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the world is in awe....Australia's socialist leader Anthony Albanese cruises to election victory thanks to anti-Trump bump - just six days after same happened in Canada Australia's socialist leader Anthony Albanese has cruised to an election victory in a remarkable turnaround fuelled by the so-called anti-Trump bump. Albanese, 62, has become the first Australian prime minister to win a second consecutive three-year term in 21 years. He revived his campaign by offering stability against the backdrop of US President Donald Trump's volatile diplomacy. Albanese's centre-left Labor government had been trailing in polls to the conservative Liberal-National coalition as recently as February, but then bounced back as voters grew increasingly alarmed by Trump's tariff threats and sought safe ground. His support only grew as Labor drew comparisons between their opponents and the US president. 'We do not seek our inspiration from overseas. We find it right here in our values and in our people,' Albanese said in his victory speech. When Trump imposed a 10 per cent tariff on Australian exports last month, Albanese said the move was 'not the act of a friend'. He said he would not compromise with US trade negotiators over Australia's efforts to lower medicine prices for families, and new social media laws to protect children. Albanese has suggested his government increased its majority in the next Parliament by not modelling itself on Trump's administration. 'Australians have chosen to face global challenges the Australian way, looking after each other while building for the future,' Albanese told supporters in a victory speech in Sydney. 'We do not need to beg or borrow or copy from anywhere else. We do not seek our inspiration overseas. We find it right here in our values and in our people,' he added. Opposition leader Peter Dutton earlier conceded defeat, saying: 'We didn't do well enough during this campaign, that much is obvious tonight, and I accept full responsibility for that. 'Earlier on, I called the prime minister to congratulate him on his success tonight. It's an historic occasion for the Labour Party and we recognise that.' The Australian Electoral Commission's early projections gave the ruling centre-left Labour Party 70 seats and the conservative opposition coalition 24 seats in the 150-seat House of Representatives, the lower chamber where parties need a majority to form governments. Unaligned minor parties and independent candidates appeared likely to win 13 seats. Energy policy and inflation were major issues in the campaign, with both sides agreeing the country faces a cost-of-living crisis. Dutton's conservative Liberal Party blames government waste for fuelling inflation and increasing interest rates, and has pledged to axe more than one in five public service jobs to reduce government spending. While both say the country should reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, Dutton argues that relying on more nuclear power instead of renewable energy sources such as solar and wind turbines would deliver less expensive electricity. Labour branded the opposition leader 'Doge-y Dutton' and accused his party of mimicking Trump and his Department of Government Efficiency. The party argued Dutton's administration would slash services to pay for its nuclear ambitions. 'We've seen the attempt to run American-style politics here of division and pitting Australians against each other and I think that's not the Australian way,' Albanese said. He also noted that his government had improved relations with China, which removed a series of official and unofficial trade barriers that had cost Australian exporters 20 billion Australian dollars a year since Labour came to power in 2022. Unlike Canada's Trump-swayed vote three days earlier, the US president was far from the biggest concern for voters who backed Albanese, academics claim. But some said Trump nevertheless appeared to have a significant impact on the governing Labor Party's late turnaround in the opinion polls, and the emphatic election result. Dutton's perceived 'Trump-lite' policies - such as axing public service jobs in a drive for government efficiency - had turned some voters off, said Henry Maher, politics lecturer at the University of Sydney. 'Of course, there are other concerns - cost of living, defence, health and everything else,' he said. 'But if we want to understand why a good chunk of the electorate has changed across the election campaign over the last couple of months, I think that's the biggest thing.' Trump's unpopular 10 per cent tariff on goods from longtime ally Australia, and the financial market disruption caused by his global trade policy, may have unnerved voters, Maher suggested, adding: 'In times of instability, we expect people to go back to a kind of steady incumbent.' Only 36 per cent of Australians trust the US, according to an annual poll by the Lowy Institute - down 20 percentage points from 2024. Dutton, who lost his own parliamentary seat in the election drubbing, earlier this year described Trump as a 'big thinker' and 'shrewd'. But he and Albanese both stiffened their rhetoric, insisting they would not bow to the American leader when defending Australia's interests. Kate Harrison Brennan, who was an advisor to Labor's former prime minister Julia Gillard, said Dutton's coalition had tried out policies that 'looked quite similar to those in the United States'. She added, that Trump 'definitely' had an impact on the election.
US President Donald Trump says he is "very friendly" with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who was re-elected over the weekend in a landslide victory. "We have had a very good relationship," Trump told the Sydney Morning Herald at the White House on Sunday, in his first remarks about the Australian election. But the US president was less familiar with the other electoral candidate. "I have no idea who the other person is that ran against him," he said of conservative opposition leader Peter Dutton, who many saw as Australia's equivalent to Trump. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjewqxjqex0o
YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.
Gus Leonisky POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.
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bolting......
It was a result that Andrew Bolt was not expecting and could not countenance.
By 9.46pm the rightwing commentator had penned a piece on the Herald Sun blaming the Australian electorate for the Coalition loss.
“No, the voters aren’t always right. This time they were wrong,” Bolt wrote.
The reason for the loss? It was because the Liberal party “refused to fight the ‘culture wars’”.
A little over a hour earlier on Sky News Australia, he had recognised it was all over for the Liberal leader that he had dubbed Scary Guy. He was unsentimental about the loss.
Peter Dutton was comprehensively beaten by Anthony Albanese, Bolt said, because everyone agreed the prime minister looked like a “nice easy going guy” compared with Dutton.
But that’s where Bolt’s praise for the Labor leader ended. It was incomprehensible, he said, that a government that “left Australians poorer, more divided, more uncertain”, could have been re-elected.
“Well, it did because Anthony Albanese didn’t look threatening,” he said.
“If Peter Dutton does lose in Dickson, they’ve got a leadership crisis. Because there is no person one can say ‘that man is a leader, or that woman is a leader’.”
By the time Dutton’s gracious concession speech was over at 9.39pm, Sky News was calling the election result a “blood bath” and recriminations were flying between Sky’s commentators and their political guests.
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Like Bolt, the Sky political editor, Andrew Clennell, pinned the loss on the leader. “People don’t like Peter Dutton,” Clennell said matter of factly as he recounted what happened when he went door knocking. “You know, it’s just one of those unfortunate things.”
https://www.theguardian.com/media/commentisfree/2025/may/04/andrew-bolt-sky-news-react-coalition-loss-australian-federal-election
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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.
Gus Leonisky
POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.
lib'rals....
David Solomon
Libs on life support after thumpingWhat kind of future does the Liberal Party have? Two elections and Peter Dutton’s leadership have reduced it to its lowest-ever level of support – fewer than one in three Australians gave it their first preference vote on Saturday. Its “small l” liberal component in the House of Representatives has been all but wiped out.
In the new Parliament, the Liberal Party will be dominated by its Queensland MPs, members of that state’s Liberal National Party. That Queensland amalgam of the two right-wing parties has been controlled since its creation in 2008 by its National Party wing, just as Sir Joh Bjelke Petersen’s Nationals dominated the state’s Liberal Party when the two were in coalition 40 and 50 years ago.
That being so, there is every likelihood the Liberal Party and its policies will continue to move further to the right and into the territory of One Nation, and whatever the name will be of the latest iteration of Clive Palmer’s personal political party.
But that is increasingly barren ground.
In the final few days before Saturday’s election, when all the opinion polls were pointing to a small Labor win, the Liberal camp was taking solace in the fact that One Nation appeared to be improving its vote. It anticipated a much better flow of preferences from that larger vote than had occurred at the previous election, when it received only 64% of One Nation’s preferences, while Labor received 86% of the Greens’ much higher vote.
It didn’t help. One Nation did increase its vote by just over 1%, but, even with a slightly better share of those preferences, the collapse in the Liberal vote by more than 4% made what was happening with One Nation and other right-wing groups irrelevant.
There are many reasons that will be advanced for Labor’s extraordinary achievement in increasing its primary vote at this election – the first time a first-term Australian Government has done so. These include Labor’s superior campaigning, the prime minister’s dominance over the Opposition Leader during the campaign and indeed, since January, the failure of the Opposition to present and defend its policies in time, the positive nature of Labor’s policies compared with the negativity of the Liberals, the unpopular Opposition policies on working from home, sacking public servants and (possibly) its nuclear plans.
And Donald Trump.
However, an underlying problem for the Liberals was the strategy Dutton adopted as Opposition Leader in response to the Coalition Government’s defeat in 2022. That defeat flowed in part from demographic changes that would not go away and needed to be countered, if possible.
The Australian Election Study, conducted after that election by the ANU, reported that a huge divide had developed between how older and younger people voted. There had always been a view that younger voters were more likely to favour parties on the left, but this divide had increased.
Additionally, and this was a new development, women were favouring left- rather than right-wing parties.
As to the age divide, the report said, “How the Coalition addresses this overwhelming deficit of support among younger generations is perhaps the biggest single question confronting Australian politics. Why is it that so many younger Australians have decided to support other parties and candidates?”
The Liberal Party’s own review of its election defeat didn’t attempt to answer that question or suggest responses to the problem that had been so starkly identified.
It noted that a majority of women in all age segments preferred Labor, and it found that Liberal support was weakest among young women. But it appeared to simply ignore the report’s warning about the voting behaviour of younger generations.
Dutton and his party failed to act in a way that directly addressed these demographic issues. The party had been aware for decades that it had a “women” problem. It had considered, but had always rejected, suggestions it should introduce quotas to improve the representation of women among its MPs.
Nothing changed after 2022. This was despite the catastrophic loss of Liberal heartland seats in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth to the so-called Teal independents, all of them women. The Teals had a pro-environment and generally progressive-reform agenda. They were supported financially and otherwise by the Climate 200 group.
Other than trying to find good, preferably female, candidates to oppose the Teals at this election, the Liberal Party did little to meet a threat that could further damage its electoral prospects. That damage eventuated, with more independents of a Teal variety winning a place in Parliament at the expense of the Liberal Party.
Dutton appeared to believe he could match the Teal losses with gains in the outer suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne. Hence, policies such as the temporary fuel rebate, aimed at people in those seats commuting by car. These seats were also thought to be more amenable to anti-immigration rhetoric, in the form of arguments that migration was putting excessive pressure on housing.
The strategy failed. The Liberals made no gains in the suburbs, but rather lost seats in metropolitan Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide, along with the traditional heartland seats they had virtually conceded to the Teals.
The federal Liberal Party is now primarily a provincial or regional party that no longer represents urban Australia.
The danger — to the Liberal Party — is that it will not tailor its policies and strategies to winning back the main population centres, but, instead, fit in with the more conservative Nationals.
What it really needs is a take-over offer. From the Teals.
https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/05/libs-on-life-support-after-thumping/
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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.
Gus Leonisky
POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.