One feature of election 2025 is the absence of the voice referendum as a symbol in the political contest. The voice was Peter Dutton’s finest call in the past parliament but the supposed permanent setback for Anthony Albanese has not materialised. The voice was a deceptive omen.
The spectre of the 2022 election now haunts the Coalition. Its fear is that the cultural and structural defects that ruined the Coalition in 2022 have not healed but still exist to deliver another damaging Coalition result in 2025. The question is: Have the Liberals been deceived by a political mirage, abetted by their media backers?
Dutton has been an effective Opposition Leader most of this term – he kept the Liberal Party united, displayed courage in promoting nuclear power, outsmarted Albanese on the voice, launched devastating attacks on Labor over living standards, distanced the party from the Morrison defeat and, in late 2024, had the Coalition in a competitive position.
But two things have gone wrong. The Liberals failed to address the fundamental challenge – agreement on their core beliefs to be promoted at the election, and the hard work to devise and finalise ahead of time the policies that would spearhead their 2025 campaign. The related problem is that the fracturing of the Coalition vote – critical in the 2022 defeat – seems to remain with the teals on the left and the Hanson-Clive Palmer parties on the right, both undermining the Coalition primary vote.
The latest polls point to a Labor win, presumably a minority Albanese government. But there are two qualifications. Much of the electorate is disinterested, with voting support being soft; and Coalition MPs still hope for a repressed conservative vote, not registering in the polls, but in areas that rejected the voice where resentment of governing elites still runs deep.
This week’s Newspoll had a warning siren – the Hanson One Nation vote at 8 per cent, up from 5 per cent at the last poll. And Palmer’s new party, the pro-Trump protest party Trumpet of Patriots, fuelled by a massive advertising campaign, is sure to register on the scoreboard. The danger is an ongoing fracturing of the conservative vote on the right.
Will the campaign break decisively one way or another in the final week? Maybe. If that happens, current trends suggest it will be towards Labor. It is hard to believe after the past three years that Albanese will be re-elected in a majority government, given the huge fall in living standards. Such a result would constitute a worse crisis for the Liberal Party than its 2022 defeat.
The Liberal Party brand is not strong enough. The core message – telling people why they should vote Liberal – is not cutting through. While Dutton has held the parliamentary forces together, conservative politics is plagued by ideological, policy and tactical differences.
What do the Liberals stand for apart from being against Albanese and determined to address the hip-pocket pain of Australians with more cost-of-living support than Labor?
The Liberals are weak on a future vision for the country. They have walked away from many of the icons of the Howard era: tax reform; industrial relations policy; they look unconvincing on fiscal responsibility; they are reluctant to show their credentials on spending restraint; incredibly, they still haven’t released their defence budget at a time of global geostrategic danger.
They retreated from their work-from-home policy, they are vulnerable over net zero, they have tried to be brave over nuclear and gas but left too many loose ends, and on housing they have released an audacious pitch designed to turn sentiment – with first-home buyers purchasing a new-built home able to deduct the interest paid on up to $650,000 of their mortgage, with no cap on home prices and eligibility for individuals earning up to $175,000, and for couples up to $250,000. The hip-pocket boost is hefty – a benefit of $12,000 a year for someone on a $650,000 mortgage and a taxable income of $120,000.
This reveals much about today’s Liberal Party. There is no way Peter Costello or Joe Hockey or Josh Frydenberg would have made this pledge. It will fuel demand, boost house prices, distort the income tax system and is highly regressive, with benefits to the better-off. It is economically flawed using the public purse to subsidise personal consumption in the form of housing purchases.
This list suggests a Liberal Party struggling to sort its values and policy implementation. At a time of global transformation, its focus is narrowcast and retail politics. It is fighting Labor on Labor’s territory. Being more ambitious would have been risky, but would it have been more risky than this retail politics framing?
None of this should detract from Dutton’s stands against anti-Semitism, for border protection, a reduced immigration intake, a crackdown on the CFMEU, restoring law and order to the building industry, tougher action against crime, a priority on patriotism, and reform of the education system. These are all part of the Dutton agenda but that agenda lacks traction.
The Coalition’s backers say in their defence: look how bad Labor is. But if Labor is so bad, then why isn’t the Coalition more ambitious?
While Dutton took direct Coalition support into the 39-40 per cent range late last year, this was deceptive, relying on anti-Labor sentiment. The closer the election got, the more the Coalition vote has slumped.
The trend is not Albanese winning votes, but Dutton losing them.
Federal election victories are driven by preference strategies. This is how Labor wins; it is how the Coalition loses. Labor is now a permanently weakened party, unlikely to ever recover; its primary vote in 2022 was 32.6 per cent. In the two recent polls, Newspoll has its primary vote at 33 per cent and the Resolve Political Monitor shows Labor at 31 per cent. Both results point to an ALP victory based on preference flows. At the 2022 election the preference flows to Labor were: from the Greens 85.7 per cent; from One Nation 35.7 per cent; from Clive Palmer’s UAP 38.1 per cent; and from independents 63.8 per cent.
With the Greens’ primary vote running at 12.3 per cent, much of this finished as a Labor vote. The paradox in 2022 was that despite the weak ALP primary vote, the country moved decisively to the left. This reflected the structural weakness of the Liberal Party, the power of the Greens and the emergence of the teals, winning six seats from the Liberals.
It would be a tall order, perhaps herculean, to imagine the Liberals could reverse this trend in one term. The Coalition is not just required to establish an ascendancy over Labor, but over the broadbased de facto alliance, Labor-Greens-teals, that constitutes a diverse anti-Coalition front.
At the 2022 election the combined One Nation and Palmer party vote was 9.1 per cent, a hefty slice coming off the Coalition vote. The risk, reinforced by Trumpian politics, is that this fragmentation on the right will continue at the coming election.
For the past 18 months much of the populist right media has relentlessly promoted Donald Trump and Pauline Hanson but, as is now obvious, this hasn’t helped Dutton. Labor now taunts him with the Trumpian curse while Hanson’s vote is rising, partly at the Coalition’s cost.
The Liberal Party 2022 election review, conducted by Brian Loughnane and Senator Jane Hume, concluded the result was “not comparable to any previous one in Australian political history”, and that it posed a “unique challenge to the party”. Many political pundits felt the Liberals faced an “existential” crisis.
The report said it was apparent the Albanese government had “no answers” to Australia’s problems and the Liberals needed to be ready and able to present an alternative policy stance to the nation. Somehow, some way, it appears this didn’t happen.
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