Australia has a distinctive electoral system and political culture, and the election last the weekend produced a decisive win for the Australian Labor Party and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, meaning it is on track to have its largest majority in the parliament since 1943. There are four main lessons for the UK to learn from the Australian election.

First, make it easier for people to vote. Australia has had compulsory voting for over a century, the fine for not voting is small (around £10) and most comply. Compulsory voting means that time and energy do not need to be used in “getting out the vote” and most campaigns are aimed at winnable votes around the political centre. However, its introduction in the UK is unlikely. Instead, Australia shows how to makes it easier for people to vote: election day is always on Saturdays, polling booths are at local schools accompanied by fundraising fetes and democracy sausage sizzle, easily accessible in-person advance pre-poll and postal voting, and well-funded and trusted Australian Electoral Commission electoral education campaigns.

Last week’s UK local government elections provided a shock result for the two major parties in the UK as Reform won Mayoralties and councillors in a broad range of areas. However, the other important point is that voter turnout was very low – often less than 30% of the electorate, which effectively means Reform is only winning 10% of the electorate with its platform. The national government should prioritise increasing turnout for local elections, and pay attention to integrity and responsiveness to citizens at this level of government.

It is also well and truly time to move on from first-past-the-post in a multi-party electoral context to make voters’ choices count. Australia uses preferential voting, or a ranking of all candidates, in lower house seats, and proportional representation to elect state Senators for its upper house. This accommodates a range of parties, including the emergence of a new group of locally based Independent parliamentarians, but makes it more difficult for radical parties to win lower house seats.  

Second, the decisive outcome in Australia showed that positive policies and not negative campaigning matters in post-Trump times. The conservatives, the Liberal-National Party Coalition, ran a mainly fear-stoking, culture war focused campaign. Earlier in the year they thought Trump would be an asset to their campaign but clearly, like in Canada, he was not.

The Coalition’s 2023 success in defeating the Voice Referendum on constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians let them assume they could win more votes from the ALP on this divisive and racist platform. It did not work in an election campaign context. They also announced unpopular core policies such as: an Australian DOGE to downsize the public sector workforce; getting rid of work from home policies - the Opposition leader Peter Dutton even stated that “women should just job share”; drastically lowering immigration quotas; and the introduction of nuclear energy where there has never been an industry, also underpinned by long-term climate change denialism by many in the party. They did not promote policies to appeal to women, younger voters, or Australia’s large multicultural population. The Liberal Party has recorded its worst result since its founding in World War Two, and have very few seats left in Australia’s main cities and urban areas where nearly 90% of the population lives. The choice to embrace a hard right agenda, rather than try to win back centre-right inner urban seats they lost in 2022 to Independents, was spectacularly unsuccessful.

The third lesson is to genuinely campaign on the ground on issues that are meaningful in people’s lives. This election was primarily about economic security - what went right for the Labor Party is that they listened to voter concerns around housing affordability, soaring health costs, student debt, and cost of living (which included increased cost of food, energy, and petrol). The Prime Minister especially focused on improving free access to Medicare-funded healthcare, Australia’s equivalent of the NHS, by frequently producing his own Medicare card at media calls. While there remains significant uncertainty in Australia about how Trump’s tariffs and other issues will affect future national and economic security, this was primarily a win built on consolidating a domestic policy agenda. In the UK context, future campaigns will need to present their own narratives about economic equity and values clearly, and not let Reform set the parameters of the debate. Appeasing overt racism and hard right political agendas does not work. It was notable that the Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese rarely mentioned Trump at all and instead focused clearly on core voter concerns.

Finally - the media need to do better and move beyond relentless, flawed opinion polling and simplistic horse race analogies. Nearly all Australian mainstream media outlets failed in this election by suggesting the outcome would be close, and/or they overtly supported a Coalition win. The dominance of conservative Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and very high media concentration in Australia (the only other significant player is Nine Entertainment) inhibits policy agenda setting debate and real scrutiny of what is happening on the ground in the electorate.

At one point, taking from the Trump playbook, Peter Dutton referred to the publicly owned Australian Broadcasting Corporation as “hate media”. In a context where Australians trust the democratic system but have low levels of trust in politicians and parties, the ABC remains Australians’ most trusted media source. Media diversity - like the UK currently has - needs to be valued. We also need to instil an expectation that the media can do better in informing the public about politics and policies. We cannot leave that to political influencers on TikTok alone.

This article first appeared in The Scotsman on 11 May.

First published: 17 May 2025

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