Australia's Election Upset

May 5th, 2025

Lindsey Zhao

For months, polls had predicted the upcoming Australian parliamentary elections would see the (ironically named) Liberal National Party conservatives eking out a victory over the ruling Labor Party liberals.

Instead, the center-left Labor Party handed the Liberals a resounding defeat and increased their Parliamentary majority; Prime Minister Anthony Albanese won a second term; and conservative party leader Peter Dutton lost his own seat, a mirror to Canadian challenger Pierre Poilievre. Surprisingly, though, this Liberal Party loss might’ve just been due to one polarizing politician—one thousands of miles away.

The decisive results of the election, which saw the Labor Party actually increase their majority in Parliament from 78 to at least 86 seats in the 150-seat House of Representatives, were a testament to the changing political sentiments of Australians following the election of President Trump in the United States.

Prior to his election, the Liberal Party in Australia seemed on an unprecedented political rise, fueled by general unhappiness about the status quo and a strategy of MAGA-style politics. Opposition leader Peter Dutton (who, as mentioned previously, has just lost the seat he has held for decades) has praised President Trump for being a “big thinker” and borrowed from his policies, including a DOGE-style government efficiency unit. He has appealed to far-right parties rising in influence—like One Nation and the Trumpet of Patriots—by calling the ABC and the Guardian “the hate media”, mirroring Trump’s anti-media language; refusing to say global warming was getting worse, while promising he would expand incredibly unpopular nuclear power despite federal and state bans; and arguing Indigenous welcome ceremonies are “overdone.”

Yet, after the disastrous meeting in the White House between President Trump and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in February and the US tariffs placed on Australia in April, Australian approval of Trump dropped sharply. A YouGov poll found that 66% of Australians believed the “US couldn’t be trusted as a security ally,” up from 39% percent roughly a year earlier. Nearly 70% of Australians were concerned that Trump would make them poorer.

Thus, Dutton’s fortunes shifted quickly; his embrace of MAGA-style politics quickly became a hindrance to both him and his party, gaining them some

far-right votes but at the expense of losing far too many moderates. Yet, Dutton’s election loss doesn’t mean that Prime Minister Albanese is out of the woods quite yet. His failure to pass the Voice to Parliament referendum, which would recognize several Indigenous tribes in the Australian constitution and prove a way to give them greater political say, still lingers in the minds of many voters who supported it.

Intifar Chowdhury, a lecturer at Flinders University in Australia, argued that his re-election was representative of voters choosing the “known evil” over the “unknown evil.”

Most of the election revolved around the high cost of living, housing shortages, and relations with China. As inflation has continued to rise and economic turmoil has been generated by trade uncertainties with the US, goods cost more and construction workers have gone bankrupt as their profit margins are erased. Australia also continues to grapple with how to deal with China, Australia’s largest trading partner but also a major strategic threat to the country.