Daniel Gleeson:

Good evening everyone. Very warm welcome to the National Library of Australia. My name is Daniel Gleeson. I'm the Director of Community Engagement here. It's so wonderful to have an almost full house for this wonderful event, which will be a really engaging conversation I'm sure about last year's remarkable federal election. Before we begin, may I acknowledge the Ngunnawal people as the traditional custodians of the ACT and the surrounding region? And I also acknowledge other people and families with a connection to these beautiful lands where the Library is placed. Now, can I ask everyone to make sure that your phones are switched off or set to silent? And this of course applies to any alarms or reminders you may have set yourself. In my experience, this tends to happen at around 7:30, which would make sense for a very politically engaged audience who might be waiting to catch Sarah Ferguson.

You won't catch Sarah Ferguson because you're here at the National Library. Tonight we're gathered for the launch of Landslide, a new publication from ANU Press edited by Marian Sawer, Jill Sheppard, and John Warhurst about the 2025 Federal Election. Now, we at the Library can't wait to receive a copy of this publication. Along with every other work published in Australia, we will add it to the national collection and we'll keep it safe for the use of all Australians. And of course, we also maintain a collection of Australian election campaign material, which now extends to more than 52 shelf metres. That's complete shelves and dates back to Federation in 1901. Last year, Australians across the country enthusiastically contributed to that collection by providing the library with the campaign material that they received. The collection represents an important record of the issues, the parties, and the policies on which campaigns are fought.

And that collection is available to all of you, either by requesting in our reading room or online via Trove. This event tonight reflects the strengths of the ongoing partnership between the National Library of Australia and the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. The Academy has done a really amazing job bringing leading thinkers, researchers, students, and storytellers to the Library and helping us to remain a place where ideas can be shared openly and generously. I would now like to invite Dr. Chris Hatherly, CEO of the Academy to officially commence this evening's discussion. Please join with me in welcoming Chris.

Chris Hatherly:

Well, thank you very much, Daniel, and thank you everyone for coming along this evening. It's wonderful to see so many people in the building and thank you also to those who are joining us online. I'd also like to acknowledge the Ngunnawal people, the Traditional Owners, and pay my respect to Elders past and present. So for those who don't know us, the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia was established in 1971 to represent, celebrate, and champion the work of achievements of Australian social science researchers, educators, and thinkers. The Academy is an elected body of over 750 leading experts across a broad range of disciplines.

A number of them are here in the audience this evening. Thank you for coming along. And we come together as an Academy to provide independent advice to governments to engage with research programmes in Australia and internationally to support greater understanding and uptake of social science research and education.

Now, this book we're launching tonight is part of a federal election workshop series, which has been going since 1958, much longer than I have. The Academy has been involved since 1996, so almost 30 years now, bringing together political scientists, election analysts, and campaign experts to dissect, understand, and learn from the strategy, the theatre, and the context that surrounds each federal election.

Each workshop series they held about five or six weeks after the federal election in question over a weekend, and the contributors and participants come together, produce an edited volume such as the one we're launching this evening. So back in 1996, we had the 'Politics of Retribution'. I'm sure some people here can probably still remember the retribution in question. Then there was 'Howard's Agenda'. We had '2001: The Centenary Election'. 'Kevin 07' was in there who could forget, followed closely by 'Julia 2010'. In 2013, we had 'Abbott's Gambit', then 'Double Dissolution', 'Morrison's Miracle' in 2019, and most recently 'Watershed', the 2022 Australian Federal Election. And tonight, of course, we have 'Landslide'. So before I introduce our panellists, I just wanted to acknowledge the editorial team of Marian Sawer, Jill Sheppard, and John Warhurst, as well as the team from ANU Press - Eloise Ball, and her colleagues. I'd also like to acknowledge my colleagues from the Academy - Vanessa, Anna, and Ellen, others in the audience, and colleagues, of course, from the National Library, so Daniel, Kelly, and your wonderful teams.

We're absolutely thrilled to have this ongoing relationship. She's not here tonight, I believe, but I'd also like to acknowledge the newly appointed Director General, Alison Dellit. She's a long-term friend of research in the social sciences, and we're thrilled that her appointment is commenced just this week.

As Daniel said, we've had an ongoing partnership now that's been growing over the last few years between the Academy and the National Library, bringing together really engaging, entertaining events like we're about to hear this evening. And we hope to see many of you at our next event, which will be the Social Sciences Week Great Debate on the 17th of September. So now to our panellists. So first we have Associate Professor Jill Sheppard from the ANU School of Politics and International Relations. So Jill's research spans elections, compulsory voting, political participation, and public opinion. She's a key contributor to major survey studies such as the Australian Election Study and the World Values Survey. And many of you here will know her, I'm sure, from her insightful commentary during federal elections. Her radio spot there is very entertaining. Joining her is journalist Nick Bryant, whose nearly three decades with the BBC have taken him from Washington to South Asia, Australia, and New York.

Nick has reported on some of the most consequential political periods of recent decades, including, well, the current ones, the Trump years, and his writing has appeared in The Economist, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, the Sydney Morning Herald, and many other outlets. Together, Jill and Nick will take us inside the making of Landslide and the broader implications of the 2025 election for Australia's political landscape. So whether you're here in the room or online, please join me in welcoming Jill Sheppard and Nick Bryant.

Nick Bryant:

Thank you very much. It is so lovely to be in this temple of learning and scholarship and literature. I didn't realise until recently the National Library is actually modelled on the proportions of the Parthenon in Athens. I didn't realise that it had a cinema in the basement either. It's fantastic to look back on those little windows.

Confessively, I am more of a fan of Canberra's brutalist architecture than its brutalist politics. When I was the BBC's correspondent and I used to come down here, it was often because you were changing prime ministers. And so those trips down the Hume Highway were quite frequent. Back in the day, I described Canberra as the coup capital of the democratic world, and this was actually before Tony Abbott got rolled by Malcolm Turnbull, and Malcolm Turnbull got rolled by Scott Morrison. So that phrase ended up having a very long afterlife.

It is fantastic to be here tonight. This is such a terrific book. I mean, Jill Sheppard, you have lived up to your name in shepherding these academics. You've herded them into this book in a rather brilliant way, and I really congratulate you on the book. It's fantastic. Thanks

Jill Sheppard:

Full credit to Marion for doing the shepherding. I'm far too nice to our contributors. Marion is the one that wields the stick.

Nick Bryant:

I guess my take on the election was that an Australian electorate had used a uniquely Australian electoral system to elect an emphatically Australian prime minister. But although Anthony Albanese won a landslide, it was a loveless landslide.

Jill Sheppard:

Yeah. I think there's two stories that have come out of the 2025 election, and I didn't predict any of them really. Obviously, as you say, Nick, there was this huge gulf between the primary vote share that Labour won, which is only about 36% of the national electorate, and then their seat share in the House of Reps, which is about 63%. Now, I've said subsequently that if we were in any other country in the world, and I know Michael Maley's here, if we were advising another country on an electoral system, you would say, 'Oh my God, stay away.' That is about the worst outcome you could hope for, that kind of disproportionality.

One of the suggested titles for the book from our colleague and contributor, Murray Goot was 'Underestimated', because he said, 'Labour was underestimated in the polls, but they're also underestimated in how well they campaigned and how well they turned that very meagre vote share in real terms into this thumping landslide win.' Now, I think that that's produced two outcomes, as I foreshadowed. One is that we have this government that probably has a bigger majority than they expected, doesn't quite know what they're going to do with that. I think it will lead to some restlessness as we go through this parliamentary term. I think there'll be members on that Labour backbench who say, 'What was that for? We've got 94 seats. What are we going to do with that?' The other thing that I think gets to where we are today, and this sort of relentless talk about One Nation is that there is a big gulf of people who didn't vote for Labour and who in our majoritarian winner-takes-all type system aren't represented in government now.

Now, should we Europeanize ourselves? That's a bigger debate, not one for tonight, but I don't think that on election night, when everyone was talking about how well Labour had done, we would have thought that we would be having these conversations not even a year later.

Nick Bryant:

It's really interesting. I mean, when I said about an Australian electorate using an emphatically Australian system to elect an emphatically Australian prime minister, I saw it as a rejection of the Americanization of politics, and yet that seemingly has been contradicted by the rise of One Nation since. Although my hunch would be in a few years time, we'll be able to say an Australian electorate has used an Australian system to elect an Australian government. I don't see them as forming government, but that paradox here, that it did seem that Dutton was being rejected for being 'team of Trump', as he was sometimes called, but since his defeat, we've actually seen a kind of populist search.

Jill Sheppard:

Yeah. And I think there is that demand in the electorate. Now, Dutton probably wasn't the right person to meet that demand head on. I don't want to get too deep in the weeds of One Nation because as the book shows, they're largely irrelevant. And I wrote in the line, they laid low. I wrote a line in the book, sorry, that they really laid low, which I think is to their benefit for the most part. But if you were to sort of reverse engineer how we got to today via the last election, you would expect One Nation to have had a much bigger role in it, and they didn't at all. It's all come subsequently. So I think there has to be something in that that traces back to that Labor's thumping win with such a small vote share.

Nick Bryant:

I was really, I don't want to focus too much on One Nation, but we can talk about that later. And there are other things to talk about in 2025, but a couple of lines leapt out at me. 'One Nation affirmed its place as the fourth party in Australia'. I mean, now arguably they're a lot stronger than that. And another line, 'One Nation maintained a relatively low profile in the lead up to the 2025 election'.

Jill Sheppard:

No, I think they were only been able to do that while they've been the fourth party. If they go into an election as the second party, that profile will have to rise commensurately. And I don't think, don't want to make predictions in this sort of current state of the world, but I don't know how well that will go for them. But I think this idea, and I'll attribute this to another one of our contributors, Ben Raue, who talks about having a four party system that is effectively a two block system, and where the Greens have settled into a party to the left of Labour that probably allows Labour to be a little bit more centrist, to talk to business, to talk a more moderate game generally. While voters can choose the Greens if they so want, One Nation will probably end up being the same for the Liberal Party.

And I think it may actually be a bit of a godsend to the Liberal National Coalition.

Nick Bryant:

You spoke about the possibility of calling the book 'Underestimated', and it's worth remembering what was happening in 2024. It was called the Year of Democracy because there were so many elections around the world, but it was really a year of anti-incumbency, wasn't it? I think every single government that faced election or reelection either lost or lost ground. The assumption was something similar would happen here and even if Albanese didn't get a majority, it'd be ended up in a hung parliament that seemed to be the best he could hope for. What happened?

Jill Sheppard:

What a question. So I mean, I think first of all, we did underestimate all of us. I don't think if anyone in the room wants to sort of argue otherwise, I don't believe you, frankly. We didn't realise how strategic Labour had been. And I think the book from various angles talks about this. They campaigned well in areas where a lot of us probably thought they were a bit mad, Queensland, namely. They dropped issues that they thought were going to lose them votes. They didn't really talk about rural and regional issues. If you were writing a campaign from scratch, it was a bold gambit. This was as much Albanese's gambit, I think as it was Abbott's gambit in 2013, and it paid off. Now, it could have gone the other way, right? Because when you have that, I'm going to get in the weeds of the electoral system a little bit here, but when you have such a low primary vote share, if you get knocked out of counting early in election night, you get completely wiped out.

And that's what the Liberal Party has just found in South Australia. It's what the Liberal Party found throughout a lot of the country in May 2025, and it could have gone very badly for Labour. They got lucky. They also got smart. They're using data a lot better than anyone else in the country at the moment. And even though their politicians are probably frustratingly risk averse, especially with this majority in the House of Reps, I think their campaign team is much less so and willing to have a punt.

Nick Bryant:

Something very important happened in January 2025 in the run up to the Australian federal election. Donald J. Trump took the oath of office for his second term. We saw the beginning of Trump 2.0. A lot of people interpreted that as this sort of great conservative vibe shift. I think Peter Dutton did for sure. To what extent did the 'Trump Effect' alter the dynamic of this election?

Jill Sheppard:

Well, certainly I think it reduced the area that Peter Dutton had to play in. He couldn't look too 'Trump Lite'. Many of us in the room would argue that he ended up doing that anyway. I would argue, I think he's much more of the Howard kind of mould than he was a sort of proto populist. I don't think that's where he fits naturally. I think he's deeply an institutionalist, but he couldn't look too Trumpian lest that become the focus of the whole campaign. He ended up there anyway because he didn't talk about anything else. So I think in a vacuum of policy and any other substance, the only thing that anyone could talk about was, "Well, is he Trump Lite? Is he Temu Trump?" And the answer is maybe, but it didn't matter because by then the agenda had been set. I also think though Trump was quite difficult for Albanese.

Albanese and Labour desperately don't want to appear weak on defence, on national security or on immigration. These are issues that the Liberal Party owns and we talk about issue ownership in election studies. The idea that if you think health, you think Labour. If you think education, you think Labour, right? And if you don't think too deeply about policy specifics, you can use these issues to carry votes over the line without too much effort. It's campaigning on easy mode. So anytime Albanese or Chalmers or anyone in Labour invoked Trump, you've run this risk that you say, 'Oh, well, what would you do differently? What would you do that might open up our borders or might make us weaker on national defence?' Labor's today announced an increase in defence spending to 4% of GDP. Now there's questions over how real that increase is. Are they just fudging the numbers?

It doesn't matter. The fact that they're even announcing this Nick shows how worried they are about defence. Right now, there are members in this government who would be appalled by what Trump's doing in Iran and they're not saying it. I think Trump is as big a problem for the left in Australia as they are for the right.

Nick Bryant:

It's interesting because a lot of the international coverage of the Australian election lumped it in with what had happened in the Canadian election. Similar dynamic, the centre left government, the Liberal Party in Canada is obviously centre left. Facing reelection, thought it was going to lose, Justin Trudeau steps aside as Prime Minister, in comes Mark Carney. And of course, Carney, because of Trump's territorial designs on Canada and calling it the 51st state and everything, he can really hammer Trump, but there's a key difference. There's no AUKUS deal that Canada's involved in. I wonder to what extent does the AUKUS deal hang like the sort of Sword of Damocles over Albanese during the campaign, he knows he's benefiting from the Trump effect, but as you say, he has to be very careful how he calibrates that.

Jill Sheppard:

Desperate not to appear weak on defence, desperate not to lose votes in South Australia. It's very cynical stuff, but you've got a defence industry that is so crucial electorally in South Australia. At the same time, we had Chinese ships circumnavigating the country, and no one really talked about that either. The one time that either party weighed into Chinese foreign policy was with regards to buying back the Port of Darwin.

And on a Friday afternoon, I think Peter Dutton announced that his reelected government would buy back the Port of Darwin from the Chinese leaseholders. And about 12 hours later, Albanese said the same. And that was the story of this campaign, was that someone would make a step, the other party would try to nullify that. They were closing the door on any gaps that could be perceived between them. It led to this, I think this huge difference between the vote chair and the seat chair, as I've said. It also led to great disengagement. Do you remember trying to make content for 35 days? It was brutal. There was very little to talk about. I think I came on and I probably blabbed for half an hour at you at some point.

There wasn't much to talk about. So now when we say in April 2026, One Nation's polling at 25% of the vote, I think there is that direct line back there.

Nick Bryant:

One thing that got a lot of focus was Dutton's performance. I mean, you were talking about how assured Labour was. And I mean, in the 2022 campaign, it seemed that Anthony Albanese just had stage fright. He fluffed that opening day or that opening second day, whatever it was, when he couldn't remember the interest rates and all that kind of gotcha stuff that became a ridiculous kind of journalistic trope throughout the campaign. Then he got COVID, didn't he? And I think that...

Jill Sheppard:

It helped.

Nick Bryant:

...reset things. I remember talking to Albanese not long after I came back to Australia. I said, 'Have you thought of doing a Biden?', which was basically to hide away during the presidential campaign.

Jill Sheppard:

What a question, Nick.

Nick Bryant:

And Albanese ended up doing that himself, and it helped Albanese in the same way, frankly, it helped Biden because they could show that the Labour government would be a group portrait and people like Chalmers and Penny Wong and others came to the fore. I thought that was really interesting. But it seemed that Peter Dutton suffered from stage fright in this election. I mean, in The Voice referendum, I mean, he prosecuted his argument in a very kind of ruthless and efficient and professional way. Those oppositional skills seemed to desert him.

Jill Sheppard:

I just think he had an argument in the referendum and the story of the 2025 election, I might be Peter Dutton's last defender, particularly in Canberra, probably in the country. I think he had a fine campaign. I think it could have been a hell of a lot worse. I think he had nothing to talk about, and that's not the problem of Peter Dutton for those 35 days. That's a problem of a Liberal Party that doesn't know what they're going to do and of a leader who is hanging on by the skin of his teeth inside that party room. And I don't think that's necessarily changed for the Liberal Party. Angus Taylor is probably a bit more forthright. I've got journalist friends who think he's a terrible communicator. I think he's a fine communicator, but he's looking over his shoulder constantly. And when you're looking over your shoulder, if you're trying to navigate a path to ... It's a theory in political science about how you move from the status quo to your desired policy position.

And if you've got scattered individuals all over the party room, it's very hard to make that move. And so Dutton, bless him, was dealing with this party room that's all over the shop. Even if he'd wanted to move a consensus policy position, he was going to find that really difficult. I also think he was weak and not very convinced by his own sort of policy preferences, so he didn't even try.

Nick Bryant:

I mean, my take on Dutton during the campaign would be slightly different, I think, which was there were a lot of unforced errors. I mean, starting off the campaign, almost was measuring the curtains in Kirribilli House. Do you remember when he answered that question? I mean, that just seems to be.

Jill Sheppard:

You got to have confidence.

Nick Bryant:

But it's just a big own goal, isn't it? The work from home stuff with the federal government, the DOGE style attacks on the Canberra bureaucracy. I mean, during The Voice he'd really sort of gone with the Canberra, the populist play, let's bash Canberra. And he seems to try to do that again and it didn't work. It was almost like he thought he could do in the federal election what he'd done in The Voice.

Jill Sheppard:

Yeah, I think that's right. I think the work from home's a really interesting example of this where-

Nick Bryant:

Disastrous, right?

Jill Sheppard:

Disastrous and so unnecessary. It didn't move voter's perceptions of the party in any direction. It just made them look even less united and convinced of anything than they had previously. But if they'd talked about that six months earlier, the party would have had a position and maybe the position would still be a dud, but you'd at least get up there and there'd be four of you there. There wouldn't be Jane Hume who you then let adrift because the policy went down like a lead balloon.

Nick Bryant:

Well, one thing the book reminded me of, actually I didn't think I realised it in the first place that Jane Hume made this announcement in advance of International Women's Day, and it was a policy that was obviously going to hit women a lot more.

Jill Sheppard:

They hadn't talked that through, and that's what a policy process does. It has to happen a year in advance and you have to stress test these things. And there has to be someone in the room that says, "This might be a dud. Who's going to be affected by this? " But when you're making policy on the road, literally at this point, right, you're in planes and you're on a bus. Again, I'm probably becoming a bit contrarian on this front, but what's Dutton to do?

Nick Bryant:

Well, one thing he could have done is read the postmortem of the 2022 campaign, right?

Jill Sheppard:

They don't read them. We've established that, right?

Nick Bryant:

Because what leapt out of that was the Liberal Party has a woman problem. One of the reasons they struggle now to win seats with views of Sydney Harbour and their equivalent seats in Melbourne and Perth and Adelaide is because professional women are rejecting the Liberal Party. You'd have thought they'd have learned that lesson in 2022. It seemed they repeated that same mistake in 2025.

Jill Sheppard:

I think they know it intellectually, but structurally that's a really hard ship to turn around. These are big liners, and it's very hard to get directional change. There'd probably be people in the room who've been to a Liberal Party meeting. They're pretty moribund. The average age is very old. All of this is well-worn territory, and it's making both candidate recruitment and then policy development inside the party, both difficult and really unrepresentative.

Nick Bryant:

There's a good quote in the book from Charlotte Mortlock, who's the founder of the Hilma's Network, which is named after Hilma Molyneux Parkes, who'd been the leader of the New South Wales Suffragette movement. The average Australian is a 37-year-old woman. Our average party member is a 70-year-old male, speaks to the problem.

Jill Sheppard:

Now, Labor's got the same problem, right? No major party is necessarily immune from this. Quotas are helping Labour a lot. They're lifting the floor up immediately. And what that does, there's arguments about how sort of valid critical mass theory is, but I think at least intuitively, there's something to it. You get enough women in the room, other women are going to feel more comfortable about entering that room. The Liberal Party, for better or worse, won't introduce quotas. I think even if they did, they would find it difficult because no one wants to be the first woman in that room. Now, we can talk about how Sussan Ley was treated as leader. I don't think she was a very good leader. And I think her position was both numerically and sort of tactically precarious from the start, but none of this helps, does it?

Nick Bryant:

One thing the election showed obviously is the big story, really, the 21st century in Australian politics, which is the comparative decline of the major parties. Tell us about the vote share that minor parties and independents got, because that was a big headline coming out of this election.

Jill Sheppard:

Well, it's effectively a three-way tie between Labour, the Coalition, and then other. Now, the problem with that comparison is that other is a heterogeneous block. There's a lot of different groups in there. There's just as many Greens as there are One Nation supporters in that 30%. The important thing though is that that 30% aren't really being heard. You can get up a couple of teal members. I desperately thought there would be a hung parliament. I thought there was no chance that the Labour won a majority. And I'm still ... Your first question tonight was, how did that happen? I still don't know really. I gave you an answer, but I'm not convinced of it.

I change my mind every day. It shouldn't happen in a good electoral system. It did happen here, and it's bad because now you have these people who have said, "Well, yeah, I'll vote teals." And the teals showed that they have a strong base in their respective seats. They've managed pretty tricky political conditions. They're trying to take nuanced positions on issues that affect their seats and it also affects the country. They're finding representation hard. It is hard. It's a tough job. But that group isn't getting smaller. It's growing and it's getting more diverse. And what that means for any party trying to govern this country, we don't quite know yet. And Labor's response to that growing group of other voters has kind of been to go to ground. And I don't know that that helps.

Nick Bryant:

We saw from this past election that the teals weren't a flash in the pan.

Jill Sheppard:

I thought they were.

Nick Bryant:

You thought they were?

Jill Sheppard:

Oh, I made some shocking predictions before this election, Nick.

Nick Bryant:

Well, you haven't got the powers of clairvoyance, Jill. But was that because you thought that the Liberals would actually kind of respond to their rise by sort of tacking back to the centre? I mean, that would have been ...

Jill Sheppard:

I thought that voters would lose patience with not having a representative in a party of government. And by that I mean by not electing someone that can have a seat at that cabinet table or at that shadow cabinet table. But what voters have shown is that they actually dislike someone who's going to talk. And as much as we have all these problems of party politics in Australia, the moribund parties, the ageing membership, the lack of women in the Liberal Party, as much as anything, I think a problem is party discipline. And that if everyone just had a slightly longer leash to speak their mind, and if us as commentators and as media and as political watchers were more tolerant of disagreement within the parties being aired publicly, we could probably have a much better politics. Now there's no magic bullet to that though, is there? That's not going to happen because I've said it here at the National Library on a Thursday night.

Nick Bryant:

You haven't got that power.

Jill Sheppard:

I'm pretty close.

Nick Bryant:

So you haven't got the powers of clairvoyance, you haven't got the power to say something to make it happen

Jill Sheppard:

No, I'm an academic.

Nick Bryant:

The point is made in the book, which I think is a really strong one, and to the point about the teals and their continued success or not. When you've got a landslide situation with a big parliament through majority, they're a kind of bit of a parliamentary irrelevance. And that makes presumably their job harder to sell next time round. But I don't think that they necessarily sell themselves on.

Jill Sheppard:

I said the same thing on what day was the election? The 3rd of May. I said the same thing on the 4th of May last year. Well, they did very well electorally, but they're sort of sitting in relevance kind of graveyard. Look at David Pocock. He's never had a bigger profile. I think it shows ... It's a different way

Nick Bryant:

In the Senate, obviously.

Jill Sheppard:

It's a different way of representing, but you can do it. Allegra Spender has released a tax white paper. I don't know if it will actually lead to tax reform, but all of them are doing better at setting the national agenda than my local Labour member or my local Liberal member.

Nick Bryant:

I think there's a behavioural impact in the way they've sort of raised standards of deportment in the House.

Jill Sheppard:

I think that's a really important part too. In some ways.

Nick Bryant:

And in a policy way, actually a lot of them are saying interesting things in

Jill Sheppard:

And there's a vacuum because the major parties aren't talking about anything.

Nick Bryant:

We haven't spoken about the Greens. There was a paradox here, wasn't there - the Greens vote stayed pretty stable, pretty similar to what it was in 2022, but their parliamentary representation obviously shifted.

Jill Sheppard:

Yeah. I think Labour hurt in 2022 by losing those seats in Queensland. The Libs also hurt, but couldn't get themselves in order to get them back. But Labour saw an opportunity, I think, in Brisbane to pull two of those seats back. Interestingly, the one seat that the Greens held onto in Brisbane, the Seat of Ryan is the most conservative of all of them. And that's an interesting kind of artefact of our electoral system. The conservative vote held up in Ryan. There's a lot of 'Tree Tories', we'll call them. People worried about the environment, but still voting Liberal. They vote Liberal, so Labour got knocked out first, and those Labour preferences then flow to the Greens. So the Greens retained the seat that on paper we wouldn't have expected them to. We would've thought would've gone back to the Libs. I think the Greens did a really tremendous job and to spruik the 2022 book, 'Watershed', really campaigned out of their skin.

And I'm sceptical about how much campaigns matter. I'm from a school of political science that says, voters are locked in by now. It doesn't matter what happens on the 10th day of the election. We've either tuned out or we've made up our mind because we're so rusted on.

And maybe that's why I'm a bit sort of bullish on Peter Dutton's 2025 campaign. But I think I'm really compelled by the idea that the Greens campaigned well. They were in the community for a year to 18 months in advance of the election. So it wasn't a flash in the pan thing. These were people and volunteers as well that voters had seen around. No other party's doing it like that. Now they couldn't back that up because it's bloody hard, right? That's 18 months of volunteering from people who at the end are knackered and you say, 'We won three seats. That was great. Oh, we're never going to get into government, are we?' People have limited patience for spending time on this stuff in those numbers.

Nick Bryant:

It's fascinating you say that about how the campaign really didn't shift things. Because looking back, I can't really remember much about the campaign.

Jill Sheppard:

Dull as dishwater.

Nick Bryant:

You think of the debates. I can't ... I was going to say the three debates were there four? I don't know. Do you know what? I don't think I even watched them all. I didn't even know they were on. It's weird.

Jill Sheppard:

We're terrible people to have doing this, Nick.

Nick Bryant:

Well, maybe we're representative. I'd suggest that. It seemed to be a kind of eventless campaign. I really can't remember much about it. Can anybody, by the way? I mean, sorry, maybe I'm just sort of having a senior moment, but looking back, what stood out? I kind of remember moments in the 2020 campaign. Albanese's fluff on the first day and that crazy gotcha question at the press club where Adam Bandt said, "Google it mate." There were a couple

Jill Sheppard:

Of things that

Nick Bryant:

Stick in the mind. This was weirdly uneventful.

Jill Sheppard:

I've voted since 2001 and this campaign feels the most like it was just a gauntlet run. It was just-

Nick Bryant:

What does that mean?

Jill Sheppard:

An endurance test. You had to get through it and not stuff up too badly. I talk a lot in politics about positive risk and negative risk. And I think this campaign was all about negative risk, just minimise it. No one was out there swinging wildly.

Nick Bryant:

That's interesting, isn't it?

Jill Sheppard:

And I think that's a real compulsory voting thing.

Nick Bryant:

Campaigning has become very risk averse and governance has arguably become very risk averse as well. Yeah, I think so. Some big themes, an urban rural divide has been exacerbated. Just tell us about that.

Jill Sheppard:

Well, I think that the counterside to saying the Liberals have lost these suburban votes, because I think that's a well-trodden path now. Seats like Goldstein winning that back for the Libs, that was swimming against the tide. Peter Dutton really struggled with even outer suburbs. I thought the Libs might've done okay because those second tiers around, the second bands of suburbs around Melbourne and Sydney would probably hold up for the Libs and they didn't. Seats like Menzies and Chisholm in Victoria, they just feel like Labour heartland now and they weren't.That was Liberal territory for so long. So Peter Dutton wasn't able to get those back. Angus Taylor I think might have a better shout. But even though Dutton was ... And this is the other thing that both the book and the Australian Election Study have talked about, really tremendously unpopular. As I said, I'm literally, I think his last defender.

The Libs and Nats did great. Nat's vote keeps holding up in rural and regional areas. And I think as much as an in because Labour has departed the field. So Labor's trying to build a coalition of voters throughout the inner suburbs and the outer suburbs. And I think to do that, they've just jettisoned anyone outside of 50kms outside of a central area.

Nick Bryant:

And do you interpret that success of the Nationals? They seem to come back to Canberra emboldened, 'We want to have more of a say'. We had that divorce that didn't last too long,

Jill Sheppard:

But ... Yeah, I think it's fascinating. We write the Nats off after every election. And I think it only seems ... Yeah, you're right. It only seems to embolden them. It seems like they like their back against the wall. And I think Matt Canavan will see how he goes among his colleagues, but he's got that mentality. And I think that's really important for the Nats. But in terms of it, this isn't good for politics, is it, that we can split the country geographically? I don't think it will last because I think the Libs, God, hopefully, will see that the future in a two-party system requires that they can win some seats in the city. Yeah.

Nick Bryant:

When you start splitting the country geographically, you get into a kind of red blue stuff. It's not good.

Jill Sheppard:

Yeah, we don't want that.

Nick Bryant:

But I am going to split the country demographically. We saw the end of the dominance in the Baby Boomers in Australian elections.

Jill Sheppard:

Yeah. Now, is this a demographic cliff for the Libs? The jury's really out because they had that vote locked in and they still do have that vote locked in. And you see it in things like housing policy and negative gearing and franking credits (still don't know what they are), in super tax minimization, all of these things that have been geared towards that generation specifically, right? Now, Labor's been more ambivalent on these. And I think in government, I was expecting them to go a little bit harder to say, all right, that's a generation of voters that is dying out, frankly, and that we're not going to win back anyway. And the fact that they haven't gone harder has been really surprising to me because I think those voters under the age of 50, Labour can lock them in for at least the next couple of elections.

What's really interesting about these generational divides though is we see from the election study, so not necessarily how people are voting, but how people feel about the parties. People come into the electorate, they're 18, they're gung ho, they vote Greens. It's a sort of even split between Greens and Labour, and then a very small percentage vote Liberal in that age. So Greens are doing great. Now, a lot of those voters do come back to Labour. I don't think this is suggesting that Greens are going to become the dominant force on the left.

These voters hit about 35 and their satisfaction, their confidence, their trust in the institutions all falls off a cliff. And that's about the age when they don't have job security and they thought they would. They don't have a mortgage and they thought they would. They feel like the system is set up for people much older than them and they've lost that naivety of youth.

That's a real problem for both parties, those voters between 35 and 55. Older than that, you're voting for the Libs. That group at the moment is voting Labour, but they won't forever. They're doing it sort of with their nose held. And I think that's ... It's not good when your core electorate is retiring or facing end of life

Nick Bryant:

My shelves at home are filled with books called the Permanent Republican Majority.

Jill Sheppard:

Oh,

Nick Bryant:

Everyone.

Jill Sheppard:

And

Nick Bryant:

There's another one called the Permanent Democratic Majority.

Jill Sheppard:

Exactly.

Nick Bryant:

These books always sort of have a very good shelf life. You can't take anything for granted, I guess, is the same with demographics. More than 30% of the electorate was born overseas. That's the highest level I think we've ever had. Chinese Australian vote more important. An Indian Australian vote more important. Just tell us about how-

Jill Sheppard:

The thing I'm really interested in in both of those particular demographics is the migrants that come here have very high rates of education and they work here and they have very bad job security and very low incomes. And at the moment they are voting Labour, but two elections ago, they voted Liberal. They're people who have, at the moment, quite high life satisfaction and are satisfied with how democracy's working for them, but that feels precarious to me.

Nick Bryant:

Why that shift from Liberal to Labour?

Jill Sheppard:

Because they don't have party loyalties, especially if you're a first generation migrant, you haven't grown up here and you haven't been told when you're 14, this is the political science sort of conventional wisdom. By 14, you're locked in. And obviously that's not true anymore, but that held up for decades pretty well. So if you're not living in the country at 14, you've never even heard of these parties. And you turn up and you've met Keith Wolahan or you've met Gladys Liu, your local member, and you feel good about them personally, so you may vote Liberal. But then if the next election, Labor's working harder and Labour is talking to you about your specific issue, which isn't necessarily being Chinese. The issue is you've come here to make your life better and we're treating you poorly. You're not being rewarded for your skills.

Nick Bryant:

And you raised another important structural point there, which is voter fluidity is being confirmed again at this election. Big story of the 21st century.

Jill Sheppard:

Yeah. We can call it volatility. And then it sounds nefarious. Better? That's a better word. Fluidity is a terrible word. No, I much prefer fluidity because I think it shows that voters are smart, right? They're watching and they're learning and they're not willing to just turn up and vote for the same party. There's a lack of loyalty. There's a lack of poverty. Yeah. Lack of loyalty will be the key to saving Australian democracy.

Nick Bryant:

It's good you brought out Australian democracy because I want to ask you a question about the health of that. And please prepare to weigh in yourselves. We're going to get some microphones sort of circulating at about quarter to. What was striking to me, Jill, I thought there was a new level of appreciation about the Australian democratic model in this election.

Jill Sheppard:

From whom?

Nick Bryant:

Thought there was a new appreciation. Maybe it's because I've become a convert. I used to think compulsory voting was part of Australia's punishment culture. It was like getting a parking ticket one minute after your metre expires. It's just another way of enforcing a rule. But actually, I now see compulsory voting as a real democratic safeguard. I really do. I mean, the AEC is a gold standard organisation. These high participation rates keep politics or supposedly keep politics pretty much in a kind of a middle and is a guard against political extremism. What did this election say about the health of Australian democracy?

Jill Sheppard:

It's all good. I mean, we had the highest electoral roll, the largest electoral roll we've ever had and the largest actual voter turnout that we've ever had. That percentage, when you got both the numerator and the denominator going up, you'd normally see a bit of a downturn in voter turnout as a percentage, but it's not going down. It was a remarkable effort. Another election of no mistakes. The one mistake was a poor election day worker accidentally taking a box of ballot papers home. It was microchipped and tagged, so they knew exactly where it was and they got it back the next day. The electoral commission are ... And it's-

Nick Bryant:

That's quite something to take home with you,

Jill Sheppard:

Isn't it? Oh no, imagine looking in the rear view mirror going 'Oh god'. I think in her defence, she thought it would be safer in her house than in the potentially unlocked polling place.

Nick Bryant:

That in America would go viral. There'd be a kind of big lie conspiracy around it. Fox News would start spreading the lie. You'd have a storming of the parliament.

Jill Sheppard:

We are so lucky. And it's very trite to say it's our precious ... We have to safeguard this trust around the AEC and it's desperate that we do. And a lot of the things that the Labour government has talked about and Liberal government, they wanted ... Oh, sorry, Liberal Party wanted even more than Labour are things like trust and also truth in political advertising, increased surveillance on political donations. These are things that are objectively good for democracy, but will make the AEC's job a hell of a lot harder. And it will change that relationship that we have with them. So I guess if we have to end it on a positive note, I would say that health of democracy is remarkable, but it is precious in the literal sense.

Nick Bryant:

Absolutely. One thing that I took away from was the lack of misinformation, actually. It wasn't a big problem at this last election.

Jill Sheppard:

Look, I don't think so.

Nick Bryant:

Disinformation, whatever you want

Jill Sheppard:

To call it. There's always going to be disagreements about what is truth and what is an outrageous lie. But I think we have a pretty good compact between the parties that we won't be too egregious in our lies. Just little lies.

Nick Bryant:

Yes. All right. I'm looking at an audience where I'm hoping somebody will put up their hand to ask a question. Yes, sir. And you're right next to a microphone. Brilliant.

Audience member 1:

I'm a bit disappointed maybe because I haven't read the book, but the name and his influence in the election, Tony Abbott wasn't mentioned at all.

Nick Bryant:

Jill?

Jill Sheppard:

Should

Nick Bryant:

Should there have been a chapter on Tony Abbott?

Jill Sheppard:

Tony Abbott looms larger over the Liberal Party than we realise, I think. And he's shown that again this week. He's weighed in on Iran, he's weighed in on Ben Roberts Smith.

Nick Bryant:

Yeah. I think he's come into view more recently, but no, I mean, I don't ...

Jill Sheppard:

I think he was probably a larger spectre in that campaign than we have given him credit for.

Nick Bryant:

Right.

Jill Sheppard:

But part of the trade offs that we make in trying to get the book out quite quickly that we don't ... And we used to have more involvement with the political parties themselves and researchers would go and talk to the parties. That doesn't happen now because of the timeliness and also because the parties just shut their doors. It is very hard in Australian politics to get the parties to talk to you at all.

Nick Bryant:

I mean, just an observation and a difference between Britain and Australia, former prime ministers in Britain tend to sort of leave the stage actually.

Jill Sheppard:

No, they love it here.

Nick Bryant:

To a certain extent. I guess it's a product, to a certain extent, it's a product of prime ministers who felt their terms were cut short and abbreviated, and they still had things to say, and they were culled

Jill Sheppard:

Decades later. ...

Nick Bryant:

Culled before they could say them. Yes, we've got to question at the back.

Audience member 2:

Thank you both for a most interesting discussion. Jill, I was quite surprised that you said you were surprised yourself that Dutton didn't win. I'd like both of you to talk about the issue of party discipline, because it seemed that on the Labour side, Paul Erickson masterminded a really tight campaign, and that was followed pretty much to the letter by the Labour Party, whereas on the Liberal side, there were stories about Dutton coming out and blindsiding his own team in the back office. Could you please just give us your views on that dynamic?

Jill Sheppard:

I'll start by defending myself. I didn't think the Libs would win. I thought there would probably be a Labour minority. I thought the Libs would do a lot better than they did. I think the groundwork for Labour was done throughout the whole three years and that Albanese, even if, and it's easy to, criticise him for not being a very policy forward type of prime minister, he's got a disciplined team and a team that has been able to agree on policy. And that means that when you start the campaign, it's easy for someone like Paul Erickson to say, 'Here are our policies. Here's how we're going to stage them throughout the campaign. Here's what we're going to talk about on day one. Here's what we're going to talk about on day two.' I think the Liberal Party got to that stage of the campaign and they said, 'What are we going to talk about on day one?' And there's nothing.
The cupboard was literally bare.

Nick Bryant:

It was weird, wasn't it? Because 2024, their message discipline had been very strict and very effective.

Jill Sheppard:

But still no policies. And I think that is the difference between opposition and alternative government, I think. So I think we probably overestimate Paul Erickson's prowess and his genius. I think we have to give Albanese a lot of credit for how he has managed his party room.

Nick Bryant:

I remember talking to the Labour team in 2022. I was doing a profile of Albanese and he just unveiled the climate change policy, which was being dubbed not only small target, no target. And I remember saying that to the Albanese team and they said, 'Fantastic.' I mean, the argument was it's incredibly timid, but they just thought it was absolutely brilliant because it was almost invisible. Yes, please.

Audience member 3:

Hi. I think you said that Sussan Ley was not a good leader. Do you think she was always doomed? Was she a stop gap leader? Was it always going to be short term and was there a gendered part to that?

Nick Bryant:

She burst through one of the most durable glass ceilings in politics, but found herself on the classic glass.

Jill Sheppard:

It's devastating, isn't it? I feel like it wasn't meant to be this way, but the leadership election that she won, there were plenty of people that I thought would have run that didn't. Oh, what a question, Nicole. I mean, I would be interested in your take on this too, having been a woman MLA, because I can't imagine it's easy. I knew Sussan Ley a little bit 20 years ago. She's extremely personable. She's very well liked by all her colleagues. I think she was doomed. She never had the numbers. So she was pushing the proverbial uphill from day one. And then how much gender leads to that, I think, or feeds into that. I think she probably was selected a little bit because she was a woman and it was almost an overcorrection from Dutton and it was a horrible way to do it, horrible way to have your first female leader.

Chris Hatherly:

Gia.

Audience member 4:

Oops, let me get up. Hi, thank you for this. It's extremely interesting, but I'm a little perplexed on various things, and I hope I can articulate this correctly. Do you give any sort of credence to the fact that Dutton's victory with the referendum made him complacent? They failed to develop policies. He failed to become match fit. He did no interviews with the press. During the campaign, he would run away, whereas the other side was out there facing up to the press and the questioning in the media. That was one thing. The other thing was the Jacinta Price, Nampijinpa Price moment of 'Make Australia Great Again', which I just went, "Yes, this is going to kill it." Because I think what happened with the referendum was that it made us all terrified that Dutton somehow had a constituency out there that would follow him to the election and potentially make him win.

I was terrified because I did not want him to see him win. That happened that moment, I think really it brought her and we thought, "Ah, Trump." That was really scary.

Nick Bryant:

It's an interesting point, isn't it? It's hard to believe in some ways that The Voice referendum happened and two years later, Albanese win a landslide. Those seem to be very contradictory.

Jill Sheppard:

There's an excellent chapter in the book by Simon Jackman who uses incredibly complex statistical models to say what you just said. Yes. Yes. Dutton I think got cocky and almost all of the votes that left the Liberal Party for Labour in the first half of 2025 were 'Yes' voters.

Nick Bryant:

Yes, please. We'll shunt that one down the line like a baton in a relay race.

Audience member 5:

A couple of sort of observations that you might like to comment on. One is that given the split away from the major parties, does that potentially make individual electorates and studies of what's going on there more important? And the other one is my thought that this election marked the emergence of the Muslim community in that they had the confidence to run as independents and that they said, "We're going to get into this democratic process." Do you agree with that?

Jill Sheppard:

Yeah. And they did a lot better than any of us predicted, I think. They ran really good campaigns and that the seat of Calwell genuinely could have gone to the Muslim votes candidate was almost a four-way tie. The question about individual seats becoming more important, yes, but I think we could probably ... There's a danger in over-correcting too. And one thing that I'm always wary about on election nights when someone says, "Oh, this is a good candidate or you run a good campaign." And I always think, no one cares, but they keep proving me wrong too. So here I am. I tell you what it does do. It makes election night an absolute nightmare, a genuine, just a stress that it never used to be. It's deeply unpleasant.

Nick Bryant:

Well, I know Antony Green certainly felt that when

Jill Sheppard:

He's very happy to be gone.

Nick Bryant:

He stopped working, didn't he?

Jill Sheppard:

It was 90 minutes of hell. It's something I do remember about the election. It's easy on radio. You can just chat away and we had no idea for a little while. Casey Briggs texted me and said, "Jill, we've got no computer."

Nick Bryant:

Oh, goodness.

Jill Sheppard:

And I think I just turned my phone over and they can't reach me.

Nick Bryant:

Unbelievable. Look, it's a brilliant book. I mean, talking about Simon Jackman's statistical analysis, one of the great things is there's pages and pages of it. There's wonderful illustration. There's wonderful memes. There's wonderful ... It's so comprehensive and I just think you've done a brilliant job. Jill's going to be upstairs afterwards, signing books. I think even buy one of my books as well, which is the Forever War, which talks about America. It's a land that is constantly altered itself. Jill Sheppard, thank you so much for putting this book together and thank you so much tonight for-

Jill Sheppard:

Thanks, Marian and John.

Daniel Gleeson:

Well, that's all the time we have left for questions, but Marian, you were one of the lead editors of this book. Can we hear from you about it?

Marian Sawer:

Thank you. Well, I mean, first of all, what I should do is to thank Nick and Jill for such a brilliant introduction, I think, to the themes of the book. And I believe we have a small token of our appreciation.

Jill Sheppard:

Drink it on the drive home, Nick.

Nick Bryant:

Is that for Jill? Oh, for me. Thank you very much.

Marian Sawer:

Well, landslide is the 19th in the Australian Federal Election Series. Our British colleagues are up to their 22nd volume, but I do note that it was only in their 2024 volume that they got around to having a chapter on digital campaigning. So we got there 20 years earlier than our British colleagues. And I have to say that we've also put much more emphasis on visual politics, which becomes so important as politics moves into the digital domain. So that's just making up for the fact we're only up to the 19th volume in our series. As Chris has said, we've been supported by the Academy of Social Sciences since 1996, and we really are indebted to the Academy and to Chris as the Chief Executive Officer and this time to Vanessa Barratt and Anna Clements and Ellen Scott for their organising work for tonight's event. The federal election series begins each time, as Chris has mentioned, with a workshop just over a month after the election, where authors present their draught chapters and discussants make suggestions for improvements.

So I'm happy that quite a few of the authors and discussants are here tonight. But someone who combines the role of co-editor and author is John Warhurst. And perhaps John, you could put your hand up just so we can locate you.

Because I mean, John has been involved in the Federal Election Series for over 40 years. He contributed to the 1983 volume, and then he co-edited the 1987, the 1990, the 1996, the 1998, the 2001, and the 2004 election books. That's before we even get to the 2025 one. So really John has become the David Butler, or Sir David Butler of the Australian Federal Election Series. So thank you, John. My own involvement only goes back to 1996 when I started contributing chapters. And Jill Sheppard is a relative newcomer and author since 2019. And she stepped up then to be co-editor for the 2022 and 2025 volumes. Murray Goot is with us online, I believe. And he's contributed to almost every federal election book since 1972.

Chris Hatherly:

Wow.

Marian Sawer:

So he is our longest continuing author. The authors here tonight, I believe, include Blair Williams, Michael Maley, Carolyn Hendriks, and Kurt Sengul. And discussants here include Frank Bongiorno, Pandanas Petter, and Patrick Leslie, perhaps. Yes. Jill has located Pat. So it's great to have our authors and discussants here and many more online. Our thanks are also due to the School of Politics and International Relations at the ANU for their support. And I think that the head, Nick Biddle is here tonight. The ANU Press has been our publisher since 2010, and they've done a wonderful job in making our research available on open access so anybody can access our wisdom and the insights of our authors. The manager of the press, Nathan Hollyer, is also here and has been a great support for publicising the 2025 volume. So thanks also to the National Library for this wonderful venue for our launch and for hosting our event.

And lastly, thank you all for coming. We hope you'll join us for a glass of something upstairs. It'll be available from the Bookplate. And of course, copies of the book will be available for purchase and for signing. Thank you all so much.