Australian politics
Can anything be salvaged from the wreckage of the Liberal Party?
Introduction
The election is behind us, and the simple narrative is that Labor’s overwhelming victory secures it in office for at least two more terms. The Coalition will claw its way back to relevance, as did Labor after its even worse defeats in the 1960s and 1970s. Then we will be back to the good old days of two dominant parties, with a few crossbenchers who may or may not have much influence, depending on whether Labor or the Coalition can form majority government.
The trouble with that interpretation is that it’s wrong. The Coalition has been steadily losing support in federal and state elections. While the National Party is more or less holding its ground, the Liberal Party’s support has collapsed. Its remaining support base is among a dying generation of baby boomers and other older Australians. Australia has shifted, but the Liberal Party hasn’t.
The Liberal Party’s new leader, Sussan Ley and her colleagues understand this well, but there is still a view in the party’s ranks that its return to electoral success lies in a Trumpist path in allegiance with far-right parties exploiting the politics of grievance, or in a reaffirmation of the neoliberal policies of the Howard years.
Undoubtedly there are many on the left, having experienced the political bastardry of the Coalition’s political tactics over the years, who enjoy the Schadenfreude of seeing the Liberal Party troubles. But as a democracy we need a political contest.
The Liberal Party is probably beyond repair: it may be in the nation’s best interest if it quietly disappears, making space for a proper centre-right party.
There have been comebacks from past landslides, but this time it’s worse
The 2025 election was a terrible result for the Coalition, particularly the Liberal Party and Queensland’s LNP, who between them lost 13 of their 47 seats. By comparison the National Party held on to all of its seats except for one whose member left the party and successfully recontested as an independent. While the Liberal Party vote was down 3 percent, the National Party vote was unchanged.
Optimists in the Coalition’s ranks may console themselves with the observation that in Australia political parties have come back from landslide defeats, within a reasonably short time. In two postwar elections Labor came into office just six or seven years after suffering catastrophic defeats.
The first instance was in 1966, when the Coalition was easily returned to office with an enlarged majority. The Cold War was still raging and the year before the government had made a substantial commitment to the Vietnam War. (Disillusionment was to set in soon after). The economy was growing strongly. Labor’s leader, Arthur Calwell, had made clear his opposition to involvement in the Vietnam War, and was not presenting well to the electorate.
In that election Harold Holt’s Coalition won 82 of the House of Representative’s 124 seats, forming the strongest majority government in Australia’s history up to that time.
Three years later in 1969 Labor, under its new leader Gough Whitlam, came close to victory, narrowly winning the TPP vote and securing 59 seats in the 125-seat chamber. Whitlam went on to win decisively in the following election in 1972.
In 1975 the Coalition broke its own record after the dismissal of the Whitlam government. Malcolm Fraser’s Coalition won 91 seats. In fact, having won 68 seats in the 127-seat chamber, the Liberal Party could have formed government in its own right, without support from the Country Party.
Just seven years later, in early 1983, Labor was back in office. The Hawke-Keating government would stay in power until 1996.
In terms of the size of the government’s majority in relation to the changing size of the House of Representatives, the Coalition’s 1966 and 1975 victories were more impressive than Labor’s victory this year. Albanese’s surprise victory, securing 63 percent of seats (94 out of 150), could be described more as a comfortable win rather than a “landslide”. The Coalition (with a little help from the British monarchy) still holds that record. (There is a full history of landslides and associated political reversals in Australia in a 21-minute podcast on Ozpol.)
It’s easy therefore for the political commentariat, and for the Coalition’s loyal supporters, to believe that the Coalition could come back in a few years: 2028 may be out of the question, but 2031 should be achievable.
That comparison offers false hope, however, because these earlier elections were two-party races (apart from one independent elected in 1966). In the last two elections the Coalition has been losing not only to Labor but also to independents and the Greens.
The political landscape in 2025 is very different from the political landscape of 1966 or 1975, when the “Westminster” two party system was still the established pattern. In terms of seats won the 1975 election was terrible for Labor, but its primary vote of 43 percent was relatively strong. In this year’s election the Coalition’s primary vote was 32 percent. (Labor’s was not much better at 35 percent.)
Because it was unexpected, the media have been amazed by the size of Labor’s victory, but its majority is not out of the ordinary. What the media has overlooked is the extent of the Coalition’s loss, particularly the Liberal Party’s loss. In terms of electoral support, the Coalition is now in a much worse position than Labor was in 1966 or in 1975.
The Coalition’s woes
In time we should see a thorough analysis of the 2025 election from the ANU election study, but there is enough revealed in the election outcome to make some reasonably robust inferences about the Coalition’s specific problems.
It is reasonably clear from the many opinion polls published in the lead-up to the election that the Coalition was polling poorly among young people and women. That has not been disputed.
The most telling result from the election is in the geographic distribution of seats, using the Electoral Commission’s classifications – inner metropolitan, outer metropolitan, provincial and rural.[1]
The most striking observation is that the Coalition holds only 9 seats out of the 88 seats in our capital cities, where two-thirds of our population lives. It holds only 2 of the 43 inner metropolitan seats – Cook in Sydney and Goldstein in Melbourne. Even in the provincial electorates where there are large urban communities demographically similar to the outer suburbs in capital cities, the Coalition holds only 9 of the 24 seats. Only in rural electorates does the Coalition make a respectable showing.
Liberal Party optimists take some heart from the fact that the “Teal” independents didn’t improve their representation, but in terms of votes most independents improved their support. The table below shows the swings for the 11 re-contesting independents. Zoe Daniel lost the inner-Melbourne Goldstein electorate by 175 votes after the Liberal Party, with strong support from right-wing movements, mounted a concerted campaign against her. (Monique Ryan describes in the Saturday Paper the extraordinary resources the Liberal Party and its supporters in the fossil-fuel industry devoted to trying to get back the adjoining seat of Kooyong.) This loss was offset by Nicolette Boele’s 26 vote victory in the inner-Sydney Bradfield electorate.[2]
These outcomes confirm that the Coalition has little support in our cities, but that it still has strong support in rural regions. When we look at the regional distribution of age, education and income by electorate (you can pick up a fair bit of that demographic information on the government’s digital atlas), it’s a fair guess that the Coalition’s support base is strongest among older people with limited education past high school. More solid information on the Coalition’s support base will become evident when researchers conduct a multivariant analysis. We can also surmise that if Australia had the same settlement pattern as the US, perhaps the Coalition would have done better: maybe Liberal strategists should have thought about US-Australia regional differences before they adopted Trumpist tactics.
Although there is argument about whether the independents are taking support from Labor or the Coalition (see the ANU 2022 Election Report), their success hints strongly that the Liberal Party has lost the support in many prosperous urban electorates. We don’t know whether this reflects existing voters’ disillusionment, or the changing demographics of those electorates.
It is hard to make too many generalizations about independents – after all they are independents – but it is a reasonable assumption that they would describe themselves as politically centrist. Those who were supported by Climate 200 are generally in favour of strong action on climate change, integrity, and gambling reform. These could hardly be called “left” or “progressive” issues, but it is notable that both the Coalition in Australia and the Republicans in America, with some success, have portrayed action on climate change as some far-left or “woke” issue. That is why some see the independents’ success as a move to the “left”.
There is often reference to independents, particularly the “Teals”, as holding the Liberal Party’s old “heartland” of prosperous electorates in Sydney and Melbourne. But as the table shows the situation is a little more complex. In fact the successful campaign that launched the “Teal” movement was Cathy McGowan’s in 2013, when she won the rural seat Indi from the Liberal sitting member. It should also be noted that in the 2025 election independents did well in some rural seats, such as Wannon in western Victoria (47 percent of the TPP vote) and the outback seat Grey in South Australia where a first-time candidate won 18 percent of the primary vote.
It is also a reasonable guess that most of the independent members would have been at home in Menzies’ or Gorton’s Liberal Party – perhaps even in Turnbull’s Liberal Party, but we know they did not fit into Abbott’s, Morrison’s or Dutton’s Liberal Party.
These scraps of data from the 2025 election paint a grainy snapshot of the federal Coalition’s situation. Their position in the states, apart from Queensland, is also grim. In these roundups I have been tracking the Coalition’s performance in state and territory elections as well. In all but 4 of the 28 elections since 2014 the Coalition’s primary vote has gone backwards. In three of those four occasions when it has improved (Queensland 2020, Northern Territory 2024, Western Australia 2025) it has been off a miserably low base. The most recent opinion polls from South Australia, where there will be an election next year, give the Liberal Party only 21 percent of the primary vote, and it is unlikely that they will make ground against Labor and the independents in the coming Tasmanian election.
All of this suggests that the Coalition’s federal loss, particularly the Liberal Party’s dismal performance, cannot be solely attributed to its campaign team, Dutton’s performance, or to specific policies. There are longer-term and broader forces at play.
As The Australian’s Paul Kelly observes, in his comment on an election that “has left the Liberal Party in ruins”, the Liberal Party has no sense of what it stands for. He goes on to suggest that while Australia has shifted to the left, the Party has stood still. Martyn Goddard comes to a similar conclusion in his well-researched post-election analysis Australia is now a one-party state. What price democracy?. He cites many pieces of research revealing that over the last thirty years, Australians have been turning away from policies held by parties on the traditional right – dog-whistling racism, devaluation of the natural environment, hostility to trade unions, privatization, and neoliberal economic policies in general.
Whether this should be called a shift to the “left” is questionable, because as Viktor Shvets and other scholars point out, people’s experience of neoliberalism has fuelled the discontent providing a basis for far-right populism in the USA and in other countries, but it is clear that Australians have lost enthusiasm for the Liberals’ policies.
Kelly suggests that if the Liberal Party has any hope of resurrection, it should go back to the “broad church” of Howard’s time, while Goddard considers that Howard “set in train the process of making his own party unelectable”.
Kelly’s view is supported by the observation that the Coalition’s support started to fall most strongly in the 2016 election, well after Howard had left the scene. But as Thomas Schelling pointed out in his 1985 work Choice and consequence, social organizations such as political parties can start to unravel over a long period, before it becomes obvious that only a hard core of zealots remains. It was in Howard’s time that some of the “moderates” started to leave the party’s parliamentary ranks.
Besides this slow decay, however, there is evidence that the Liberal Party has also made a more decisive lurch to the authoritarian right, and that whatever the Party’s strategists and analysts may be advising, it should move further in that direction. Goddard’s longer-term analysis does not contradict Kelly’s short-term analysis: both forces are probably in play.
In two Saturday Paper articles – How Abbott and Credlin control the Liberals, and “A very dangerous man”: how Alex Antic is shaping the Liberals, Jason Koutsoukis describes how there are individuals with ideologies on the authoritarian right exercising strong influence over members of the parliamentary Liberal Party, at both federal and state levels. He quotes one (unnamed) Liberal MP:
If you’re trying to understand why the Liberal Party today is a smoking ruin, then look no further than Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin. … It was Abbott and Credlin who were forever in Dutton’s ear. It was Abbott and Credlin who were programming Dutton’s stupid policy positions. I actually think Dutton was open to a broader, more inclusive set of policies, but Abbott and Credlin were in there, basically fucking vetoing everything.
One would expect that the people who have given such bad advice to their Liberal Party would have quietly gone away to write their memoirs or to “spend more time with their families”, but as Koutsoukis reports, in the post-election period they have doubled down on their Trumpist line. The Monday after the election Gina Rinehart was on air urging the Liberals to stick with their Trumpist policies. Their reasoning, as far as we can infer, is that although the Coalition’s primary vote is only 32 percent, the election revealed another 11 percent support for parties that may be classified as “far right” – One Nation, Trumpet of Patriots, Family First, Libertarian, Australian Christians: perhaps their supporters could rally around a Trumpist-style Liberal Party. But how many of these discontents would come back to a mainstream party, and how likely is it that libertarians will find common ground with authoritarians who label themselves as “Christian”?
In a separate article Inside story: Advance “siphoned” Liberal resources Koutsoukis describes how the Coalition misinterpreted the success of its anti-Voice campaign, believing that it was the public’s attraction to the Coalition’s hard-line negativism. An ABC Four Corners program covering the Liberals’ loss revealed that party strategists saw the defeat of the Voice as confirmation that the party was in touch and in tune with the community.
If one reflects on the Liberal Party’s performance over its last three years in opposition, it seems that it interpreted the role of “opposition” in terms of thwarting the government’s agenda, even to the extent of forming alliances with the Greens whose stances on many matters were well to the left of the government’s. It’s a clever short-term tactic, but it leaves the electorate confused – just what does this mob stand for?
But could the Liberal Party have been so flexible, or has it bound itself into positional rigidity?
It's easy to say that the Liberals should have used that period in opposition to put forward an agenda that contrasted with the government’s and would resonate with the Australian people. But instead their political tactic was to appeal to their diminishing base, and to assume that the public shared its view that the most important thing the Liberal Party should do is to keep the Labor out of office.
Perhaps that’s all it could do in the circumstances, because their policy choices were constrained – on one side by the National Party’s hysterical anti-renewable energy push, and on another side by their attachment to their stated platform and the set of policies that John Howard had taken to four successful election campaigns.
The trouble is that the last election Howard won was 21 years ago: Australia has moved on. And the Coalition’s last period in government was characterised by policy inconsistencies, factional battles and corruption, capped off by a pandemic, the response to which made its talk about “small government” and fiscal responsibility look rather silly.
For a short period it looked as if the Liberal and National Parties might go their own way, but this all too radical. So the Liberal Party elected Sussan Ley as leader with a slim caucus majority, and she presented herself to Australia in that role in her Press Club Address on June 25.
Sussan Ley’s Press Club Address – a masterpiece of avoidance
The most notable aspect of Ley’s Press Club Address was its style – a style in strong contrast to Scott Morrison’s condescending tone, and to Peter Dutton’s insecure rapid-fire bluster. She presented herself with assuredness and confidence, not only in delivering a carefully crafted speech, but also in her responses to media questions.
Refreshingly she didn’t sheet the blame for the Coalition’s loss onto the media, the government’s dirty tactics, or to the party’s poor campaigning. (She noted that the party is separately reviewing its campaign shortcomings.) Those used to hearing post-election speeches by losing Liberal candidates would have expected the usual “we had good policies, but they didn’t get through to the electorate”, but instead she said that what the Coalition had to offer was “comprehensively rejected”. She was realistic about the size of the Coalition’s defeat, and avoided saying that it would be back in office in 2028. (Even if the Coalition enjoyed a Morrison-scale “miracle” in the House of Representatives, it would face an extraordinarily hostile Senate.),
Journalists have picked up on her frankness – “we got smashed” – and they have dwelt at length on the easy territory of gender issues and the question of quotas. But in that focus they tend to have overlooked some of the subtle messages in her speech, and have not noted issues she has deliberately avoided.
Tellingly, she devoted the first 16 minutes of her 40-minute speech to her own biographical details – a public high school, a struggle to get work as a pilot, work in the bush, experience as a mature-age university student studying economics and accounting. It’s not the career path of the usual politician. The most explicit hint of a difference from her immediate predecessors was a mention of her time working in the Australian Taxation Office and her respect for the public service.
It was not clear to the listener whether she was talking about the Coalition or the Liberal Party. That vagueness was surely a deliberate way to avoid the hard issue of the fragile relationship between the Liberal and National parties.
Nor was there much hint about which aspects of the Coalition’s policies were “comprehensively rejected”, or which part of the electorate was doing the rejection. She carefully navigated her way around energy and climate-change policies. As Alan Kohler points out, energy and climate-change policy is particularly difficult territory for the Coalition. But she did acknowledge, as pollsters have pointed out, that over the last 25 years women have increasingly turned away from the Coalition. That’s so obvious from polling that there is little risk in pointing it out.
Starting with an acknowledgement of country, Ley used her speech to shake off association with Dutton’s Trumpisms. She knows better than Dutton that not much should be inferred from rejection of the Voice referendum.
Her strongest hints on policy related to taxes, asserting that the Liberal Party is the “party of lower taxes” – a re-affirmation of what is written in the party’s statement of beliefs that “businesses and individuals – not government – are the true creators of wealth and employment”. She deflected a question from an Australianjournalist who asked how she would deal with pressures on public revenue.
Unless it can free itself from this “lower taxes” constraint, the Liberal Party will find it hard to move on, because it has trapped itself in a “small government” obsession.
That “small government” obsession is more embedded in the party’s culture than the party’s recent flirtation with Trumpism. In her final regular appearance on Late Night Live, shortly after the election, Laura Tingle described how from the time of the Howard government the Liberal Party has shown a contempt for government, manifest in a belief that government is just some unproductive overhead on society, rather than a vital part of the economy. We witness this in Angus Taylor’s assertion that employment and GDP growth resulting from increased government-funded services are simply statistical artefacts, because the only economic activity worthy of recording is in the private sector.
It's an absurd and disempowering obsession. Australia already has almost the lowest taxes and smallest government of all prosperous “developed countries”, and there are at least four economically compelling reasons why Australia should be collecting more taxes.
First, and most obvious, is the need, over business cycles, to balance government revenue and recurrent expenditure, often referred to by the quaint term “budget repair”.
Second is the fact that many functions necessarily provided by government, are intrinsically labour-intensive, and do not enjoy the labour productivity improvements experienced in private markets. This applies particularly to health care, school education and policing, which are mainly the responsibility of state governments. Just to maintain our present level of services, we have to shift the public-private mix of expenditure towards the public sector.
Third is the supposed need to increase defence spending. Many strategists disagree with the idea that Australia should spend more on defence, but the idea seems to be sufficiently established among policymakers to regard it as an inevitability.
Fourth is the need to reverse some high-cost privatizations, including health insurance, toll roads, airports, and electricity transmission. These are cases where private provision provides higher-cost and in most cases poorer quality services than government services – “market failure” in economists’ terms. There is no point in saving $1.00 in taxes if it means spending $1.10 or $1.50 for the same service, usually of a poorer quality, when it is transferred to the private sector.
This is all mainstream economics. Ley, with her solid economic education, would be familiar with all four reasons. In her speech she said “I understand what government can and cannot” do.
But it’s not clear that the Liberal Party has a well-grounded theory of government. After all, if you believe that government is just a wasteful overhead, the only guide to what’s in and what’s out is the political test of public demand. That’s why governments fund football stadiums and commuter car parks (for which there is no public good case), while skimping on school education and health care (for which there is a strong economic case for public funding).
Nowhere is the Liberal Party’s policy confusion more evident than in the energy policy it took to the election. Only a dedicated communist of the Soviet old school, or an economic novice, could come up with the idea of publicly-owned power stations (nuclear or otherwise) combined with privately-owned transmission lines. Exactly the wrong way around. Jim Green, of Renew Economy, believes that its nuclear power policy may have cost the Coalition 11 seats.
That is not only a comment on the specifics of that policy: it is also about the burden the Liberal Party has imposed on itself in its coalition deals with the National Party, whose economic principles are based on political opportunism rather than any consistent “left” or “right” principles. The National Party seems to do a good job at representing its own constituency, but its policies and practices find little support in the wider community.
The other issue Ley avoided was inequality, particularly wealth inequality.
In line with the established orthodoxy of centre-right parties she referred to the virtues of hard work and delayed gratification. That’s uncontentious ground: some degree of income inequality is an essential aspect of a predominately market-based economy.
But wealth inequality is different. As Thomas Piketty demonstrates, once individuals accumulate a certain level of financial wealth it goes on growing, without any effort, risk or toil on the part of the wealth holder. Accumulating financial wealth through property speculation, rent-seeking, monopolization, idle investment of inheritances, is at odds with Ley’s values of rewards for hard work and delayed gratification.
Unfortunately the Liberal Party has not got off to a good start with its spokesperson for small business, Tim Wilson, defending the tax concessions enjoyed by those whose idle investments and inheritances have allowed them to accumulate more than $3 million in their superannuation accounts. It’s a pity that Zoe Daniel didn’t pick up another 176 votes.
Conclusion – is this a stage in the journey to a multi-party democracy?
He broke it up and started again
Paul Kelly questioned whether the Liberal Party is capable of recovery.
It probably isn’t. It’s losing ground federally and in the states. It is riven with ideological factionalism – a centrist faction that supports its present leader, and a hard-right Trumpian faction that’s almost as powerful. It has constrained its policy options by its own platform that denigrates and devalues the public sector. It has locked itself into a coalition with a party that rejects evidence-based policy and is prone to regional cronyism.
That is not to suggest there is no place for a centre-right political party. The success of centrist independents, and the electorate’s reward for the Albanese government’s conservatism, demonstrate where the voting public’s preferences lie. But the Liberal Party is in such a terrible mess that it cannot align itself with those preferences.
The Coalition’s defeat presented an opportunity for the party to dissolve and to re-constitute itself, as Menzies did in 1944 when he created the Liberal Party out of the ruins of the United Australia Party and other factions.
That option still remains. It would probably involve abandoning any idea of a coalition with the National Party, which means it would be difficult for the Liberal Party or whatever replaces it to muster the numbers to govern in its own right. But there is nothing in our Constitution that sentences us to a two-party “Westminster” system.
As has been demonstrated in these roundups, and in many other places, Australia is slowly developing into a multi-party democracy. In time historians may see the 2025 wreckage of the Coalition simply as an awkward step along the way.
1. The term “provincial” refers to seats “outside capital cities, but with a majority of enrolment in major provincial cities” to quote from the AEC. They include eponymously named electorates such as Ballarat and Bendigo, and a number of heavily-settled coastal regions in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria. ↩
2. For the sake of completeness I should mention Andrew Gee, in the rural New South Wales Calare electorate: he was elected in 2022 as a National Party member and resigned from the party because he disagreed with its hard line on the Voice. This year he retained the seat as an independent. ↩
Albanese’s speeches – is risk aversion setting in?
The post above explains why opposition leader Ley was politically cautious in her Press Club speech. Prime Minister Albanese, newly re-elected with a large parliamentary majority, facing a diminished, disunited and dispirited opposition, has more political licence to articulate a strong Labor agenda.
He got off to a strong start in his Press Club address on June 10, when talking about his government’s vision for economic reform. Being in government, he said “means you can pursue unexpected opportunities”.
The way we deal with big challenges and opportunities from our first term, from economic growth and productivity to the energy transition will continue to evolve
and
… we have to move quickly to build an economy that is more dynamic, more productive and more resilient.
It’s a speech about building our economic strength. He refers to tangible investment in renewable energy and infrastructure, and he refers to investment in human capital. It’s about a future “where education enriches our human potential from universal affordable early learning, through properly funded schools and a dynamic tertiary sector”.
In that speech he announced that in August Treasurer Chalmers would be convening a roundtable “to support and shape our government’s growth and productivity agenda”.
Less than a month later, however, on July 4, his speech on Australia’s economic outlook was far less upbeat. His praise of small business, and his promise of “lower taxes” could have been a cut-and-paste from one of John Howard’s speeches.
Perhaps he toned down his style in recognition of the audience’s composition, the event having been organized by News Corporation.
According to media reports, in response to questions he gave a strong hint that he was ruling out any increase in the GST.
Reformers
Any Labor politician should remember that the Rudd government failed to make progress on tax reform and health reform because it ruled out particular reforms (to GST and to private health insurance) in the respective reform commissions’ terms of reference.
Albanese had an opportunity on the following day to present his government’s reform agenda when he delivered the John Curtin Oration before a friendlier audience.
His speech, a blend of history and hagiography, recognized how Curtin used his political powers to re-shape Australia, setting the country up for postwar prosperity and a break from the shackles of the dying British Empire. Curtin’s political authority was helped not only by his wartime powers, but also by the disarray of the UAP opposition. It’s hard to miss the relevance to similar opportunities facing the Labor government of 2025.
But praising Curtin was as far as Albanese went. He mentioned Labor’s policies on Medicare, superannuation and paid parental leave, but there is no hint in this speech that his government is about to embark on a program of structural reform.
Although the prevailing view is that Labor, with a decisive majority, has an assured six years in office, the hard political reality is that time is not on the side of a reforming government. It takes little time for rent-seekers and others benefiting from distortions in our tax system to mobilize, as Rudd learned.
An encouraging lesson in reform is provided by the Howard government. It was elected on March 2, 1966; the Port Arthur massacre was on April 28; on May 2 Howard was in Parliament stating “We need to achieve a total prohibition on the ownership, possession, sale and importation of all automatic and semi-automatic weapons. That will be the essence of the proposal that will be put by the Commonwealth government at the meeting on Friday”. The gun lobby never had time to organize.
(Next week’s roundup will look at Treasurer Chalmers’ agenda for tax reform.)
Australians are generally satisfied with democracy
Although only 35 percent of the electorate voted for the party that was to form government, post-election research by Nicholas Biddle of the ANU finds that Australians are generally satisfied with democracy and with the direction the country is heading in: Shifting Trust and Satisfaction: Monitoring a Key Dimension of Democratic Resilience in Australia.
His survey finds that although an increasing proportion of people have been reporting lower scores on life satisfaction and higher levels of financial stress over the last five years, people are generally satisfied with the state of Australia’s democratic institutions and with the direction the country is headed (leading one to wonder how the Coalition conjured up that message about getting Australia “back on track”).
It is notable, however, that younger people, people with limited education, and those experiencing financial stress report lower confidence in the performance of democratic institutions.
Notably, between October 2024 and May 2025 the proportion of survey respondents expressing confidence in democracy rose from 64.1 percent to 73.3 percent, and confidence in the federal government has picked up strongly over that same period. Polls by Redbridge and Roy Morgan show that Labor’s support has risen since the election.
Perhaps some Labor stalwarts would read these results as enthusiastic support of Albanese and the government, but it could simply indicate that people like it when the government, any government, has a strong majority, after having been subjected to a scare campaign about the hazards of a “hung” parliament.
Outside the researchers’ framework of analysis is the fact that over this period we have seen the election of Trump, and following his inauguration his selective implantation of fascist measures. Our democracy stands out pretty well in comparison.
Unresolved issues in the antisemitism report to government
Jillian Segal, the special envoy to combat antisemitism, has presented to government her Plan to Combat Antisemitism.
So far the main concern has been about the idea that the government should withhold funding from universities and cultural institutions that fail to reduce hatred against Jews. Anyone who has been involved with institutions that necessarily allow and encourage openness of expression will be aware of the administrative and rights issues involved in such a policy. This concern has probably been heightened by Trump’s accusations of antisemitism at Harvard, as part of his assault on learning.
Writing in The Conversation – The special envoy’s antisemitism plan is ambitious, but fails to reckon with the hardest questions – Matteo Vergani summarizes the report and draws attention to issues it leaves unresolved. He writes that “the document ignores the elephant in the room: whether the plan could be used to silence legitimate criticism of Israel.”
Holocaust Denkmal Berlin
He notes that the envoy has adopted the 2016 International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism “which covers both direct attacks on Jewish identity and certain criticisms of Israel, such as comparisons with Nazi Germany”. Kenneth Stern, the lead author of that definition, has subsequently expressed his concern that the definition has been misinterpreted. He explains this in an interview on PBS in May last year: He wrote a definition of antisemitism; now he says it’s being weaponized.
The enduring problem remains the way criticism of the Israel government and antisemitism are conflated. Vergani notes that “some people – often those already harbouring anti-Jewish views – treat the entire Jewish community as if it represents the Netanyahu government or the Israel Defense Forces”. (He could have gone on to note that such conflation has put many Australians off attending protest rallies against the Netanyahu government’s policies.)
An interview on Radio National’s Breakfast program on Friday morning gave Jillian Segal an opportunity to respond to criticism of her report from the Jewish Council of Australia, who called it “a blueprint for silencing dissent rather than building inclusion”. Segal pointed out that two other Australia Jewish bodies have endorsed the report. This issue of representation will inevitably remain unresolved; can we imagine that there might be one body speaking for all Australian Christians?
More seriously on that same interview, when Steve Cannane asked Segal for an example of a media report with antisemitic bias (“manipulated narrative” in her terms) she presented an example of a report on an IDF bombing that hit a hospital. The target may or may not have been deliberate, which means the media could have misrepresented the IDF. But the relevant point is that the report was about the Israel government’s war against Hamas: it had nothing to do with antisemitism. Why did she choose that example?
What constitutes a “display of Nazi symbols”?
On a related matter Jess Scully of ABC Riverina reports that a Wagga Wagga man has been charged with displaying Nazi symbols over a shopfront poster, displayed during the election campaign.
Her article shows the allegedly offensive poster, which portrays Peter Dutton, Gina Rinehart, Clive Palmer and Michael McCormack in uniforms worn by senior officers of Hitler’s regime.
As far as the picture shows, none of the four are displaying a Hakenkreuz (swastika). Two are wearing an Eiserneskreuz (iron cross), a medallion that was first awarded in 1813.
One may reasonably criticize the display for stretching the similarity between Hitler’s thugs and the Liberal Party. There are some clear parallels between the right-wing movements of today and Germany’s Nazis, but so far these present-day movements have not deliberately advocated mass murder of any ethnic minority. It could therefore be argued that the comparison trivialises the Holocaust, but it should be remembered that in their early stages the fascist parties of Europe were not dissimilar to present-day right-wing populist authoritarian movements. The display was probably intended as a warning about what authoritarian populism could grow into.
But does the prohibition of display of Nazi symbols extend to the display of German uniforms? And even if some people judge aspects of the uniforms to be Nazi symbols, is this form of their display likely to cause offence to Jews or others subject to racial or religious vilification? After all, the theme of the display is clearly anti-Nazi.
Are well-meaning people undoing progress on sex discrimination?
Public discussion about the Liberal Party has been focussed on gender quotas, as if achieving X percent of female representation in Parliament or in the executive government will deliver good policy, and bring the female half of the electorate back to support the party.
Really? Would we be assured of good public policy from a cabinet of Sophie Mirabella, Jane Hume, and Bronwyn Bishop?
Now, in response to revelations of alleged paedophilia in child-care centres, some are suggesting that men should be prohibited from working in situations involving caring for young children. Never mind the positive benefits of male role models in such occupations. A compromise suggestion is that only women should change children’s diapers. Do they really believe that the most unpleasant tasks of child care should be left to women?
Both issues have raised questions about gender equality, an area of public policy where there is still much unfinished business, and where reversals can occur.
A big men's shed – Adelaide Club
Older Australians can remember the days when men and women had separate award pay rates, when the Commonwealth Public Service required married women to resign, when a female surgeon or engineer was a rarity, and when women sat in cars outside pubs because they weren’t allowed inside bars. They will remember how in 1984 Susan Ryan, one of only 19 women in Parliament, successfully steered our first sex discrimination act through the legislature.
Societies’ practices relating to gender equality depend not only on discrimination laws and labour laws, but also on people’s comfort with situations involving mixed gender activities.
A group of researchers at Meta and New York University have established that gender equality in law and in practice is likely to occur in societies where friendships between men and women are part of normal social relationships. Their paper, cross-gender social ties around the world – looks at the extent of social gender separation by country and by regions within countries. They conclude that people from areas with less social segregation are “more supportive of equal treatment of men and women across a range of domains”.
As an indicator of gender segregation they look at the number of people of the opposite sex Facebook subscribers include in their top 10, 25 or 200 friends. Unsurprisingly gender separation is strong in the Middle East and in parts of India. Within Europe gender separation is particularly low in France and the former East Germany, but is very high in the stretch of countries that constituted the former Yugoslavia, and in Greece and Turkey. Within countries it is stronger in rural regions than in urban regions.
Their article includes maps of Africa, Europe, the Americas and parts of Asia showing gender separation by region. They have an appendix with maps of other regions, including Australia (on a very slow server). Nationally we come out about the same as the USA and western Europe, and our rural regions stand out as having more separation than urban and coastal regions.
For those with access to The Economist there is an article – Can men and women be just friends? – drawing on this and complementary research. They stress the importance of mixing in education institutions, from pre-school up to university, in breaking down gender barriers.
This research is important in a time when progress in desegregating schools and men’s clubs is slow. Movements such as Me too have had the unintended consequence of raising young women’s fear about forming friendships with men. Well-meaning people have developed programs bringing young men together to become more responsible in their social relationships, but these tend to normalize male bonding. Older men are supported with men’s sheds, encouraging the continuation of traditional gender roles. Some women have come together to form women’s-only clubs, perhaps not realizing that in doing so they provide a justification for men’s-only clubs, where male power networks become established, and where misogynistic attitudes can be nurtured. At the extreme young men who socialize in all male networks can turn to extremist political movements.