How Labor carved a path to landslide victory

Australia Broadcast Center

03-05-2025

Australian voters have delivered Anthony Albanese "a win for the ages" that should see Labor with more seats than at any point in its history.
More even than Kevin Rudd or Bob Hawke after their most famous victories.
Albanese outperformed the polls and the pundits' expectations on a historic night that will leave the Coalition interrogating where it all went so very wrong, with Peter Dutton "fired into the Sun" and many other senior figures and potential future leaders wiped out.
The Labor landslide has also overshadowed the ongoing rise and rise of independents in Australian politics.
Let's break it down.
A map shows the huge primary vote swing towards Labor.
Labor built its win on the foundations of a significant bump in its primary vote.
This map shows the change in first preference vote for Labor in each electorate compared to 2022.
(Every seat is represented as a hexagon, so they're all the same size.)
Labor clawed back important ground in Queensland, and bagged huge swings in Tasmania and key marginal electorates in South Australia and Western Sydney.
While it slipped a little in Western Australia, that came off an extremely high vote in 2022 and didn't inflict any real damage.
The night's key shift was how the Coalition haemorrhaged votes, even in comparison to its bruising 2022 loss.
The Coalition's primary vote was down across the board.
Its primary vote share fell more than 5 per cent.
The map tells the story — from north to south, east to west, the trend was basically universal. A disaster for the Coalition.
Support for independent candidates once more surged across the country, and many of the independents who stormed parliament in 2022 have improved their winning margins.
'All these 'teals' won from second place last time,' says ABC election analyst Antony Green.
'This time they're winning from first place.'
And there's a decent chance they could yet be joined by a couple of extra crossbenchers.
The outcome of these voting trends translated to a dramatic shift in who won what.
Rather than colouring in every seat, here's a look at all the seats that are changing hands this election, or where the incumbent is behind in the current count.
The colours represent the party that has won or is ahead.
Labor has had one of its biggest victories ever.
Peter Dutton and the Coalition came into the campaign needing to pick up an extra 19 seats to win government.
Instead, Labor has seized 13 Coalition-held seats to massively increase the size of its majority, while also taking two off the Greens in Brisbane.
Where the changes happened
Peter Dutton's electoral strategy targeted "forgotten Australians in the suburbs", and his campaign featured stop after stop at petrol stations to sell voters on his cut to the fuel excise.
But in Mr Dutton's home city of Brisbane, the Coalition has suffered a stunning repudiation in exactly the kinds of areas he was targeting.
The Liberal Party's night went from bad to worse when it became clear the leader himself would lose his own seat, Dickson …
Queensland delivered seats to Labor in spades.
… as well as Petrie and Bonner – two more electorates on the outer fringes of the city.
Longman and Forde are also looking likely to go Labor's way.
In the inner city, Labor is projected to pick up Brisbane and Griffith from the Greens, significantly eroding the minor party's gains from 2022.
Despite moderate swings against it, the Coalition has held most of its seats in the rest of Queensland.
Leichhardt was the only regional electorate to change hands on the back of a 9.7 per cent swing to Labor.
The story was much the same in rural NSW, aside from two notable exceptions.
Calare and Cowper are both tight races.
One was ex-National Party MP Andrew Gee, who appears likely to retain his seat of Calare as an Independent.
And the other was independent Caz Heise leading in Cowper.
In Sydney, the Coalition once again failed to win back any of the outer-suburban seats it was targeting.
The swing wasn't as extreme in Sydney.
Instead, Labor scooped up three marginal seats in the suburbs – Bennelong, Banks, and Hughes – on the back of swings of at least 6 per cent in each one.
Hughes has been held by the Coalition for the past 29 years, while defeat in Banks means losing senior frontbencher David Coleman.
Sydney's three existing teal independents are on track to be joined by a fourth in Nicolette Boele.
After narrowly missing out in 2022, Boele is ahead in Bradfield by a narrow margin.
In Canberra, another Climate 200-backed independent, Jessie Price, is looking good to pick up the seat of Bean from Labor.
Some are pointing to a "Pocock effect" as a factor in the surprise result, as the popular ACT senator is also on track to roughly double his vote compared to 2019.
The Melbourne seats of McEwen, Menzies, Deakin, Chisolm and Aston have all gone to Labor.
In Melbourne, the Coalition had high hopes of capitalising on an unpopular Labor state government to take outer seats like Aston, Chisholm, and McEwen.
But in the end, not only did that trio stay in Labor hands …
… but the seats of Deakin and Menzies turned red, further weakening the Coalition's leadership stable.
Shadow housing minister Michael Sukkar and Keith Wolahan — previously thought of as possibly part of a future Liberal leadership – will not be returning to parliament this term.
The seats of Bass and Braddon fell to Labor.
Further shocks were in store in Tasmania, as Bass and Braddon swung hard to Labor.
And the bad news for the Coalition didn't stop there, as Labor strengthened its hold on the seat of Lyons with a 10 per cent swing.
Labor has gained the key South Australian seat of Sturt.
The only seat changing hands in South Australia has gone to Labor in a historic win.
The loss of Sturt, a blue-ribbon Liberal seat held since 1972, leaves just two Coalition seats in South Australia. Metropolitan Adelaide is now a sea of red.
The seat of Moore voted in a Labor MP.
Peter Dutton travelled to Perth on the final day of the campaign, signalling that the Coalition possibly hoped to make inroads in what was already a Labor stronghold.
But it was a similar story to other capital cities, as the only seat to change hands was Moore — and yes, it's gone to Labor too.
However, Labor is in a tussle with the Coalition for the new electorate of Bullwinkel.
All of this adds up to an electoral landslide. As of early Sunday morning, the ABC's election computer has Labor sitting on 85 seats, with another seven leaning its way.
The electorate-by-electorate results for the entire country.
As one side celebrates a historic win, the other is left to wonder where it all went wrong.
In 2022, when Peter Dutton was on the cusp of becoming Liberal Party leader, one of his colleagues told the ABC that Mr Dutton was a "very decent man" but had a terrible perception problem that the Liberals would need to address immediately.
"I'm sure people will say, 'He's a man who looks like the other bloke, only worse,'" the MP said.
Three years on, after a crushing election loss, those comments look prescient.
And the Liberal Party will be asking itself why it didn't listen.
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