society that's in it and

(01:04:59):
it's always been held back by small minded governments and
it's been really one step forward, five step back thing
for a long time. This is how you cement your legacy.
I went through some of it earlier, but now would
be the time to reform the banking system, get rid
of the chunks and the spibs. Now it would be
the time to distance yourself from a dangerous American government,

(01:05:22):
a government that's more interested in entertainment than policy. Now
would be the time to make Australia a middle power
in the South Pacific, to make it a friend to
the major powers, To realize that the far East to
them is the near north to us. To build our

(01:05:42):
ties with Europe, with South America, with India, although India
is probably not great at the moment because of what's
happening with Pakistan, but to either avoid it or pick
a side and commit to that side, and pick the
side that is on the right, on the correct side,
on the side of good and justice and democracy and

(01:06:02):
all the things that we needed to be on the
side of. And if it's not in Australia's interest to
stay out of it, look to Finland, look to Scandinavia
for models in education, for models in healthcare. We still
have one of the best health systems in the world.
There's no reason why we can't have the best health
system in the world. We had one of the best
education systems in the world. There's no reason why we

(01:06:25):
can't get back to that. And Labour's got this unprecedented
opportunity to fix all this. And with the death of
the Liberal Party, now's the time we're not going to
be hearing a lot of policy is developed by those
geniuses on Sky After Dark because they're gone as influences.
And so now's the chance to become the great nation.

(01:06:47):
And I hesitate to say it, to make Australia great,
And I won't put in the last word because you
all know what I'm trying not to say.

Speaker 2 (01:06:57):
And we will be having a short break from the
podcast for a couple of weeks. We're pretty exhausted after
this big campaign. But we've also got a big book
on the twenty twenty five federal election to finish off,
and that will be out in a few weeks time
and will be back when we finish that off at
the end of May.

Speaker 3 (01:07:14):
Thanks Eddie for a terrific campaign. I'm looking forward to
finishing off the book. It's been fun, it's been amazing
to be a tiny tiny part of it, and to
watch it from this perspective has been a great experience.
I hope that the audience has mostly enjoyed it, and
thank you for all the comments, good, bad, and indifferent.
It's great to hear that people are listening to us

(01:07:36):
and at least appreciating that we have something to say.

Speaker 2 (01:07:42):
That's it for this episode of New Politics. Thanks for
listening in, and if you'd like to support our style
of journalism and commentary, please make your donation at our
website at newpolitics dot com dot au. We don't beg plead,
beseech or gaslight you about journalism coming to an end.
We just keep it very simple. If you like while
we do, please send some support our way. It keeps

(01:08:03):
our commitment to independent journalism ticking along. B I'm Eddie Jokovic.
Thanks for listening in, and it's goodbye to our listeners.

Speaker 3 (01:08:10):
I'm David Lewis. We'll see you next time.