The light on the hill burns bright

This is quite possibly the longest I've gone after the result of an election in one of my countries is known before writing up a post in response. This time, it was for good reasons: I was away visiting friends over the weekend (about which more in a later post), and, after a fretfully sleepless night of anxiety about the result, I woke up on Saturday morning UK time to find that my fellow Australian citizens had done me proud.

This is the first election since I turned eighteen in which I was not eligible to vote; I lost the right due to living overseas for too long, so I contributed literally nothing to the outcome.

Non-Australians wanting further context about our electoral system can read my post from the last election in 2022, which goes into more detail about all these things, but the crucial and decisive factors to my mind are: a) mandatory voting and b) preferential (ranked choice) voting, which lead to more moderate politics, and make it impossible for a party to win by appealling to a narrow base and assuming low turnout will do the rest for them. (I can only remember a single election in my lifetime that was won on what I'd term culture war issues.) I'm happy to answer further questions about Australian democracy, political parties, etc in the comments if you're interested.

In 2022, we voted in a Labor government on a razor thin majority after a decade of centre-right conservative government. I commented at the time that our centre-right parties (they always campaign and govern as a two-party coalition, and do not field candidates in 'each other's' electorates) had a choice: do some soul-searching, work out what went wrong, and try to course-correct in three years' time, or the opposite, which I termed as follows:

'Are we out of touch? No, it's the voters who are wrong'

I'm pleased to report that they did the latter, and, after a few tense months where it appeared this might have paid off, it became apparant that Australians do not currently want culture warring right-wing populism, and responded by reelecting Labor in an absolutely massive landslide. Peter Dutton, the creepy, far-right culture-warring opposition leader made history, but not in the way he wanted: he became the first opposition leader in Australia to lose his seat in an election. (The schadenfreude on Australian politics social media was absolutely off the charts.)

The two of my sisters who are adults are what we'd term in Australia 'true believers': die-hard Labor supporters, party members who spent this election as volunteers for their local Labor candidates' campaigns. Sister #1 was even briefly asked to stand as the candidate, but ultimately ruled it out, instead throwing her efforts behind the woman who did stand, in an unwinnable electorate where it was important to have someone from Labor on the ballot to make it harder for the conservative candidate to win against the 'teal' independent who was standing. Sister #2 appears to have run the social media accounts for her own Labor MP who was facing a very tough uphill battle for reelection which was ultimately successful. Both sisters are, as you can imagine, absolutely ecstatic.

The very first piece of legislation the reelected Labor government is going to pass will reduce student debts by 20 per cent.

I can't claim to have contributed anything to this result, but I've been floating on air for the past four days as a consequence.

I'll close this post with a few commentary pieces whose analysis teases out some of the issues that were in play this election.

Annabel Crabb on Dutton's toxicity with female voters

Crabb again, on the failure of culture wars to affect the result

The Murdoch press no longer has the power to sway voters

Edited to add two articles about the lengths to which the Australian electoral commission will go to ensure all voters have their ballots, and have no difficulties voting: one and two.

And, finally, one link and another, which provide context for the title of this post, and my 2022 election post as well.

A massive round of applause for all Australian voters.