Anthony Albanese today became the first Australian prime minister to win consecutive federal elections since John Howard in 2004. More than that, he swept to victory with an increased lower house majority, while Leader of the Opposition Peter Dutton unexpectedly lost his own seat.

However, Albanese’s apparent success masks a growing disillusionment among voters with both major parties, the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and the Liberal-National Party Coalition. At the time of writing, with some votes still being counted, the combined primary vote for the two major parties stands at less than 66%. If reflected in the final tally, this would be the lowest ever.

Recent events have not helped either party. The Albanese government, elected without much fanfare in 2022, has proven disappointing. It blew considerable political capital in its failed referendum to enshrine an Indigenous “Voice” into the Australian constitution, and has struggled to address cost-of-living pressures. While Albanese had, by general consensus, a strong election campaign, Labor’s primary vote share stands at 34.7%. This is just two percentage points above its 2022 level, which was itself the smallest winning margin in nearly a century.

As today’s results make clear, things have been even more difficult for the Coalition and Dutton. Despite landing a series of blows against Albanese in the past three years, especially over the Voice referendum, immigration bungles, and the cost of living, Dutton has been far less effective at putting forward a vision of his own. A disastrous, poorly-coordinated election campaign, marred by gaffes over working from home and Russian planes in Indonesia, as well as a number of policy U-turns, made an already difficult task — no first-term Australian government has lost office since 1931 — even more challenging. In these circumstances, it’s not entirely surprising that the Coalition’s primary vote has slumped to just 30.7%, its worst ever.

Unfortunately for both major parties, the long-term trends are running against them. For over a century, Australian politics has been dominated by Labor and various incarnations of the Coalition. Between them, they captured almost 98% of the vote at the 1951 federal election and were managing a shared total of over 90% into the Eighties. By the 2010 federal election, however, this had fallen to just over 80%, and in 2022 it slumped to 68.3%, then a record low.

Initially, this caused relatively little damage to the major parties, at least in the lower house. Thanks to Australia’s preferential voting system — under which the votes from lowest-ranked candidates are redistributed until one candidate reaches a majority — minor-party primary votes inevitably flowed back to the two main parties.

Yet, as the independent and minor-party vote share has continued to increase, this has weakened the major parties’ once-firm grip. By the 2022 election, a record 16 independent and minor-party MPs were elected to the lower house, representing more than 10% of the 151-member chamber. Even if, as seems possible based on current figures, some of these flow back to Labor, such as the Green-held seats of Brisbane and Griffith, the long-term trend is clear.

So far, this has caused the most damage to the Coalition. Most notably, all seven seats gained by the “teal” independents — who combine social liberalism with environmentalism and fiscal conservatism — were former Coalition strongholds, and it is unclear whether the Coalition will regain any of them in 2025. Labor has not been immune to this trend, either. Its former heartland seat of Melbourne, for instance, has been held by the Greens since 2010, and it may now lose the Canberra seat of Bean to an independent.

After a rough start to the year, when his approval ratings were at a low for his term, Albanese has every reason to celebrate today’s better than expected result. However, with such a low primary vote and growing numbers of voters rejecting the major parties, it would not take much for Labor to share the Coalition’s fate next time around.

---

Will Prescott is a senior researcher at Bright Blue.

wjprescott

---