Australian election results 2025: Albanese wins as Peter Dutton concedes

Times

03-05-2025

Anthony Albanese has become the first Australian prime minister in 20 years to win back-to-back elections, after a stunning reversal in his political fortunes and a little help from President Trump.
The national broadcaster the ABC called the election result at 8.26pm (Australian Eastern Standard Time), less than two-and-a-half hours after polls closed on the eastern seaboard.
It is not yet known whether the ruling Labor party, which holds 77 seats, will win the 76 required to hang on to its majority.
However, based on a swing towards the party in early counting, the government looks set to increase its majority.
It means Albanese becomes the first prime minister since the Liberal leader John Howard in 2004 to be re-elected. The last Labor leader to achieve this feat was Bob Hawke in 1990.
Albanese's opponent, Peter Dutton, lost his seat of Dickson, in suburban Brisbane, which he had held since 2001. He is the first federal opposition leader in Australian history to lose their seat, leaving the Coalition leaderless.
Flanked by his wife and two grown-up sons, Dutton arrived at about 9.30pm local time at the Liberal Party's headquarters in Brisbane to concede defeat and bring down the curtain on his long political career.
In a gracious speech he said: 'Earlier on I called the prime minister to congratulate him on his success tonight. It's an historic occasion for the Labor party.
'I said to the prime minister that his mum would be incredibly proud of his achievement tonight, and he should be very proud of his achievement tonight.'
Albanese grew up on a Sydney council estate as an only child with his single mother Maryanne Ellery, who was crippled with arthritis and survived on a disability pension. She died after a brain aneurism in 2002.
Jim Chalmers, the Labor treasurer, described the overall result as a 'win for the ages'.
'He [Albanese] has pulled off one of the great election victories since Federation,' he told the ABC.
The coalition is projected to win its lowest share of the primary vote ever recorded, at 31 per cent, compared with 35.3 per cent for Labour. Australia operates a complicated preferential voting system in which voters have to rank all the candidates in order of preference.
Even the chance to form a minority government for Albanese's party looked unlikely at the turn of the year but the opposition campaign led by Peter Dutton, a former policeman from Queensland, has been widely hailed as among the worst in living memory. Unpopular policy pledges were ditched and unflattering comparisons were drawn between Dutton, 54, and President Trump.
In contrast, apart from falling off a stage during a campaign event in New South Wales, Albanese has rarely put a foot wrong since calling the election on March 28.
Andrew Hughes, a political and marketing specialist at the Australian National University, said: 'Dutton absolutely blew this election. He was all over Labor at the end of the summer in February. But we've seen the worst Coalition campaign this decade, and probably one of the worst this century. They've been all over the shop.'
In January the Coalition, comprised of the Liberals and the right-wing National party, held a commanding lead in the polls and looked on course for a historic election victory. But the understated Albanese proved unexpectedly resilient.
First he managed to hold his party together and avoid the internal mid-term coups that have toppled several of his recent predecessors. Then he began to turn the polls around.
For a year and a half his popularity had languished after a referendum to enshrine an aboriginal parliamentary advisory group in the constitution. The proposal was emphatically defeated in October 2023 after a 'No' campaign led by Dutton.
The prime minister's key election promise from 2022 to cut $275 off energy bills had been broken, as soaring energy bills and rising mortgage repayments conspired to ensure Australians endured the biggest fall in living standards in the developed world under the Labor government's watch.
This played into the Coalition's hands in an election campaign dominated by the rising cost of living. But then, as in Canada, the shadow of a new American president tilted the direction of Australia 's politics.
• Trump effect upended Canada's election race
Dutton sought to emulate Trump's winning approach from the November 2024 campaign. He sang his praises and emphasised 'anti-woke' policy pledges, such as removing the Aboriginal and Torres Islander flags from prime ministerial press conferences, opposing the ubiquitous Aboriginal 'Welcome to Country' ceremonies at public events and school assemblies, and overhauling Australia's school curriculum amid fears that students were being 'indoctrinated' by left-wing teachers.
A special government efficiency department would also be set up, under the supervision of Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, the Coalition senator, tasked with cutting bloated departments down to size and sacking 41,000 public sector workers in Canberra.
To many, it sounded remarkably similar to Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or Doge.
But allegiance with Trump became more problematic when he raised tariffs, sending global stock markets into meltdown in the first week of Australia's election campaign.
Dutton rushed to distance himself and the Coalition from Trump, notably dumping an unpopular plan to force public service employees in Canberra not to work from home, which carried echoes of Musk's approach in the United States.
Polls revealed how deeply unpopular Trump was among Australian voters.
'Dutton massively misread the public mood. Trump brings conflict and drama into situations where it doesn't need to be. This is at odds with Australia's culture which is laid back,' Hughes said.
Dutton repeatedly accused the prime minister in the televised leaders' debates of being a 'liar', citing his broken election promise to cut energy bills by $275, and for claiming the Coalition's plans to build and operate seven nuclear reactors would cost $600 billion.
Although Albanese usually refused to get drawn into a slanging match, his campaign machine did the dirty work for him, launching frequent personal attacks on the opposition leader on social media.
One TikTok video asked followers to 'rank your favourite baldie', and compared Dutton to a zombie who rides a chicken.
Commentators across the political spectrum accused both sides of lacking bold, imaginative policies. Tackling climate change, a key theme in Labor's winning election campaign in 2022, was rarely mentioned. The government rushed through a small tax cut, costing $17 billion, but worth just $5 a week on average for taxpayers from next year.
Dutton toured petrol forecourts to trumpet a flagship $6 billion election pledge to halve fuel tax for a year, saving drivers around $14 a tank.
'The government's offers to help households with the cost of living were better supported than the Coalition's' Paul Smith, of YouGov, said.
The upshot is that Albanese, after ousting the unpopular Scott Morrison in 2019, is favoured to become the first Labor leader to be re-elected in 35 years.
'He's come up against Scott Morrsion and then Peter Dutton. In political careers, you can't get luckier than that,' Hughes said.