2025 election analysis

With the Trump win in 2024, many political commentators posited that a similar right-wing populist surge could occur in Australia.

News outlets are always on the lookout for stories to beat up, and with Trump winning the presidency in 2024, of course they will want to beat it up about the possibility of a right-wing surge in Australia, as has happened in many recent elections in Europe. We can expect more of such talk, especially from the Murdoch media outlets, with conservative politicians happy to front up and spew their dubious lies and misinformation. But how likely is such a change, given that recent trends in Australia have shown the opposite?

While the Labor Party was losing support before the 2025 election, when faced with the wholesale destruction perpetrated by Trump's tariffs and dismantling of democracy, Australians obviously saw that they certainly did not want a government anything like the US, leading to an even larger majority for Labor. With the loss of many moderate Liberal MPs in the 2022 election, the coalition moved further to the right for 2025, whereupon they lost more moderates. With the Nationals now at about 40% of the coalition seats, and so having more say, expect that the Liberals will lose more in 2028.

Australia does not have the half of its population believing in crackpot conspiracy theories to appeal to. However, with Labor showing that it is just as caught up in neoliberal ideals and supporting genocide as the Liberals, some appeal could be made by the latter with the false popular impression that they are superior economic managers. The thorn in the Liberal side is the Teals and other independents. They have made the most inroads into the Liberals because they basically support the same economic policies, but want action on climate change and some better support for people, like women.

While there might be some dissatisfaction with the current governments in Australia, there is too much skepticism of all the right-wing hype for a populist leader like Trump, or any such mass sentiment, to result in a similar takeover of government. Plus almost all of the bureaucracy is not voted for, but statutory, so there is less chances for the type of broad political inroads that have occurred in the US.

For the 2022 election, the recent fires had raised the issue of tackling climate change for many Australians. For 2025, the thinking had shifted back to economic concerns.

Trump's tariff mayhem obviously spooked many Australians, with their concerns about already high costs-of-living getting a severe anxiety boost. Climate change barely got a mention. The coalition was doubling down on some of Trumps policies like sacking public servant and pushing return-to-office measures, only to have to abandon them mid-campaign when their polling showed that was not going to fly with their voters. With not much else to offer, the coalition was effectively cast adrift without any meaningful policies, and so the Liberals suffered their worst election result ever.

Clive Palmer's attempt at Trumpian politics was a fizzer like their efforts in 2022, though it did cost a few $million less than in 2025. The Murdoch press was just as ignored as in 2022, probably due to their rampant misinformation and delusional plugging of the adrift Liberals. The tariff issues had also blown Palestinian issues off the news radar, so the Greens were also casualties of the general move towards Labor. So, while 2022 promised some support for tackling some of our big issues, Australians centred on managing the economy again, but didn't trust the Liberals to do it this time.