13-05-2025
The campaign was derided as dull, but the election aftermath kicks like a shirty mule
The aftermath of the 2025 federal election has very decidedly been a split-screen sort of affair, so it was appropriate that yesterday's swearing-in of the Albanese ministry at Yarralumla was scheduled for exactly the same time as the Liberal Party's swearing-at. Sorry, leadership vote.
Live coverage toggled back and forth between the governor-general's gaff, where the twin sons of new Communications Minister Anika Wells conducted their now customary dragging of their mother (this year, a plush football was deployed in a lovely nod to Wells' continuing stewardship of the sports portfolio), and the Liberal party room, which TV cameras captured as leadership candidate Angus Taylor attempted to enter via the wrong door.
These distractions aside, both events made history.
The new Albanese Cabinet is the first in our Federation's 124-year lifespan to be majority-female. Of the 23 senior ministers sworn in by Governor-General Sam Mostyn yesterday, 12 — or 52 per cent — are women.
And over in the blue corner, the Liberal Party yesterday for the first time chose a woman to be its federal leader: Sussan Ley, the Member for Farrer.
Susan Penelope Braybrooks (as the Liberal leader was born in Nigeria, later to emigrate at age 13 to Australia after her Dad changed jobs from being a British spy) added an "S" to her first name back in the 1980s, when she became interested in numerology.
"I worked out that if you added an 'S', I would have an incredibly exciting, interesting life and nothing would ever be boring," she explained dryly in a newspaper interview in 2015.
Disappointingly, the numerology phase — along with Ley's teenage nose piercing and deep commitment to Canberra's punk scene — is a thing of the past.
But was she on to something? Since taking on the extra consonant, Ley's worked as a shearer's cook, pilot, farmer, trained as an air traffic controller, had three kids, got an economics degree and two Masters (one in taxation law, one in accounting) and followed all that with a quarter of a century in politics.
Like many Australian women of the "sandwich generation", she has juggled work and family at multiple junctures, and indeed yesterday departed Canberra to be with her mother, who is in palliative care in Albury. The last week cannot have been easy, but if Ley was stressed, it didn't show. And that's fortunate, because her life is about to get even more interesting.
Ley assumes custody of the Liberal Party at a particularly upsetting time in its 81-year history. Of the seriously depleted Liberal ranks meeting in Room GR-114, yesterday, Ley won 29 votes. Her rival, shadow treasurer Angus Taylor, won 25.
It would be way too simplistic to interpret this roughly half-half split as a division between Liberals who think that campaigning on nuclear energy, anti-immigration and culture war issues was a terrible idea, and those who think the problem was they didn't go hard enough.
But the closeness of the result absolutely confirms the scale of Ley's reconstruction task.
By a broader margin of 38 votes to 16, the party room also backed Ted O'Brien as deputy leader, over fellow Queenslander Phillip Thompson, who took the room by surprise when he nominated "on a whim".
There are many "learnings" from this development. And to be fair, for most Aussies the headline news would be the very existence of Thompson in any capacity. (He is a veteran, and the Member for Herbert, and a former Invictus Games competitor and powerlifting coach, so consider yourself introduced) But for Liberalologists, the real surprise was the non-candidacy of Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who last week took the electrifying step of defecting to the Liberals from the National party room and announcing her bid to be 2IC of her new crew.
Taylor and Price hard-launched their joint ticket on Sunday morning with a split-screen social media video in which both earnestly proclaimed their respect for each other, possibly from separate rooms.
Of the 400-odd Instagram comments below the video, a solid majority simply said "Fantastic. Great move. Well done Angus", in tribute to one of the accident-prone Member for Hume's best-loved public misadventures.
We cannot now know what Nampijinpa Price's level of support would have been; when Taylor was defeated, she decided not to run after all.
And now the deputy leader is Ted O'Brien, who until last Saturday was hoping that his main job for the next few years would involve speed-assembling a series of nuclear reactors from scratch at key points around the continent, but now finds himself taking on a reconstruction challenge far more complex and fissile.
Nampijinpa Price's sensational defection — in which former Liberal leader, prime minister and minister for women Tony Abbott is reported to have played a significant role — came in a week of post-election eventfulness so hallucinogenically intense that at times it appeared the nation had slipped into some kind of metaverse where every single thing that anyone had on their election night bingo card, anywhere, was coming true one by one.
Peter Dutton loses his seat! Adam Bandt loses his seat! Matt Canavan challenges for the leadership of the National Party! The Deputy Prime Minister Whacks the Attorney General! The Minister for Science Loses His Job And Chews Out The PM On Live TV! Tim Wilson Comeback!
For a campaign that was widely derided as dull and uninspiring, the aftermath of Election 2025 has a kick like a seriously shirty mule.
Live results: Find out what's happening in your seat as counting continues
Viewed in split-screen, these remarkable events are easier to understand. The Liberal Party's ructions are caused by the unexpected scale of its defeat. And the Labor Party's are caused by the unexpected scale of its victory.
The landslide result last Saturday is — of course, first and foremost — a breathtaking win for Anthony Albanese. But large victories create large expectations, especially among a large and under-occupied back bench. And a crushing political victory can sometimes turn out to be political risk in very convincing drag. John Howard experienced this after the 2004 election, in which he trounced Labor's Mark Latham and won control of the Senate, a victory that empowered him to introduce the Work Choices industrial reforms that finished him off three years later.
It is a horrid truth of politics that the moments at which one feels most invincible are the commonest time codes for overreach and error. Governments with too much power aren't great for democracies, or even for themselves.
Of the many vexing problems with which Sussan Ley's plate is piled high from today, the risk of hubris certainly isn't one. Expectations have never been lower. Which technically should give her the freedom to be ambitious. Fortunately, she seems the adventurous type.
