Comment

Paul Bongiorno
The spoils of defeat

In politics, it is easy to misread a victory or a loss. It is only the subsequent election that can prove whether that judgement was correct or not.

This reality was further complicated in this election by the fact it came so soon after a referendum with a very different outcome. The way both major parties interpreted the majority “No” vote in the 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum had a significant bearing on this campaign.

Speaking at length for the first time since the Voice defeat, respected Indigenous leader Pat Dodson noted the government had come back with “a resounding victory”. The horror they anticipated “passed by”, he said, and now Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has “the confidence of the Australian people”.

The failure of the Voice referendum was a shattering blow to the prime minister, damaging his perception that he was on the same page as a majority of Australians. He took almost 12 months to see that defeat in a different perspective. His political opponent, Peter Dutton, never did. He read the outcome as a rejection of the Albanese government.

Dutton mistook a referendum for a general election, which was the fatal flaw of his doomed campaign. What an overwhelming majority were rejecting was a proposition for a way to recognise the unique place held undeniably and indelibly in the history of the continent by First Nations people.

The election post-mortem on Four Corners this week had a sober acceptance of this reality. Jonathon Duniam, a Tasmanian Liberal senator, told the program: “It was a big win for us at the time, but that didn’t mean that people were going to vote for us on the more substantive question on who they want to govern this country.”

Western Australian Liberal Andrew Hastie says the referendum went a long way to establishing Albanese as a conviction politician prepared “to politically die for something”. He believes rather than establish Albanese as “weak”, the defeat enhanced the prime minister’s reputation for courage.

One Labor insider notes courage is not the same as being “crazy brave”. Dodson’s urging of Albanese to show the same conviction in implementing the truth-telling and Treaty components of the Uluru Statement from the Heart is unlikely to be heeded, with the prime minister opting instead for economic empowerment of First Nations people.

In doing so, however, there will be no embracing of the “assimilationist” agenda once championed by Dutton and his shadow minister for Indigenous Australians, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price. Nor will there be any comfort for the culture wars denigrating 65,000 years of history.

We got a taste of this on the night of May 3 when, to huge applause from the Labor faithful, the prime minister acknowledged “the Traditional Owners of the land on which we meet”. “I pay respects to Elders, past, present and emerging,” he continued, and, in response to Dutton’s anti-Welcome campaign rhetoric, added, “today and every day”.

Albanese is convinced the way to reward voters is to focus on what was foreshadowed in the campaign. There is, however, scope for the unexpected or previously excluded to happen. A government insider points to the revamping of the stage three tax cuts as a prime example.

Albanese is no longer the unknown risk who might be better than the rejected alternative. Rather, he is seen as a steady leader heading in a direction endorsed by an overwhelming majority.

As pollster Kos Samaras remarked on election night, the landslide was generated by the fact a vast majority of preferences from independents and minor parties flowed to Labor, leaving the recently reformed Coalition holding less than one third of the seats in the House of Representatives.

Post election, Albanese has been his most outspoken on the dire situation in Gaza. Freed from the uncertainties of how the issue was playing in particular electorates, he said Israel’s blockade of humanitarian aid to the besieged Palestinians was “completely unacceptable” and “outrageous”.

The election was a watershed moment for the domestic politics of the conflict. Attempts to weaponise it against Labor by elements in the Muslim and Jewish communities failed.

Dutton received no electoral reward for his unquestioning support for the government of Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, and the various independents championing the Palestinian cause failed to defeat any Labor MPs.

Albanese is particularly appalled at Israel’s escalation of its offensive in Gaza and its ignoring of the calls for a ceasefire from the international community and even United States President Donald Trump.

Albanese’s strong language was not matched by threats of sanctions against Israel or calling in the Israeli ambassador. His office says the prime minister expressed his concerns in a forthright way to the country’s president, Isaac Herzog, at Pope Leo XIV’s inauguration in Rome.

Demoted cabinet minister Ed Husic has utilised his newfound freedom on the back bench to call for the government to move beyond words to action, including sanctions, as threatened by the United Kingdom, France and Canada.

Husic says the sort of sanctions he has in mind would target individual Israeli politicians and military leaders responsible for the policies that have generated so much international opprobrium.

The prime minister dismissed sanctions, saying Australia does not export military assets to Israel. He did, however, give a strong indication that at a forthcoming United Nations conference Australia could be open to recognising the state of Palestine ahead of any end to the conflict.

Labor’s Josh Burns, who is Jewish and saw off challenges from the Greens and Liberals in his heavily Jewish seat of Macnamara, says few in the community are willing to defend Netanyahu’s continuing blockade and assaults in Gaza. The humanitarian toll is too great and the military strategy has clearly failed to free all the hostages taken by Hamas.

Albanese’s ability to maintain the electorate’s confidence will heavily depend on how he manages the new parliament. When it returns in almost two months’ time, his credentials as an astute parliamentary tactician will be tested not in the lower house but in the Senate.

In the House of Representatives the Coalition holds so few seats it is really a fringe bloc; in the Senate it is projected to have 27 senators to Labor’s 28. Should the 11 Greens not support any of Labor’s legislation, Sussan Ley’s team could come into play.

The first test is likely to be Labor’s promised revisiting of environmental protection laws, after the new environment minister, Murray Watt, approved the extension of the North West Shelf gas processing project to 2070.

New Greens leader Larissa Waters, who is signalling a more cooperative approach, thinks the North West Shelf outcome is “terrible” and a climate test Albanese has failed.

Waters is willing to revisit the so-called nature positive laws and the setting up of an environmental protection agency, but accommodating Watt may be too big an ask, especially if the new EPA lacks real teeth.

A government source says these environmental law reforms could be just as critical for Sussan Ley in her commitment to drag the Liberals back to the political centre. Environment and climate change are two areas where the Coalition has palpably failed to impress voters.

Ley’s new-look ministry, announced this week, appears to skew more moderate. Still, she will be at the mercy of her own conservatives and the Nationals on issues such as the net zero target and energy policy.

The Nationals’ Matt Canavan told ABC TV he is more than happy to be on the back bench and able to agitate against the net zero target, which he says is costly and losing its credibility in conservative circles internationally.

His fellow traveller in this scepticism, the newly minted Liberal Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, will be more constrained, especially if she is willing to play by the rules.

Ley overlooked Price for the shadow cabinet, demoting her to a junior defence portfolio. There, she is under her erstwhile leadership partner, Angus Taylor, as the senior shadow minister for defence. Still, as a frontbencher, Price will be expected to conform publicly to ministerial solidarity.

Ley, who holds her position by a very slim margin, nevertheless showed toughness in dropping two of Taylor’s supporters from the cabinet.

The biggest surprise was former shadow minister for finance Jane Hume. Her performance in the campaign championing work-from-home bans and nominating Chinese Labor booth-workers as spies made her an easy target.

Sarah Henderson, who was a disgruntled shadow education minister under Dutton, nevertheless supported his opposition to student debt relief and Commonwealth Prac Payments to student nurses, teachers and social workers. These policies alienated voters Ley says she wants to win back.

Stories of deep splits within the Nationals were surfacing all week. In light of them, it is no surprise that party leader David Littleproud consigned to the back bench two former deputy prime ministers, Barnaby Joyce and Michael McCormack.

Neither of them can be expected to sit quietly. On the day of the shadow ministry’s unveiling, McCormack called a news conference to tell the world he still had a lot to offer. Joyce, for one, says he would back him to return as leader.

Albanese is no doubt happy to observe his opponents wrangling over the spoils of defeat.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 30, 2025 as "The spoils of defeat".

For almost a decade, The Saturday Paper has published Australia’s leading writers and thinkers. We have pursued stories that are ignored elsewhere, covering them with sensitivity and depth. We have done this on refugee policy, on government integrity, on robo-debt, on aged care, on climate change, on the pandemic.

All our journalism is fiercely independent. It relies on the support of readers. By subscribing to The Saturday Paper, you are ensuring that we can continue to produce essential, issue-defining coverage, to dig out stories that take time, to doggedly hold to account politicians and the political class.

There are very few titles that have the freedom and the space to produce journalism like this. In a country with a concentration of media ownership unlike anything else in the world, it is vitally important. Your subscription helps make it possible.

Send this article to a friend for free.