The exact record will depend on the final results, but it seems likely that this election result will produce more seats than the 90 seats won by Tony Abbott in 2013. There’s a chance Labor could surpass John Howard’s result in 1996, although I don’t think they’ll quite get there. As for Labor results, this is their best result in seat terms since 1943, and I don’t think any other result before that was any better.
For the Coalition, this looks like the worst result for any major party since 1943, even producing a lower seat proportion than Whitlam’s Labor in 1975. Of course the ballooning size of the crossbench means the defeat of the Coalition is a bit more impressive than Labor’s victory – an exaggerated version of the mismatch we saw in 2022.
For this whole campaign we have been looking at the declining major party votes, and what is amazing is that Labor has achieved this enormous victory while barely raising their primary vote.
…
The final point I want to touch on is the Greens’ performance. At the moment it looks like they will scrape by in Melbourne and potentially win other seats like Wills and Ryan. Their result wasn’t particularly impressive, but I want to emphasise how much they are victims of the electoral system. Nationally the Greens vote is steady, just over 12%, and part of the story is that the Greens suffered primary vote swings in many of their best seats while gaining votes elsewhere. The map at the end of this post makes this very clear in cities like Melbourne and Brisbane, although you don’t see it in the same way in Sydney.
But in a number of their seats, their defeat did not primarily come due to a dropping primary vote, but a rearrangement of their opponents. In Brisbane and Griffith, the rising Labor vote pushed the LNP into third, and thus LNP preferences will elect Labor.
It’s a perverse part of our system that the most conservative voters decide who wins in some of the most progressive seats. Elizabeth Watson-Brown likely will survive while Max Chandler-Mather will be defeated because she represents a more conservative seat where the LNP is the main opponent.
And this is a challenge for the Greens because so many of their best seats are now Labor vs Greens contests where Labor will easily win the 2CP on Liberal preferences.
That’s completely the wrong takeaway for The Greens and sounds like the left-wing version of Jacinta Nampijinpa Price cope on ABC’s coverage last night, trying to blame everyone and everything except herself and her party. As a party they need to reassess what their goals are and whether their actions and their communication over the last term were effective in making progress towards those goals. Being super obstructionist on housing during a housing crisis, aggressively loud on Gaza during a period of rising antisemitism and hate in communities around Australia, publicly linking themselves to (and backing) unions with alleged links to criminal organisations are all things that may play well with their left-wing base but are not necessarily going to help them expand further.
A regular Greens voter like myself down in SA may appreciate and understand the nuances around some of these positions, but I seriously question whether the people who voted Green for the first time in Queensland at the last election were happy with the outcome. Don’t forget that action on climate change (and better relief for the disasters it causes) were massive issues at the last election, particularly in that region, and they were issues that the major parties were seen to be failing on. Those are mainstream issues that these Greens MPs were elected on, yet when they got into parliament they did not behave like a mainstream party and continued to play to their hardcore base. That is ultimately going to hurt them in a country where fringe politics is nowhere near as powerful due to compulsory voting.
It’s very important to remember that The Greens didn’t actually perform particularly poorly overall, this isn’t a total rejection from their existing supporters of their strategy and positioning within the system. It was only a failure to take their left-wing agenda any further. They need to decide whether they are willing to sacrifice some of that to manually peel off left-leaning Labor voters once again (rather than just automatically picking them up through disillusionment as they have been previously, that isn’t going to work after such a decisive result) or whether they are content to be a fringe party that plays an important role in the Senate but is mostly absent in the lower house.