This Sale Of The Century election will leave us all out of pocket

Follow live coverage of the 2025 federal election here.

What cost a victory? After an election spendathon, victory may prove a curse to the victor.

That is, of course, not how the result will be received and interpreted by the winners and losers. Politics is a zero-sum game in which power is prized for its own sake. There will be no shortage of campaign post-mortems seeking to learn how to replicate the win – who did what well and how it swung a booth here, a crucial marginal seat there. The campaign strategies will be forensically dissected in the media, along with the demographic trends that affected the result. None of this will answer whether we the people, as a whole, were well served.

Perhaps politicians believe their job is to give away prizes in a nationwide Sale of the Century.Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto

We weren’t. For anyone of working age, the most consequential assessment of the 2025 election was delivered before the polls, in the last week of the campaign, by rating agency Standard & Poor’s. S&P Global warned that Australia’s triple-A credit rating might be downgraded “if election promises result in larger, structural deficits, and debt and interest expenses rising more than we expect”.

This is a serious matter. The rating awarded by the agency determines how costly it is for Australia to borrow money – essentially, how much interest we have to pay on the national debt. And we’ve got a lot of that. If the rating were to be downgraded, we’d be like a household which, struggling to keep up with mortgage payments, puts living costs on a high-interest credit card.

S&P’s assessment is more important than the most insightful campaign post-mortem because the agency couldn’t give two figs who wins an Australian election, or any other. Its assessment of the effect of our cyclical spendathon is ruthlessly dispassionate. The agency simply passes judgment on the nation’s ability to pay its debts, given its baked-in habit of spending more than it earns, not whether it is having a nice time or doing lovely, compassionate things with its money. And the agency thinks Australia is getting closer to a point where lending money to us might become risky.

That should have scared voters more thoroughly than any ominous political ad. It’s a sign of our economically feckless times that Anthony Albanese just sneered at S&P Global’s warning and brushed off its assessment that the true state of the budget is being obscured.

In the past, the rating agency’s independent censure could have been leveraged by a savvy opposition into a knockout blow on an incumbent government. Not this campaign, though. Because the Coalition began the campaign by matching Labor’s sizeable spending promises (and continued throughout as more were announced), it had long since neutralised its own attacks on Labor based on economic management. Even if it had been able to explain the big-picture problem in a way that made it salient to people struggling to borrow enough to get by at an individual level, the Coalition blew its ability to claim it would manage any better.

With the two supposedly serious parties focused on handouts and accounting tricks, the campaign gave a slew of minor parties and independents funded by various interest groups a perfect opportunity to slide into the political fray under the very low bar they had set. The Greens have freed themselves from the chains of evidence entirely. A group called the Muslim Vote put up candidates on the sole issue of religious affiliation with the people of Palestine and were treated by many media outlets as a delicious new snack imported from the Orient – a very different approach to that Fred Nile, for instance, received when he ran the Christian Democratic Party.

Among a flurry of handouts and small-target strategies, the campaign has left Australians utterly untroubled by any forward vision for the country. Rather than highlighting the debt that the promises are creating and pressing party leaders to outline what kind of society all these perks and favours are supposed to create, the media has reported the contest for buckets of money as though the real question were why politicians are so mean-spirited in distributing the fruits of an evergreen money tree. Despite increasing global threats, the question was rarely posed as to how consistently spending beyond our means will shape our place in the world.

The final days of the campaign. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen, James Brickwood

If I ever permit myself to feel a little sorry for politicians, it’s on this front: they are never asked how they are going to set the economy right so that individuals can shape a life of their choosing; they are only ever accused of leaving one group or another behind. Perhaps they have collectively, genuinely begun to believe the real aim of the political game is giving away prizes in a sort of nationwide Sale of the Century. The role of political strategy is now just to ensure the prizes go to the groups holding the most crucial parcels of votes for re-election. Rationally, if cynically, many advocacy organisations have shifted to meet politicians where they’re at in this game, focusing on demonstrating they can shift key parcels of votes, rather than making the case that the policy they’re asking for is an overall good for Australia as a nation.

Of course, no wrap on this election would be complete without mentioning US President Donald Trump. The president is terrifying voters at home, where his popularity has plummeted, and abroad. To celebrate his first 100 days in office, Trump lost the Canadian election for Pierre Poilievre, restoring the left-leaning Canadian Liberals (formerly led by Justin Trudeau) to power.

But though he looks like a whirlwind of chaos at present, he does have a plan. By the time it starts taking effect, Australia will be knees-deep in promised election spending and might find itself hit with a bill the country can’t pay without pain. The real losers in this election are Australians, whichever way we voted.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens.