Why campaign Albo was such a work of art

When Donald Trump phoned Anthony Albanese on Monday to offer his congratulations, the prime minister wanted to drive home the scale of his victory.

The election result was “extraordinary”, he told the US president, according to a person familiar with the content of the call. We will have more than twice the number of seats in the House of Representatives as our opponents, he told Trump.

Illustration by Simon LetchCredit:

Trump is only interested in winners. In character, he publicly described Albanese as “very good” and a “friend” while disowning Peter Dutton: “I have no idea who the other person is that ran against him.”

At that point, Labor was heading for a tally of 86 seats, a comfortable Labor majority of 10. By Friday, it had improved. Labor had clinched at least 91 seats according to this masthead’s assessment and that of the ABC. The Coalition has won only 40 so far in a chamber with 150.

Albanese was not exaggerating. The former Liberal campaign director Tony Barry, of Redbridge, recalls Albanese’s remark that he’s been underestimated by people his whole life, “and I’m one of them”, adds Barry, who goes on to describe the result as “extraordinary”, the Labor campaign as “brilliant” and the effect as “structural, not cyclical”.

What does he mean by structural? “For the Liberals, we’d think, ‘It’s our turn, then it’s Labor’s turn’, depending on the cycle. Now it’s almost beyond cyclical – that you are so weak, you can’t win. Even if there’s a mood for change, the Liberals lack the strength to win structurally,” he says.

“You don’t have money, you don’t have donors, you don’t have good candidates. How would you convince a quality candidate like Keith Wolahan – a successful barrister with a young family – to give up his work for two years to campaign?”

Wolahan lost the outer metropolitan Melbourne seat of Menzies to Labor after a single term. Barry offers the Liberal Party’s Victorian branch as an example of a party so institutionally weak that it can’t win against a deeply unpopular state Labor government.

A former deputy leader of the Liberal Party, Fred Chaney, says, “We’re close to being back to 1940 when Bob Menzies stepped in and started the Liberal Party by bringing together all the non-Labor groups.” But, he says, he looks in vain for anyone with the stature to forge a new centre-right catch-all party with mass appeal.

Chaney, a minister in the Fraser government and uncle of the “teal” independent Kate Chaney, joined the Liberals in 1959 and was an active member until 1995: “It was genuinely a broad church and accommodated a broad range of views. But for a long time the moderates in the party have been spineless. The tragedy is that the National Party has become the tail that wags the dog.”

Kate Chaney with her uncle and former Liberal Party deputy leader Fred Chaney, in 2022. Credit: Bohdan Warchomij

He says that he knows families, like his, that were multi-generational Liberal bastions, but today would not even consider voting for the party. “The problem is that the Liberals don’t like Australia as it is. Australia is not the problem, it’s the Liberals themselves.” The party didn’t win a majority of women in any age group, nor a majority of any age cohort under the age of 60.

So the Liberals did poorly; Labor did well. Extraordinarily well. Every first-term government since World War II has suffered a net loss of lower house seats when re-elected to a second term. Including Bob Hawke’s and John Howard’s. Albanese gained. Notably, Labor took the opposition leader’s seat, another first.

Taken together with Albanese’s 2023 feat of leading the first government in a century to win a seat from the opposition at a byelection, it must be time to reevaluate the man.

Politically, in manner plebeian, he is royalty. “Whatever you say about Albanese,” says the political historian Paul Rodin, “he’s done some important things historically.” In only three years. Tony Barry agrees: “Winners write history, and he’s writing it, and he’s got quite a good entry in the history books already.”

Another of Labor’s extraordinary accomplishments at the election is that it cut into political territory to its right and left, unseating not only the Liberal leader but also Greens’ leader Adam Bandt. It’s evidence of how firmly Labor conquered the centre.

The Greens bragged that their share of the vote was a record high for the party, but in the electorates where they actually held seats – all four of them – voters rejected the Greens MPs in at least three, with the result in the fourth still pending. The seats lost by the Greens all were taken by Labor.

Seeking to diminish Albanese’s achievement, the Greens’ acting leader, Nick McKim, says: “The prime minister needs to recognise that this was a strong result for Labor in terms of seats, not votes.

“Only around one-third of Australians voted for his party, his national primary vote is lower than Mark Latham achieved in 2004, and in many seats Labor only won thanks to Greens preferences.”

This is all true, but how so? Labor’s primary vote was 34.7 per cent on the count so far. That’s an increase of 2.1 per cent since the last election. But it used to be orthodoxy that Labor needed a primary vote of 38 to 40 per cent to win a majority. How can such a modest primary produce such a big majority of seats?

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese addressing Labor caucus on Friday morning. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

It’s a kind of electoral alchemy. In this election, Labor won a primary vote 11 percentage points lower than Bob Hawke’s when he was re-elected in 1987. Yet Albanese won a bigger share of the two-party preferred vote and more seats than Hawke did. How?

A Labor strategist points to a campaign conducted on two levels. At the national level, Labor had a clear and consistent set of overarching themes, positive and negative. At the local level, Labor ran dozens of distinct campaigns tailored “to meet the community where they are”. This was six years in the planning, led jointly by Albanese and Labor’s national secretary, Paul Erickson.

“We won seats in inner-city Melbourne and the north-west coast of Tasmania – they couldn’t be further apart,” says the strategist. Labor took some seats, like Bandt’s seat of Melbourne, from the Greens and others, like north-west Tasmania’s Braddon, from the Liberals, with quite different local campaigns.

Apart from the bifurcated structure of the campaign, what were the main strengths of the Labor effort? Its architects nominate its theme of the future, whereas the Coalition’s campaign constantly referenced the past. Dutton wanted to know whether you were better off than you were three years ago, while Albanese offered a brighter prospect for the three years ahead. Under the “future” rubric came all its policy offerings.

A Liberal strategist, asked to nominate the reasons for the party’s failure, named its feeble, ill-aimed and chaotic effort at policy offerings first and foremost. “Everything was left to the last moment.”

The Liberal next nominated its polling. This misled the campaign. For example, the party’s pollsters twice surveyed Dutton’s seat of Dickson and both times reported that he was ahead by 55 per cent to Labor’s 45. But when Labor polled the same seat in the campaign’s first week, it found that it was effectively at parity with 49.5 per cent and knew it could be won.

Third, the Liberal pointed to Dutton’s poor image, which contrasted with Albanese’s. Fourth came Donald Trump. The impression that Dutton was a Temu Trump hurt the Liberal vote as the US president upturned the global order and sent the sharemarket into downturn.

Indeed, the Labor strategist highlighted three moments where Albanese’s leadership boosted the party’s support. First was his performance during Tropical Cyclone Alfred, contrasting with Dutton’s flight to a Sydney fundraiser at the time. The other two were times when Trump imposed tariffs on Australian exports. Albanese’s responses reassured the country.

Albanese and Peter Dutton in one of the leaders’ debates during the election campaign.Credit: News Corp Australia

As the campaign progressed, Albanese’s confidence gained. When some of his advisers recommended that he agree to three debates with Dutton, Albanese insisted on doing a fourth. When some around him told him not to risk his lead by appearing at the National Press Club, he did it anyway. The Liberal strategist counted Albanese’s confident campaign performances as the fourth decisive factor.

And the Greens’ poor showing? Tony Barry says that they were seen as obstructionist and extremist: “Older Labor voters who sometimes vote Greens just went back into Labor’s arms.”

At some points in his time as Labor leader, Albanese has conceived of himself in John Howard’s mode as a relatable, reassuring everyman. At others, he’s seen himself in Hawke’s model as a centrist consensus-builder. How does he imagine his political persona today? In reply to this question from an interlocutor, he answers simply: “I’m me.”

We will learn more fully who he is from the way he wields his enlarged mandate in his second term governing, a vastly more complex challenge than campaigning. But we probably shouldn’t underestimate him.

Peter Hartcher is political editor.

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