A Key Lesson for the Democratic Party from the 2025 Australian Election

The Importance of Not Interpreting an Electoral Mandate Where None Exists

In 2023, international television loudmouth Piers Morgan asked Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who leads the center-left Labor Party, “what is a woman?”¹

“An adult female,” he responded in his thick Australian accent.² He further added that he didn’t think it was a very difficult question.³

On May 3, 2025, Prime Minister Albanese not only won re-election to a second term but Labor won the largest number of seats ever. Their opposition, the center-right Coalition, once considered the natural governing party of Australia, was reduced to political rubble.⁴

Like the April 28, 2025 Canadian election, the Australian election was influenced by disgust for Trump, which helped galvanize voters to rally to the leading center-left party. In Canada, the incumbent Liberal Party stormed back from a 25% deficit in the polls to win government under Mark Carney.⁵

The disgust towards Trump could be seen from former Australian Prime Minister John Howard in a Sky News interview. Very conservative, Howard was a staunch ally of the Bush Administration. Though still fiercely loyal to his party, Howard, who will be 86 in July, has reached the stage of life where he says whatever he really thinks.

In the interview where he attacked Albanese as “out of his depth”, Howard also criticized Trump, arguing he wasn’t a “conservative.” He stated:

I think the attitude that President Trump has taken towards some great allies - America’s in the past - is really blameworthy. I mean Canada. Has he forgotten that when the allies launched Operation Overlord to liberate Europe from the Nazis that the third largest of the invading armies was Canadian after the Americans and the British? Has he forgotten the Canadian contribution in Afghanistan? To undermine Canada - I find it inexplicable.⁶

The United States is one of Australia’s oldest and closest allies. Trump’s attacks against fellow-ally Canada clearly rubbed Australian voters the wrong way.

But it’s not just simply disgust with Trump that helped Australia’s Labor Party win a landslide victory.

As John Halpin wrote in Lessons From Canada’s Liberals:

Although the circumstances of the Canadian election are not easily replicated in other nations with different political and economic contexts, there are larger lessons for center-left parties like U.S. Democrats.

Likewise, the Democratic Party can definitely learn a valuable lesson from Prime Minister Albanese and the Australian Labor Party, who in winning a historic landslide re-election defied political history.

While no first term Australian government has been defeated for re-election since 1931, Australians usually give their incumbent government a good kick in the teeth at their first re-election. In Australia, the last four times a party faced its first re-election, there was a major swing to the opposition.

• 1984. In 1983, Labor won a landslide victory under Bob Hawke. Extremely popular with record high approval ratings, Hawke called another election in 1984 to take advantage. While his party gained 7 seats due to an expansion of Australia’s Parliament, his party saw a swing against it and the opposition Coalition gained 16 seats.

• 1998. In 1996, the Coalition won a historic landslide under John Howard.⁷ Just two years later, a major swing to Labor led to the Coalition losing 14 seats and Labor gaining 18 seats while winning the national popular vote. The election outcome wasn’t known for weeks as Australians counted vote-by-mail ballots.⁸

• 2010. In 2007, Labor won a near-landslide victory under Kevin Rudd. A temporary fall in Rudd’s popularity led to his caucus removing him and replacing him with Prime Minister Julia Gillard. However, in 2010, Labor lost its majority and finished tied for seats with the Coalition. Gillard remained Prime Minister by negotiating a unique coalition with independents.⁹

• 2016. In 2013, the Coalition won a landslide victory under Tony Abbot. Abbot proved unpopular from the outset and his caucus replaced him with Malcolm Turnbull, a far more moderate leader. However, a surprisingly strong swing to Labor led to a near loss for the Coalition in 2016, which clung to power with 76 seats, the bare majority.

In the 2022 election, a closely contested political knife fight, Labor under Albanese won 77 seats, only one more seat than needed for a majority. Thus, any swing against them in 2025, as had happened to every first term government going back to 1951 would have resulted in Labor losing its majority.

There are some interesting parallels between the 2019 and 2022 Australian elections and the 2016 and 2020 U.S. Presidential elections.

In 2019, Bill Shorten was all set to become Prime Minister of Australia. After leading a strong performance in 2016, all the polls had his Labor Party leading the Coalition. The Coalition had dumped its incumbent Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, for Scott Morrison, a far more conservative politician than Turnbull. The Coalition had also lost their majority in Parliament.

Eerily reminiscent of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, Labor started election night confident. But as the numbers began to report, the election turned out differently than the polls had predicted.

Labor wasn’t gaining the seats they had expected to. Worse yet, they were losing the key seats that they had gained in 2016.

The polls turned out to be completely wrong. The Coalition was returned to power with a one seat majority, Labor net lost one seat. Stunned, many Australians questioned the failure of pollsters.

Policy wise, the election seemingly doomed any efforts on curbing global climate change. The only potential bright spot for global climate change activists was former Olympian Zali Steggall’s upset victory over former Prime Minister Tony Abbot in the very safe Coalition seat of Warringah, one of Australia’s wealthiest seats.

While Warringah’s voters were fiscally conservative, they were pro-choice, pro-LGBT rights, and favored policies to fight global climate change. Abbot, a deeply religious social conservative, had grown out of touch with his own constituents. Steggall ran as a socially liberal and pro-environmental but fiscally conservative independent.

Inspired by Steggall’s victory, climate change activists in 2022 targeted a set of historically safe Coalition seats similar to Warringah and recruited independent candidates who shared Steggall’s politics, running on platforms of social liberalism, fiscal conservativism, and fighting global climate change. These independent candidates were known as the “Teal Independents”.

However, Teal Independents were not Labor candidates and even if they won (considered unlikely), it would not guarantee a Labor victory in 2022.

Heading into the 2022 election, the polls once again all showed Labor leading the Coalition.

Yet, early on election night in 2022, it looked like a repeat of 2019. The first returns placed the Coalition ahead of Labor. Meanwhile, Labor wasn’t getting big swings in key swing electoral divisions and seemed not to be gaining the seats they needed.

In fact, Labor would ultimately only win three swing seats - Reid, Robertson, and Chisholm.¹⁰ They would also lose two of their own safe seats - Griffith (to a Green Party candidate) and Fowler (to an independent).

However, 2019 didn’t repeat. Instead, the election replicated the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, where early returns looked like a poll defying repeat of 2016 only to have Biden win after late numbers reported.

The Coalition lost six of their normally safest seats - Wentworth, Kooyong, North Sydney, Curtin, Goldstein, and Mackellar - to the Teal Independents. They also failed to gain back Warringah, where Steggall was re-elected easily.¹¹

The Coalition also lost two additional seats - Brisbane and Ryan - to Green Party challengers.

To win a majority in their own right, Labor had to thread a narrow needle.

First, Labor won three upper middle class, longtime Coalition held seats.

Labor gained Bennelong, a longtime safe Coalition seat that had only voted for Labor once - famously in 2007 when Labor’s Maxine McKew defeated Prime Minister John Howard - but had returned to being a safe Coalition seat in 2010. Labor also gained Boothby, which had not been won by Labor since 1946, and Higgins, which had never elected a Labor MP.

Labor then gained four seats in Western Australia - Swan, Tangney, Pearce, and Hasluck - where a popular state Labor government had won a landslide re-election victory in 2021 and where Prime Minister Scott Morrison had become extremely unpopular.¹²

Western Australia had long been a safe bastion for the Coalition. While relying on Western Australia to win an election for Labor was seemingly unfathomable, it constituted the final winning margin.

In the end, Labor won the knife fight and entered government with 77 seats, just one more than needed to claim a majority in Parliament.¹³

In How Democrats Misread the Environment,

Michael Baharaeen

noted how the Democratic Party’s 2020 victory was actually very close. As he explained:

• Biden really won the Electoral College by just 42,918 votes across the three closest states: Arizona (10,457), Georgia (11,779), and Wisconsin (20,682). If Trump had won even half (or 50.01 percent) of those additional Biden votes in each state, he would have been re-elected.

• Jon Ossoff’s 55,232-vote win in the Georgia Senate runoff gave the party a 50–50 working majority in the upper chamber, with Vice President Harris casting tie-breaking votes.

• In the House, Democrats experienced a net loss of seats and kept their majority by just 31,751 votes across five districts.

Much like the Democratic victory in 2020, Labor’s 2022 victory was narrow, built on a very broad, somewhat unwieldy, and unique coalition.

But unlike the Democratic Party and President Biden after 2020, Labor did not over-estimate its mandate, engage in extreme wokeness politics, or forget their very broad coalition for a narrow victory.

This could be seen in several policy and political choices made by Prime Minister Albanese.

• Instead of aligning itself with YIMBYism and attempting to make emotionally manipulative and factually inaccurate arguments that single family homes were “racist”, the Labor government acknowledged its limitation on land use powers and instead encouraged higher density development by awarding competitive grants to states and localities. They also resisted national rent control proposals.

• Instead of finding ways to add new fees and tax increases, Labor enacted minor tax cuts, and proposed new ones during the election that were subsequently opposed by the Coalition.

• After the dramatic failure of the 2023 Voice Referendum, which would have given a reserved seat in Parliament to indigenous Australians, Albanese didn’t scold the Australian voters as ignorant and racist. While he was clearly disappointed, he acknowledged defeat and looked to unify his country, recognizing how many of his own voters did not support the Voice Referendum.

• More importantly, Albanese respected the verdict of the voters, explaining that he would not try to go around the voters to legislatively implement a specially reserved Parliamentary seat for an indigenous Australian. When the issue arose in the 2025 election, Albanese acknowledged that he would not be bringing back a new referendum on the issue.

• The government, realizing the divisiveness of the issue (and perhaps pointlessness of it since it has such little impact on daily life and governance), shelved proposals to have a national referendum on making Australia a republic.

• When the state of Queensland announced a policy banning the use of puberty blockers for the purposes transitioning children, instead of a lawsuit and a campaign cry against it, the Labor Health Minister announced that there would be a review into such policies and a development of best practice guidelines for treating gender dysphoria in youth.

Ultimately, Prime Minister Albanese understood something that Biden and the Democrats did not - after a narrow electoral victory, even the slightest loss of voters would cost them re-election.

While some may have philosophical objections to moderation, Labor achieved numerous key policy goals during Prime Minister Albanese’s first term, including dramatically increasing Australia’s global climate emissions reduction goals and setting emissions standards for automakers for the first time.

Because Labor didn’t bog down on pet issues designed to appease loud activists, Australian voters appreciated Labor’s solid stewardship of the economy and COVID-19 recovery.

While Trump’s Presidency certainly helped Labor’s electoral fortunes, voters who switched to them only felt comfortable doing so because Labor had earned their trust. Throughout Albanese’s first term, Labor had respected voters and shown that they were not beholden to the loony left or activist groups. As a result, Australians rewarded them with a historic landslide.

Australian politics may seem distant. But lessons from their political system still influence us. After all, Australians first invented the concept of the secret ballot in elections.¹⁴

Respecting voters and understanding the limits of an electoral victory are critical lessons that the Democratic Party in the United States should consider emulating.

1. The author of this article is an attorney licensed to practice in the State of California and the District of Columbia. This article and all of the works on this Substack page are statements of the opinions of the author, only, and do not constitute legal advice; they are not intended to be relied upon by any individual or entity in any transaction or other legal matter, past, pending, or future. A paid subscription to this Substack page supports the author’s scholarship and provides access to research that the author has compiled, but does not establish an attorney-client relationship. The author does not accept unsolicited requests for legal advice or representation, and this Substack page is not intended as legal advertising. The opinions expressed on this Substack page reflect the personal views of the author only.

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3. He had previously been asked this question in a 2022 Election Debate where he gave the same answer. When the moderator noted that there had “been some confusion” on the issue, he added “I don’t think it’s confusing.”

4. The Coalition refers to the Liberal Party of Australia (which is actually center-right) and the National Party. Although different parties, they run together and typically seats won by either party are counted towards totals. The Coalition also includes the Liberal National Party of Queensland, where the two state parties merged into one.

5. In both elections, the opposition leader lost re-election in their own seat. In Canada, Pierre Poilievre lost his riding of Carleton. In Australia, Peter Dutton lost his electoral division of Dickson.

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7. The Coalition’s total of 94 seats in 1996 had only been matched by this year’s result of Labor winning 94 seats.

8. There is often great criticism of California for our election laws that are designed to count otherwise valid vote-by-mail ballots. Vote-by-mail ballots that are cast before the close of polls on Election Day but arrive late to county election offices within a period of time after the election will be counted. Vote-by-mail ballots that arrive at the wrong county election offices will be forwarded to the appropriate offices and then counted. While this is often attacked, Australia has the same system.

9. The coalition agreement allowing her to govern included former Coalition MPs Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor, Green Party MP Adam Bandt, and independent Andrew Wilkie.

10. Reid had been a longtime Labor seat until it was won by the Coalition in the 2013 landslide and held by the Coalition in 2016 and 2019. Robertson had been a longtime Labor seat until the Coalition’s 1996 landslide. Labor won the seat back in 2007 and held it through 2013, when the Coalition won it. Chisholm had been gained by Labor in 1998. In 2016, it was the only seat Labor lost to the Coalition.

11. These losses ensured that the Coalition could not form a majority government on its own. However, these election outcomes did not guarantee that Labor would form government either.

12. Among these Western Australia seats, Hasluck is considered a swing seat. It had elected a Labor MP, Sharryn Jackson, in 2001. She lost re-election in 2004; however, She gained the seat back in 2007. However, she lost re-election once more in 2010 and the Coalition had held it fairly easily since.

The other seats show the improbability of Labor’s victory. Swan was one of the only Labor held seats to flip to the Coalition in the 2007 election. In 2019, on preferences, the Coalition candidate won re-election in Tangney, 61.47%-38.53%. In 2019, on preferences, the Coalition candidate won re-election in Pearce, a seat that had never been held by Labor, 57.52%-42.48%.