Federal election 2025, Anthony Albanese got lucky when he beat Peter Dutton
As the Prime Minister marched into a polling booth clutching his long-suffering cavoodle Toto on Saturday, the biggest danger of this election was hanging in the air.
Anthony Albanese got lucky.
He got lucky that he ran against Scott Morrison when he was popular as dysentery in 2022.
The Prime Minister got lucky again when he stuffed up the Voice referendum and the Liberal Party started thinking, “Oh, something is happening, we could win”.
Instead, they got complacent. They didn’t do the work. That’s why one Liberal MP described treasury spokesman Angus Taylor as “an absolute disaster” on Saturday night.
He got lucky when the Liberal leader wanted to dot the landscape with little nuclear reactors and sack 41,000 public servants.
This might be red-meat to the Liberal Party base that already votes for him, but it’s not a huge turn on for swinging voters unless you can explain it properly. He didn’t.
The election of Donald Trump? Lucky again.
The US President promptly spooked the horses in Australia from the day of his inauguration, with his meeting with the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, before spraying friends and foes with trade tariffs.
He got lucky the Liberals didn’t have a coherent tax policy and promised to repeal tax cuts if elected.
Lucky when Peter Dutton had his tyres over-pumped by supporters who inflated his chances of defeating a first term government for the first time since the 1930s.
He got lucky that the Liberal leader didn’t have a strategy to inoculate himself from inevitable attacks about his record as health minister on bulk billing.
Finally, he got lucky with two wildly popular Labor premiers – first in WA at the 2022 election and now in South Australia.
WA saved him from minority government in 2022. Farmers Union Iced Coffee was deployed to do the same in 2025 – as the PM and the SA Premier were photographed downing a carton of the good stuff.
The “Mali factor” – the popularity of SA Premier Peter Malinauskas – was expected to deliver the ALP the seat of Sturt in 2025, a blue ribbon seat which hasn’t voted Labor since 1969.
Meanwhile, the PM even got lucky when there was a terrible cyclone in Queensland, which gave ALP strategists more time to repair and hand down a budget, something the Liberals insisted he would never do.
They were wrong. And it turned out they were wrong about more than a few things, including the idea that Australian workers would cheer on his call to march public servants back to the office.
Instead, the mums and dads he wanted to target with the offer of a cut to fuel excise, were up in arms that their bosses would follow suit in the private sector.
Going into Saturday’s election, Labor held a notional 78 seats in Australia’s 150-seat Parliament and the Coalition a notional 57 seats.
The early results suggested the ALP was on track to win enough seats to form a government. A majority government wasn’t locked in.
Instead, there was a surprising swing to Labor across the country, most notably in Peter Dutton’s own seat of Dickson, which was lost to Labor’s Ali France.
What lessons will Anthony Albanese learn from this result? Will he realise that voters were underwhelmed, disappointed and he needs to do better?
Will he realise that he and his government has to change to show voters that they are worthy of the privilege bestowed upon them?
“Cost of living is killing people, and they’re looking for an answer,” Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce observed on election night.
“If they don’t get it this time, by gosh, they’ll get it the next.”