Australians have chosen, and they have looked to the future.

Penny Wong, on Election Night 2022

After a long wait for all the seats to be called, Australia finally has a government and ministry sworn in, and despite all the pre-election hoopla, a working Labor majority on the floor of the House is assured.

It is somewhat quizzical, Australia’s fear of hung parliaments. Most of the parliaments in the world outside of the English-speaking democracies tend to be coalitions of parties, often with very competing views and priorities.

In the end, Labor appears to have 77 seats, a working majority allowing for the position of Speaker to be filled by the Government benches, but the real story of the night is just how decimated the Liberal/National Party coalition is with only 59 seats likely in the incoming Parliament.

The rise of the ‘teal’ independents, themselves born out of the ‘voices of’ movements that has been a hallmark of independent candidates in the last decade of Australian politics, has done much to stifle the Liberal Party in seats that traditionally would have been it’s heartland – Kooyong in Melbourne, Wentworth, North Sydney and Warringah in Sydney. Indeed, one former Liberal Party stalwart, now ‘presenter’ on Sky News, Peta Credlin, claimed these seats were ‘rightfully Liberal’ in the lead-up to Election Day. Such ‘born to rule’ protestations undoubtedly didn’t go unnoticed in those seats.

To be fair, the ALP primary vote fell as well, however a lot of this can be put down to ‘strategic’ voting in those ‘teal’ seats, where Labor supporters voted 1 for the independent candidate in order to ensure the sitting Liberal MP got the boot – artificially depressing the ALP overall figure. How much this played into things will be a matter of debate for psephologists for the next year or so, no doubt.

But the tale of the tape is this – in spite of the ALP vote nationally being depressed, they still got enough seats to form a workable majority in the House in their own right, and no amount of L/NP hissy-fits of first preference results can change that. What we saw on election night, and the week and a half that followed, was the preferential voting system in all its glory – delivering each electorates ‘preferred’ candidate, exactly how it is designed to. The Labor Party now has a clear mandate to enact the policies it took to the election from the Australian people, according to how we elect our representatives.

In that sense, the 2022 Federal Election was truly a marvel of the Australian version of democracy.

Possibly the biggest shock, at least to commentators, was how small Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party’s support was across the nation. For me, the numbers felt about right. After all, this was a party clutching to fringe issues around lockdowns and vaccinations to garner support, but Australia is one of the highest vaccinated populations in the world. Plus, One Nation was also making a play for that vote, further splintering it. Had they got any more than 4-or-so% in the final count, I would have been very surprised.

It’s hard to know what will happen to these far-right parties. I feel that the Palmer junket has probably now run its course. And with Pauline Hanson still not assured (even if she’s the most likely) to win her Queensland Senate seat, they may suffer the same fate that the Democrats did in the early 2000s without a strong (for lack of a better word) leader. I still content that if she fails to win her seat, much pressure will be placed on Malcolm Roberts to resign with the casual vacancy created given to Hanson.

With counting still ongoing in the ACT Senate, I’ll save my observations about that election until either David Pocock or Zed Seselja is declared, save for this – it is looking extremely likely that Pocock will win that seat. If that happens, this is the biggest fall of the Liberal Party in ACT Election history. That is remarkable. I still maintain that roughly a third of the electorate would still describe themselves as Liberal, but on the surface it would seem that the right faction of the Liberal Party is starting to bleed that support. The next ACT Election will make for interesting viewing.

This was a fascinating election for so many reasons, not least the fact that I got to work on a couple of campaigns for a trade union, thus ticking a couple of bucket-list items along the way. As I sit on the balcony of the resort unit in Coffs Harbour, taking a few days off to reflect, there is a sense of pride at the small part I played, but more prominently, a sense of excitement for the future of Australia.

It’s been a while since I could say that.