Niki Savva’s Earthquake is a damning account of the election that shook Australia |
In ‘Earthquake: The Election that Shook Australia’, Niki Savva dissects a federal election result that all but erased the Liberal Party from metropolitan Australia and exposed a deep crisis of purpose, leadership and relevance.
As federal polling day neared on May 3 2025, the ground was silent but the people of Australia stirred, some restless with fear, others hankering for a change of government. History favoured the incumbent. There had been no single-term governments nationally since the interwar years.
Deep in the bedrock of Australia’s political establishment, forces were building.
In 2022, despite his poor campaign, Anthony Albanese had been preferred, narrowly, by voters desperate to see the back of a dishonest Coalition government. He secured a very low primary vote ( 32.6 per cent) and a majority of just two seats. A repeat of that uncertainty, as a sitting prime minister, might be politically fatal.
On paper, it could be close again, given the variables: a tremulous government out-argued in its 2023 Voice referendum; polling inaccuracies in several recent elections, which had under-measured outsider resentment; and a hard-charging opponent in Peter Dutton, leading a united team energised by his referendum success.
In the end, this would be an election like no other and it would deliver a result like no other.
As the days counted down, it became clear that “Team Dutton” was running on little more than bloke-energy, a risky and unaffordable nuclear power policy and, crazily, higher taxes.
Albanese began well and became more assured as things progressed, despite an unusually large percentage of undecided voters. Labor’s campaign was measured and methodical. Its household-focused promises – such as an $8.5 billion Medicare boost – were iterative rather than novel, but at least well calibrated and thoroughly explained.
When the results came in, the electoral earth moved, all but banishing the Liberal Party from metropolitan Australia and eliminating Dutton from parliament.
In her keenly anticipated new book, Earthquake: The Election that Shook Australia, veteran journalist Niki Savva charts the journey to an election result that caught everyone by surprise. But Earthquake is also a journey to the dead heart of the centre-right’s Trump-addled identity crisis.
In hindsight, the opposition’s failure was obvious. “By the time of the election, people knew what the Liberals opposed,” writes Savva:
What they couldn’t tell anymore was what they were for – or, if they could, they could no longer stomach it. The Liberal Party simply did not look, think, speak or act like modern mainstream Australia.
This damning critique grinds and yields like the San Andreas Fault under Savva’s savage, learned commentary. Perhaps more........