Election 25’

This year’s election certainly was an interesting one, especially since it was my first to vote in. 

I’d been studying Australian voting, its history, what each party's policies include, and desperately wanted a democracy sausage, for at least six months. Sadly, there was no democracy sausage, but there certainly was Australian voting. 

I decided to go to my nearest polling place at 8am, the time it opened, with the idea of skipping the cue. And so it seems half of my electorate had the same idea. A line had formed before I arrived, full of goodwill citizens ready to conduct their civic duty, campaign workers shoving propaganda down my throat, and the local crackheads shouting who to vote for. 

After a good fifteen minutes of waiting in line, avoiding indoctrination into voting for dirt, the time had come. I went up to the booth, preferences memorised, and wrote some numbers in small boxes that will contribute to the next three years of mine and everyone’s life. Civic duty finished, I immediately fled the city scape to a much less populated town, where I purchased a democracy sausage. 

Now, I should probably give some backstory as to how I chose my preferences for the ballot, and how I saw this election cycle altogether. To put it bluntly, the way I see it, I was voting for bad, worse, and worst. 

It should be known also that I am a firm believer in the secret ballot, as well as not letting any external influence affect my vote. Only look at each party's policies to determine who gets three years in power. Naturally, with my above description of the three largest parties, this caused some groans to slip my mouth. 

Over the last nine or so months, I had asked my family on how elections work and where I should look to research as much as I can to help determine how I should vote. This led to recommendations of books and newspapers to read, and some lectures on the history of Australia. I do not consider this to be an external influence on my vote. What I would consider violating this belief of mine is having someone tell me I must vote for a person or party, and more stupidly enacting the suggestion blindly. The way I chose who would be at the top of my ballot was by going to the AEC website, seeing who was running in my electorate, and looking at their individual websites to read their exact policies. No bias or intrusion, just who meets my beliefs closest from the source material. The problem I have with gaining my information solely from news media is the issue of company bias. Either conflict on a personal or business level between them all, Left and Right bias, or anything else. Nothing is 100% truthful in this world.

Here is a second issue I have when it comes to the news, and it focuses on the consumer rather than the creator. I go to a school where if I say that I’m putting the Greens at the bottom of my ballot, I get booed. Not as badly as the Anzac welcome to country this year, but it’s still noticeable. The issue I see is too many people looking either purely at left leaning media or right leaning media. This causes people to have drastically different or agreeable opinions, there is no in-between. And it is incredibly saddening for me to see this.

I consider myself to be moreover on the right purely based on my morals and logic, however I still seek to consume an equal amount of left and right leaning news. One minute I’m reading the AFR, the next I’m listening to Matt Walsh, and soon after I’m reading an article on The Age. (But all of it’s depressing no matter what, so why should I?)

I do not want to state that what I am doing is right and everyone's wrong, but that seems to be the way other people think, purely because they are rooted in their left or right belief and think the opposing side is entirely wrong. The difference between me and them is that I am attempting to see and reason with both sides. However, for some reason, it is both unacceptable and dumbfounding that I am attempting to reason with both sides at the same time.

I am oversimplifying this, and I am referring solely to my experience with students and teachers at my school. The world is more complex than this. 

If you guessed that I go to a public school, you get a medal.

The reason I mention this is due to my concern for the next election. Most students at my school love and preach policies and ideology excruciatingly similar to the greens, yet most of them are not eligible to vote. With another three years worth of young voters, especially if they seek the Greens policies, there can be a large swing from a Labor landslide win to the Greens due to aligning ideology. This is why I believe there is every possibility that in 2028 an even more left government is put into power. 

I also believe this due to Labor’s absurd win of 87 seats to the coalitions 40 in the House of Representatives (sourced by the ABC at 9:33am, 7th of May, 25). Even though the greens received no seats this campaign, Albanese’s monster win is still overwhelming, and generally the Labor Party is more left leaning than the Liberal party. While the victory may seem great for Labor, the opposition leader Peter Dutton not only watched his party lose, but lost his own seat in parliament altogether. 

This has caused a massive disruption to the Liberal party as they now need to internally elect a new leader. One of the decisions to discuss during this process is whether they should choose to stay or shift further into a right wing stance, or aim to go more central to help win back some votes from Labor in 2028. If Liberal decides to take the latter option, I see the potential risk for a concerning decrease in opposition. Independents will need to push even harder in their campaigns to win voters over from both major parties due to aligning policies between Labor and Liberal. If there is staggeringly large support for the two holding the same principles, and later on their policies either change or begin to rot the foundations of Australia, we the people are unable to say we should’ve voted otherwise. We also couldn't do much to mitigate the consequence. There are other options, however; the people turn to support independents more and further damage the reputation of the major parties, or the Liberal party could stay where they are, or go further to the right to keep its differentiation.

Back to Labor’s next three years, I can see a multitude of things happening: Albanese manages to stay well with his party for his three years, loses stability and his party members turn on him, or he really messes up by beginning to completely degrade the country. Our current Governor-General would need to step in to appoint a new prime minister and call an early election. 

The only time the latter option has happened in Australia’s history was on the 11th of November 1975. The dismissal of Gough Whitlam, Prime Minister from the Labor Party, by Sir John Kerr. Kerr appointed the opposition leader Malcolm Fraser to act as a caretaker between the dismissal and early election during December of the same year, which he won. (I’ll write on this further in a separate post).

Getting back to the first two options, the most likely I see happening is that Albanese maintains a good balance with his party members. Combining the current uncertain times of America’s threats with tariffs, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and the pressures within Australia to bring the cost of living down, Anthony Albanese cannot afford to have stir ups within his own party. While in power, if our prime minister wants to achieve what needs to be achieved, he must keep good ties with as many people as possible, particularly with his party members and the Australian people. If he wants to lead a third term, that is.

These are my thoughts on the election, with a slight peak into my observations of the Left vs Right wing divide. Obviously, this is a rather first layer observation, and I did not expound upon the senate results or independent parties. However, as I said, these are just my thoughts and experience with this cycle.