The light on the hill burns bright
May. 6th, 2025 08:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12This 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:
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.
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.
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Date: 2025-05-06 08:52 pm (UTC)I really, really wanted to be in Australia this past weekend, and had to content myself with my mother sending me photos she'd taken of the laptop screen as she watched the ABC's live coverage, Sister #1 sending me increasingly ecstatic text messages (and finally photos of her dancing wildly around the living room), and Sister #2 posting wholesome Instagram content of her reelected MP, set to a Taylor Swift soundtrack.
The friends we were visiting included one Canadian, however, so much political fun was had by all nonetheless. What a bizarre week it's been in global politics!
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Date: 2025-05-06 08:32 pm (UTC)(We also had an even further right local billionaire businessman start up a new political party — in what was I think his third attempt — called, I kid you not, 'Trumpet of Patriots,' whose antics included sending mass spam text messages to all Australian voters, only to lose spectacularly and claim that he had essentially flushed $60 million down the drain in this latest political vanity project.)
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Date: 2025-05-06 08:38 pm (UTC)but sad that the Greens lost their 3 or 4 seats - it looks like even Greens leader Adam Bandt has lost his seat :(
I was hoping for Labor forming a minority government with the Greens, so that the greens could force
- real action on climate change
- real action on public housing
- action on their plan for subsidised dental care as part of Medicare
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Date: 2025-05-06 08:47 pm (UTC)The way to push governments into action is to remind them that democracy is not just about elections — it's not a voting ritual where we get wheeled out of our boxes every three-five years, number a few squares on a piece of paper, and then go dormant — it's constant, active citizenship, which means voters need to remain engaged, writing to their MPs, joining grassroots campaigns, participating in protests, etc, according to their capacity and ability. If people step up in this regard, I'm confident that they will see corresponding action from the new Labor government. It may end up being partial, or imperfect, but it will be a step down the right road.
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Date: 2025-05-06 10:19 pm (UTC)Hurray!
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Date: 2025-05-10 02:35 pm (UTC)The only thing I'd change about the system is to make parliamentary terms four years rather than three, as I feel that the three-year electoral cycle makes Australian politicians (and, to be honest, voters) bad at long-term thinking.
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Date: 2025-05-10 11:26 am (UTC)SO DELIGHTED.
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Date: 2025-05-10 02:49 pm (UTC)The last time something in Australian politics made me that delighted was 2007, when we voted out a ghastly, right-wing government, led by John Howard, who had been prime minister for my entire adolescence, undergraduate years, and the first year of my full-time working life. They'd been in office for eleven years (the second-longest serving prime minister in Australia's history), they were really on the nose, and everyone knew they were going to get booted out of power — the question was just how decisively.
At that time, Australia still had a 'national tally room' in Canberra, where all the votes from all the various polling stations were counted (obviously the actual ballots were counted closer to the individual polling stations, but they were tallied in this central location in our capital city), and where members of the public could come in and witness democracy in action. TV news crews often filmed their election night coverage there as well. I was watching the ABC's tally room coverage at my mum's place with a bunch of tipsy, ageing left-wing boomers — champagne was flowing.
As the night wore on, it became apparent that John Howard — the sitting prime minister — was going to lose his seat, the first time this had happened in Australia since the Second World War. (As in the UK, you would never put the sitting prime minister in a marginal seat, and this was one of the safest, safest Liberal seats in the country — I think it had literally always been held by a member of the Liberal Party.) The live ABC coverage from the tally room was finding it impossible to broadcast, because they were getting drowned out by a massive, cheering crowd of members of the public, who were celebrating Howard losing his seat so loudly that the journalists and other pundits were unable to make themselves heard. (As in the UK, they had members of the two main political parties on their panel, and the Liberal politician started whining about 'lefty ABC bias,' as if they'd somehow brought in their own partisan crowd, as opposed to this being the genuine, spontaneous emotion of all the members of the public witnessing the election results unfold in the tally room.)
All the above was incredibly satisfying to watch. I'm not sure if it's beaten by Dutton losing his seat this time around, but it's close!