PARTISAN!

Labor knocked the 2025 federal election out of the park. But, contrary to the true believers, Labor doesn’t have some world-historic mandate to enact some groundbreaking, progressive agenda. Instead, Porco writes, Labor is all smoke and mirrors, and communists need to make serious moves to build a party of their own.

This election turned a new page for Australian politics. At first glance, the electorate voted for stability, and the perceived steady leadership of Anthony Albanese. In a world of increasing disorder and global conflict, Albanese successfully marketed himself as the reliable and good humoured manager of Australian capitalism. He may be a tepid neoliberal social democrat (emphasis on the neoliberal part), but he’s our tepid neoliberal social democrat.

The Coalition lost ten seats in this election. They had lost another five over the last three years. They’re haemorrhaging support from their voter base. It was the lowest Coalition primary vote since the Liberal party’s formation. Voters have been shifting more and more to independents and smaller rightwing parties, such as One Nation and the Libertarians. In 2025, the minor parties and independent primary vote was 33.1%. For the Coalition it was 31.8%.

Labor inconceivably expanded its lower house majority to ninety-three seats with a mere 34% of the primary vote. This victory rationalised a divided electorate with a message of “patriotic progressivism”. Labor did not mention labour once in the victory speeches or election coverage. Instead, Penny Wong talked about how the “Liberal party does not represent middle Australia”, and how the “Australian story is embodied by our Prime Minister”.

Peter Dutton lost his own seat and Trump claimed he had no idea who he was. Trump likes to posture that he only ever chooses “winners”. If everyone is just in it for themselves, there’s nothing more reprehensible than a hairless copycat.

Labor’s “mandate”

Albanese has ushered in a new Labor regime. He could win the election after this. Seats that the Liberals had held since their formation flipped to Labor in double digit swings.

Labor’s “mandate” is a rebuttal from the Liberal base of Dutton’s culture war theory of change. Labor is beginning to turn the inner city Liberal electorates. The Liberal Party experienced huge swings against them in the rich inner suburbs of every major city, and in many regional city electorates as well. The outer suburbs where Labor reigns had been Dutton’s focus. But Labor held on, even if their primary vote did diminish.

Dutton lost his seat to Labor candidate Ali France with a 7.7% swing. The Liberals also had massive swings against them from Chinese voters. The Liberal election campaign consisted of “DOGE” (Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency”, named for a dog meme from the 2010s) cuts, incoherent and non-costed nuclear plans, and an obsession with standing out the front of petrol stations. The Liberals were forced to consider the possibility that they don’t understand the Australian electorate anymore.

While Labor appears ascendant, this election was really decided by preferences. The Australian electorate is actually more fragmented than ever in recent memory. Labor attained an almost 20% bump from third party preference votes. Labor will try to obfuscate this fact, but it’s hard to imagine this level of internal conflict in Australian society going away just because Labor have over ninety-three seats in the lower house.

For context, the Coalition would have won an extra thirteen seats if we had a “first past the post” (FPTP) system like the United Kingdom. Bill Shorten lost the 2019 election with a higher primary vote than Albanese. Preference voting can lead to some strange outcomes. The Greens achieved almost 1.9M primary votes in the lower house and lost almost all of their seats.

Labor is going to act like they have total social support. Albanese claims that he appreciates the Liberal voters that switched to his party, but it remains to be seen what Labor’s plans for governing are other than 5% deposits for first-time home buyers will be. They can act like the last two elections haven’t been a cry for change for now. However, change is coming whether they like it or not.

Labor may have achieved a historic victory, but their mandate is simply to remain calm, shelter us from the rest of the world, and espouse a very particular kind of “civic nationalism” that serves as the political equivalent of carbon monoxide filling our lungs. When you look closer at the minor parties who receive 1-10% of the vote in any given electorate, you will see a stratified and contradictory Australian society increasingly at its own neck.

Green around the gills

The Greens have scratched at the two major parties for the past decade. Both parties have conveniently used the Greens as the irritating sideshow — they are blamed for everything, and never to be trusted. The Greens played into and benefitted from this dynamic, becoming in the last election cycle an almost social-democratic party in rhetoric. But this strategy led their nervous base to choose Labor after all. Albanese was considered fundamentally less dangerous to the environment than Dutton. This has meant that Labor has cut the Greens down to one lower house seat in Queensland (Ryan). They also lost a seat in the senate.

Adam Bandt said on election night that “millions of people across the country have voted for the Greens, more than ever before in history.” He declared his own victory prematurely, being forced to concede his seat to Labor after dragging his feet for a few days. The Greens did receive a higher primary vote than 2022, but not by much. Less than a percentage point.

Bandt wanted to have his cake and eat it too. Why did they lose three of their seats in parliament? What does this say about our electoral system? Greens voters should be angry, and they should be demanding electoral reform. If we really desire climate action, we’re going to need bolder politicians than protest candidates who breathe a sigh of relief when they lose their seat (as Max Chandler-Mather did after conceding his loss in Griffith).

The Greens appear to be losing their political relevance, being stuck roughly in the 10%-15% vote share range for the last decade. Climate action cannot be legislated by this parliamentary system. The radical flank of the Greens should come to terms with this sooner, rather than later. If they want to meaningfully stop coal production going forward, they’re going to have to recognise that this state, our economy, our entire social formation is reliant on this mining boom. We can only change this with a mass movement of workers, a social revolution and the expropriation of the commanding heights of the economy.

Unfortunately these are commitments the right-wing of the Greens will never touch. The left-wing of the Greens, if serious about climate action, should break from these tree-tories.

Coalition “on hold”

The Nationals couldn’t take it any longer, so they had to dump the Liberals after Sussan Ley’s nomination for leader. While it’s doubtful this split will stick around until the next election (or until next week), the move made the Coalition look even weaker politically. John Howard called the split a “stupid move,” and exclaimed “disunity is death” (The Right understand this, why don’t Socialists?). Nationals leader David Littleproud listed nuclear power and supermarket divestiture as some of the fundamental policy positions that he wanted the Liberals to guarantee.

The Coalition faces a demographic problem. The Australian electorate is simply becoming more divided and more metropolitan. The LNP’s voters are all aging, and the cities are ballooning to politically dominate parliament. Now, this split creates even more problems for the Liberals and the Nationals, because the Liberal Party is going to have to reform its political positions if it ever hopes to win back these inner city electorates. But some of these changes may be fundamentally at odds with the demands of the Nationals. Who the Liberals also require to win government.

All of this is also going to take place in the context of an increasingly unstable climate. Australia is the one of the front lines of the ecological catastrophe. When 84% of Australians claim they have been personally affected by a climate disaster, the Coalition’s climate denialism has become increasingly toxic politically. This is a material reality that will not go away. The Coalition could conceivably disintegrate under the weight of it’s own ideological commitments to the mass polluting industries.

This just means Labor may become the dominant political force in the country for the foreseeable future. What this means for socialists right now is uncertain. We cannot meaningfully influence the Labor party, nor should we spend anymore time doing entryism into the Greens. The leftwing of the Greens should be uniting with socialists. But we don’t have a robust political organisation that can appeal to them yet. Our own political immaturity as a socialist movement is the first barrier we must address.

Is there a Socialist Alternative?

Victorian Socialists (VS) gained almost twenty four thousand votes this election, and felt that this warranted a national expansion. State franchises have sprouted up in the last few weeks, showing a readiness to mobilise that might not have been imaginable before hand.

This is a positive development for the socialist movement. However, it falls short of a truly unified socialist party project. VS is a Socialist Alternative front with a non aligned section of organisers. SAlt know this better than anyone. The other branches of The Socialists will still be beholden, for the time being, to the executive committee in Victoria. There does not seem to be a national strategy per se, nor does VS have a revolutionary program. It is sub reformist platform, a mere phantasmagoria of socialist politics.

This expansion provides the RCO with an opportunity to petition for a truly democratic party, that is revolutionary and united around a socialist program.

Our manifesto is Partyism. We believe in democracy, and in factions. We believe in actual politics. We reject Marx-ish cargo cults and petty sectarian conflicts. If Socialist Alliance will not join the Socialist Party, then they must be vigorously critiqued. If Socialist Alternative continue to exploit this Socialist Party for their own organisation’s purposes, they should be admonished. The failures of the past must be metabolised by the movement of the future in the present. There is no longer any good reason to remain divided. Our division and our sectarianism is the primary obstruction to developing a mass socialist workers movement.

History will not remember the socialists who dragged their feet. The future is for the working class. Not our obscure cliques. We can only petition for that future politically with a program and political coherence.