James Campbell: How Anthony Albanese won the election with less votes than Bill Shorten

Vote share has plummeted for both major players as minor parties’ and independents’ popularity has surged. Is this the end of majority governments, asks James Campbell.

It’s not hard to understand why Labor folk and their friends in the media are up and about at the moment.

But before everyone gets too carried away with the idea that last weekend marks some kind of permanent leftward shift in the psyche of the nation, they ought to consider that this was the second election in a row at which the ALP has lost votes.

Yes, you read that right: in 2019 more people as a percentage voted for the losing Bill Shorten than voted for last weekend’s winner Anthony Albanese.

Not only that, at the time of writing — with still around 20 per cent of the votes to be counted — Labor has a primary vote of 32.8, which, believe it or not, is actually lower than the 33.38 per cent the Ruddster got when the public showed him the door back in 2013. Compared to this lot, the loser Mark Latham was a rock star: in 2004 he got 37.6 per cent of the primaries.

New Prime Minister Anthony Albanese won, but the ALP’s vote fell … again. Picture: John Grainger

But, despite the continuing decline in Labor’s popularity, Anthony Albanese is now the Prime Minister with a likely – one-seat – majority in his own right.

His actual buffer is actually much bigger, of course, because he can be pretty sure he can rely on the votes of 12 of the 15 “others” elected last week.

The reason, of course, is that while the popularity of the Labor Party has been in decline, so too has the popularity of the Liberal Party.

In the Coalition’s case, its vote has dropped at every election since Tony Abbott brought it back to office in 2013. At that poll he got 45.55 per cent of the primary vote, which became 42.04 per cent at the hands of Malcolm Turnbull in 2016.

At his miracle win in 2019, Scott Morrison got 41.44 per cent, which crashed last Saturday to 36.2 per cent.

In other words, over the past 20 or so years while Labor has been going broke in a genteel steady-as-she-goes sort of fashion, the Coalition’s decline has been much more sudden and dramatic.

Mark Latham lost the 2004 election with a much larger vote share.

You can see this from the results in Josh Frydenberg’s seat of Kooyong, where for most of the past 20 years the primary vote was in the low to mid-50s — indeed as high as 58.2 per cent as recently as 2016.

From that high in Malcolm-time, it crashed to 49.41 per cent in 2019 under Scott Morrison before dropping again to 42.98 per cent last weekend.

Some of this can be explained by demographic changes to the electorate, which has a lot more renters and young people in it than were there six years ago, but not all of it.

Everyone will no doubt have their own theories why the Liberal Party’s vote fell so brutally.

Some think it was because it was too right-wing, some because it wasn’t right-wing enough.

Some will ponder whether in these fractious and divided times it is just no longer possible for a political party to appeal to people everywhere.

Perhaps in the future majority governments will become the exception and most of the time prime ministers will find themselves negotiating with a crossbench to get their legislation through.

That normal service can be resumed for the Liberal Party by swapping out voters in the Teal seats for voters in Labor’s heartland is an idea that has been floated in recent days, and sounds good in theory.

But encouraging people in these seats to stop voting Labor will be a much easier job I suspect than encouraging them to vote Liberal.

Josh Frydenberg’s primary vote has fallen by more than 15 per cent since 2016. Picture: Andrew Henshaw

A large number of the members of the Liberal Party — in Victoria I’d say a majority — now live in seats held either by Labor, the Greens or the Teals. Are the advocates of this strategy of targeting the outer suburbs planning on moving there to make this happen?

The first thing they would discover if they did is that while the residents of these places share the socially conservative views of the Right wing of the Liberal Party the things they have in common don’t go much beyond that.

As the Tories have discovered from their success in the formerly Labor-voting areas of the north of England, people living in poorer areas tend to have a very different attitude to government spending than people living in richer areas. Indeed, unsurprisingly, many of them tend to think it is the job of the people in those rich areas to pay for their government services.

Which isn’t to say that the Liberal Party can’t get itself into an auction for their affections — obviously it can — but just that to do so it will need to be a very different sort of Liberal Party to the one we have today.

My only other observation about last weekend is that the Liberals’ situation in Victoria is now so dire it has become an existential threat to the Coalition.

The party lost four seats there — two to Labor and two to Teals — leaving it with a grand total of eight out of 39, while the Nats hold another three.

Labor has 24 seats and the crossbench another four.

If Victoria continues to give the anti-Coalition forces a 28-seat head start in the race to 76, it’s hard to see how the Coalition can hope to hold office for very long in Canberra.

Originally published as James Campbell: How Anthony Albanese won the election with less votes than Bill Shorten