This thumping election result shows how Australians do not like division

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s landslide victory and the self-destruction of the Liberal Party – including Peter Dutton becoming the first federal opposition leader to lose his seat – ensure the 2025 election is a political watershed.

We congratulate the voters of Australia for their common sense when faced with a choice between a milquetoast government and an opposition so palpably unready to govern that in the end it was reduced to fighting past cultural wars when voters wanted future visions.

The Liberal Party that became the dominant political force in Australia by holding office for nearly 50 years from its formation in 1949 has now been reduced to a wraith. Its national vote fell from Scott Morrison’s dismal haul in 2022 and its once inviolable heartland is in cardiac arrest.

As vote-counting continues, in Sydney Labor has won Bennelong, Banks and Hughes and the Liberal presence may have been reduced to just five of 28 seats. In Melbourne, Labor has scooped two blue-ribbon seats, Deakin and Menzies, as well as two seats in Tasmania and one in South Australia. The rout was particularly brutal in Queensland, where just six months after the Liberal National Party won the state election, some five electorates – including Green seats – will join Dutton’s seat of Dickson to change hands. The Liberals also failed to claw back seats they lost to the teals at the last election.

Dutton’s narrow tribalism kept “small l” Liberals at bay even as less rigid thinking was needed to reshape his party from Morrison’s era and dominance of right-wingers. Reforms were few, and while cost-of-living issues dominated, Dutton spoke of the “quiet Australians” but made nuclear power stations his signature policy. When those nuclear costs unravelled, he turned on public servants working from home and the media before fulminating against Welcome to Country ceremonies. In the campaign’s dying days, having non-voting Exclusive Brethren handing out Liberal material at election booths only added to the poor optics.

Dutton’s dim-witted decision to hitch onto Donald Trump’s bandwagon until tariffs, Ukraine and Gaza made the US president toxic was both predictable and fatal. Dutton tried to backpedal, but it was too late, and Australians accorded him the same fate suffered by Trump’s man in Canada, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, and threw him out.

It is a tragedy for the Liberals that Dutton and party powerbrokers lost touch with the needs and aspirations of Australians. Now the Liberals are headless, clinging to policies no longer fit for use in an Australia that has moved beyond culture wars and division and has no wish to join the international trend of right-wing populism and nastiness that has swamped some nations.

First-term governments in Australia usually win second terms, and Albanese proved true to history. His victory delivered Labor a record number of seats in the Australian parliament. Albanese’s first term lacked achievements, but his strategy paid off. He should use this second chance and swag of seats to maximum advantage for all Australians.

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