By Jacob Greber, ABC News
From the very start, Peter Dutton showed himself unprepared, inflexible and profoundly unready, Jason Greber writes. Photo:
Analysis: Australia has fired Peter Dutton into the sun, taking much of the Liberal Party and its future with him.
Standing in the vapour wake stood a euphoric and unimpeded Anthony Albanese, whose campaign was as devastating, driven and determined as Dutton's was dreadful, deluded and doomed.
Albanese stands atop a dominant and remarkable victory that will surely change the country as profoundly as Bob Hawke and John Howard did in their time.
Australia's political centre has held - as disenchanted Liberal voters continued their drift to new pastures, turning their backs on bunyip Trumpism - paradoxically even as the political core becomes more fractured and diverse.
The Greens saw their own repudiation, with voters rejecting what they regarded as extremism, obstructionism and support for bad causes such as the CFMEU (the Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees Union).
Like Howard in 1998, when he won after a difficult first term, Albanese has earned something that five of his immediate predecessors over the last 21 years did not - an unfettered opportunity to string together a lengthy stint in the job.
Albanese triumphant
Vitally, Albanese has no real rivals, whether internally or from whatever remains of the shattered opposite bench.
Labor wasted no time targeting shadow Treasurer Angus Taylor's role in the Coalition's devastation, effectively recognising him as the opposition's most likely next leader after Dutton's own seat decided they'd seen enough of him after nearly a quarter century.
What Albanese does with that authority and how he cements a legacy in the face of huge mounting global, geo-strategic, economic and domestic challenges rests almost entirely in his hands.
The late Deputy Prime Minister Tim Fischer described the second term of a government under the Westminster system as the pinnacle of possibility and achievement.
Anthony Albanese arrives onstage in Sydney after winning the general election. Photo: AFP/SAEED KHAN
'People have made a clear choice'
The Senate's final make-up is still not known, but Albanese's mandate for brave and sensible action has never been stronger.
"Australians have chosen to face global challenges the Australian way," he told cheering supporters.
"The people have made a clear choice."
The long-time blue-ribbon seat of Sturt in Adelaide's east has fallen to Labor for the first time in more than five decades, while the government has also retained Boothby, in a result that has left the Liberals without a single suburban Adelaide MP.
For the Coalition, Saturday night was like one of those gory horror movies where half the headline cast gets decapitated before the first act is over.
Australia's Opposition Leader Peter Dutton leaves the stage after conceding defeat in the general election at the Liberal Party election night event in Brisbane on May 3, 2025. Photo: AFP / Patrick Hamilton
Characters you've only just started to notice - like shadow housing minister Michael Sukkar and mooted future leadership talent Keith Wolahan - cheaply tossed into the woodchipper.
While others, bit players from the prequels, like "maverick" Tasmanian MP Bridget Archer, were summarily gobbled up by the monster.
In Victoria, where the Coalition's hopes were at their most acute given decades of failure and underperformance, the party appears to have wandered into a fresh basement of horrors.
"The Victorian Liberal Party once again continues to find new ways to fail," said former Liberal state director Tony Barry.
"There is simply no pathway to victory in the near future, in the next couple of elections, unless the Liberal Party can be semi-competitive in Victoria."
At the start of the campaign, the Liberal Party was targeting up to 10 seats in the state. While the counts are not yet done, the party appears to be going backwards in the state, struggling to regain teal seats, on track to hold a single seat in Melbourne.
The NSW National Party is on the cusp of its own chainsaw debacle, perhaps failing for the first time to get a senator up.
Queensland, the LNP's heartland - which could have been home to both the PM and deputy PM - swung away from the Coalition, immolating more players.
"Some of tonight's outcomes were not 'worst-case scenarios'," said one Coalition strategist. "Some were beyond comprehension".
"Swings to Labor in Victoria, not even getting Aston; seat losses in Queensland not on the radar including Dickson; Tasmania becoming red… it goes on and on."
Dutton's calamity - and it is largely his, despite the scarifying blame-game that will now unfold - has reset the clock to zero on the Coalition's "two-term strategy".
David Littleproud, the Nationals leader, vowed his nuclear power plan would not come at expense of Liberals in the cities. He has a tough road ahead after this mess.
In the end - incredibly, despite being as Jim Chalmers said on the ABC's coverage "in all sorts of trouble at the end of last year" - Labor is on track to a historically high two-party preferred victory.
'Dutton's biggest mistake was to believe Newspoll'
It's hard to believe that it was only six years ago that Scott Morrison won the "miracle" election. The Coalition's decline since then has been nothing short of precipitous.
Dutton's biggest mistake was to believe Newspoll, aided and abetted by a narrow media support base that struggled to back their man as his campaign floundered.
It's hard to describe in detail just how bad the Coalition's campaign was.From the very start, Dutton showed himself unprepared, inflexible and profoundly unready. He entered the campaign promising to increase income taxes - a first for the Liberal Party.
He mused prematurely about living in Kirribilli and scoffed on the first Saturday of the campaign that "nobody" expected Albanese to win a majority. He "verballed" the Indonesian president and claimed he would win a US tariff exemption, only to later admit: "I don't know Trump."
Every step of the way, Dutton reminded key groups of voters - the Chinese community, the Muslim community - why he was not their guy.
When he leant into culture war favourites, like welcome to country ceremonies or the Voice - it had the effect of again reminding voters in seats like Bradfield, which voted overwhelmingly in favour of Indigenous constitutional recognition in 2023, that the Dutton Liberal Party was foreign to them.
The work-from-home backdown, threats to gut the public service, and his failure to remember the cost of a dozen eggs all undermined his credibility on cost of living.
But perhaps most egregiously, Dutton alienated many once-rusted on Liberal Party supporters, leaving them wondering about what had happened to their party.
He conjured up "sugar hit" electoral bribes; a gas policy that antagonised Gina Rinehart and that no pro-market party of capitalism could ever sanely support; alongside a budget with bigger deficits than Labor's in the first two years.
Jacqui Lambie, Tasmania's pre-eminent political oracle, said Labor has "been the bigger and smarter outfit".
"They look like they want to run. Liberals do not. What were they expecting? If you want to govern but you do not want to tell us how you would do that, that is ridiculous," she said.
"They have lost people who thought they might have voted for them."
Dutton has taken the Coalition backwards. Albanese has dramatically expanded Labor's majority.
Albanese rightly deserves all the kudos for his historic achievement.
In the end, not only was Dutton unfit for government. He wasn't fit for opposition.
- ABC News
