Category Archives: Australian election 2025

One Nation picks up four Senate spots, with surprise NSW seat for former British soldier Warwick Stacey

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Final Senate result confirms pathway for Labor to pass legislation with either Coalition or Greens support alone, or majority of diverse crossbench

One Nation has gained an unexpected Senate seat in New South Wales, taking Pauline Hanson’s party to four members in the upper house – equalling its best-ever result in a federal election.

Warwick Stacey, a former member of the British army, has snagged the sixth Senate seat in NSW and will join fellow new senator Tyron Whitten who was yesterday elected in Western Australia.

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Zoe Daniel requests recount in seat of Goldstein after Liberal Tim Wilson wins by 260 votes

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AEC says it is considering recount request while opponent Wilson says he hopes Daniel ‘finds peace’

Zoe Daniel has requested the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) conduct a recount in the seat of Goldstein after Liberal Tim Wilson emerged 260 votes ahead after the final distribution of preferences.

The AEC automatically recounts votes if the margin is less than 100, but candidates can also request one if they believe they have sufficient grounds to do so.

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Passengers freed from stranded train – as it happened

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Liberals question role of advocacy group Advance

We have an exclusive story this morning about the bitter aftermath within the Liberal party after its election defeat with some senior Liberal sources questioning the impact of Advance Australia, the rightwing advocacy that campaigned for the party.

We are absolutely deeply and gravely concerned about the situation in Gaza. For anyone who is watching the images or reading about what is happening there, we have been calling to ensure that aid is getting through and this is something that the Australian government keeps a watching brief on.

I will leave it to the foreign minister to make any further updates, but we … certainly … are seeking support for the people of Gaza and for Israel to allow that support to be provided.

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Independent Nicolette Boele declared provisional winner in Bradfield by 40 votes

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AEC vote recount expected in Sydney north shore seat after Liberal candidate Gisele Kapterian overtaken in final surge

Nicolette Boele has been declared the provisional winner of Bradfield in Sydney’s north shore after a nail-biting count which saw her take a last-minute 40-vote lead over the Liberal candidate, Gisele Kapterian.

Counting continued on Monday as the final postal votes were processed in the former blue ribbon seat.

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Bradfield and Goldstein face nervous weekend wait for election result but Tim Wilson ‘very relaxed’

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AEC considers sending staff to airport ‘at late hours’ to collect final postal and overseas votes before midnight deadline

Liberal Tim Wilson has said he is “very relaxed” despite his lead over Zoe Daniel in the Melbourne seat of Goldstein slipping to 206 votes with late postal and overseas ballots from as far away as Nairobi still to be counted.

Candidates in the Sydney seat of Bradfield also face an anxious weekend, with no more counting to take place until Monday. On Friday afternoon, Liberal candidate Gisele Kapterian led the independent candidate, Nicolette Boele, by just 43 votes.

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Federal election results: Monique Ryan wins Kooyong while Liberal candidate Gisele Kapterian takes Bradfield

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Amelia Hamer could only secure small primary vote swing towards Liberals in Kooyong, while Greens MP Elizabeth Watson-Brown holds inner-Brisbane seat of Ryan

The independent MP Monique Ryan has won Kooyong in Melbourne, holding off her Liberal challenger, but Nicolette Boele, another Climate 200-backed candidate, is expected to fall short on Sydney’s north shore.

The ABC’s election analyst, Antony Green, on Monday projected that Ryan would maintain her slim lead in the Melbourne seat, where she led by about 700 votes with a few thousand left to count.

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Australia news live: Erin Patterson’s daughter says her mother was a ‘very good cook’; PM’s department boss quits

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Erin Patterson’s daughter’s pre-recorded video evidence is being played to the jury in Patterson’s triple murder trial. Follow today’s news live

‘I want to harness all the talent in my team’

“We do need to reflect a modern Liberal party,” Sussan Ley says. She is speaking on Sunrise before the Liberals’ party room meeting on Tuesday, when they will select a new leader:

It’s about making sure that I am listening to my colleagues and … demonstrate to them we want a strong approach that includes everyone. I want to harness all of the talent in my team, take it forward under my leadership and meet the Australian people where they are because, clearly we didn’t do that at the last election. But we do need to reflect a modern Liberal party, meeting modern Australians in every single walk of life across the country.

On the weekend, we suffered a significant election defeat and since then, I have been having many conversations with my colleagues, members of the community, with members of the party, indeed the Coalition, with everyday Australians. I have listened. We got it wrong. We need to do things differently, going forward, and we do need a fresh approach. So, on Tuesday morning when the Liberal party room meets in Canberra, I will be putting myself forward for the position of leader of the federal party.

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Sarah Witty v Adam Bandt: how an unlikely Labor champion took down a Greens giant

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Melbourne was barely on the ALP’s radar as a seat it could win – but a sparsely funded campaign proved powerful

Labor could hardly be considered a metaphorical David in most federal election contests. But in the progressive seat of Melbourne, where the now-beaten Greens leader Adam Bandt had reigned for 15 years, there are similarities to the oft-told biblical story.

On 28 March, when Anthony Albanese called an election date for May, Melbourne appeared on no one’s list as a battle to watch.

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Adam Bandt concedes defeat in seat of Melbourne as Greens leadership talks loom

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Greens leader uses concession speech to urge media to treat climate crisis ‘as if our country is being invaded’

The Greens leader, Adam Bandt, has conceded defeat in his electorate of Melbourne, saying he “fell just short” of holding the seat.

“A short time ago I called the Labor candidate for Melbourne, Sarah Witty, to concede, to congratulate her and to wish her all the best as the next member for Melbourne,” Bandt said in a statement.

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PM launches attack on Max Chandler-Mather as Greens leader Adam Bandt projected to lose seat

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Anthony Albanese says former Greens MP ‘should have a look at the way that he conducted himself in question time’

Anthony Albanese has labelled Max Chandler-Mather a hypocrite who should look in the mirror after the former Greens MP described workplace culture in parliament as “bloody awful”.

The prime minister, who clashed with Chandler-Mather on a number of occasions during question time, said the 33-year-old who lost his Brisbane seat on Saturday needed a “mirror and a reflection on why he’s no longer in parliament”.

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Too close to call: follow the federal election results in the undecided seats here

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Things are looking rocky in Bullwinkel for Labor but it’s likely the party will hold Richmond against the Greens

Election night ended with at least 16 seats too close to call. Here you can see a list of those which were, as of Wednesday morning, still undecided and our reasons for holding off from making predictions about who will win them.

We’re going to leave the electorates on this list even after predictions have been made so if something happens you won’t miss it.

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Huge swings to Labor from Chinese Australian voters in key seats show Liberals failed to rebuild trust, experts say

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Community convincingly chooses Labor in Melbourne and Sydney seats, despite opposition efforts to engage after 2022 review

Suburbs with significant Chinese Australian populations in key marginal seats recorded huge swings to Labor of up to 30%, and strategists and analysts warn the Liberal party has failed to rebuild trust with the community.

The Liberal party’s review of the 2022 federal election found hawkish rhetoric on China cost it votes in several seats with high numbers of Chinese Australians. It called for greater community outreach and to rebuild trust before the 2025 poll.

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Victorian Labor was bracing for a federal backlash – now Jacinta Allan sees vindication

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Despite relentless commentary about the premier’s unpopularity, the state swung even harder to Labor than in 2022, while the Liberal party blame game has begun

If anyone is as happy as Anthony Albanese right now, it’s Jacinta Allan.

As the federal election results rolled in on Saturday night, one of the biggest surprises came in Victoria – where Labor defied months of grim predictions to strengthen its grip on the state.

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Simon Birmingham calls out ‘broken’ Liberal party model as Sussan Ley says Coalition reflecting on results ‘with humility’ – as it happened

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Littleproud on Labor: ‘They’re a slick machine’

Finally, David Littleproud is asked about what impact Donald Trump had on the outcome after Labor sought to tie Peter Dutton to the US president throughout the campaign.

What Anthony Albanese and the Labor team were able to was to really tap into these sorts of issues and then paint a bigger picture and destroy his character.

I think there’s a lesson in how they (Labor) did politics. They did it a lot better than us, and you’ve got to acknowledge that they’re a slick machine.

I think it’s part of the contagion of the way in which American politics has infused its way in to Australian politics, but very few people would have seen this coming and would have seen it coming certainly to the extent that it has happened.

My own view is that it’s an awful influence on Australian politics and something that we would do well to repudiate. Notwithstanding, you know the strength and the warmth and the importance of the relationship with the United States, in my opinion, Donald Trump does not have a role in relation to Australian domestic politics and we would do well to make that clear.

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Australian election: Anthony Albanese claims a piece of history as scale of Labor victory stuns raucous crowd | Josh Butler

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The Australian prime minister is the first to be re-elected since John Howard – and becomes one of Labor’s biggest heroes

It might have been the surprise packet of the night, but Labor picked up as early as January that it had a sniff in Dickson.

Early in the evening – hours before Anthony Albanese raised workers’ rights, housing, gender equality, childcare, the NDIS and Indigenous reconciliation as the priorities of his second-term Labor government – the hundreds-strong crowd at his election night party grew round-eyed as results from Dickson started pouring in on the television screens.

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Anywhere but Canberra: meet some of the voters who will decide Australia’s 2025 federal election

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Guardian Australia spoke to a range of people all across the country to ask about their lives and perspectives ahead of Saturday’s ballot

Over the past three months, Guardian Australia has been speaking to ordinary people about their everyday lives – their families, work, hobbies, stressors and hopes.

These interviews have formed our Anywhere But Canberra series – a portrait of what different people across the country are dealing with in the lead up to the federal election. We wanted to see how people’s lives and perspectives shaped their votes.

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The polls point to a Labor win, but its primary vote is barely moving – can both things be true?

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Labor’s confidence going into Saturday’s election is tempered by gnawing anxiety about the underlying polling data

Australia’s major parties are headed for a historically low primary vote, continuing a downward trend of several decades, according to the latest from Guardian Australia’s poll tracker. Labor leads the Coalition 51.5-48.5 on the two-party-preferred measure according to our latest average, although there is still uncertainty in the polling.

The two-party-preferred vote has been trending towards a repeat of the last election, but this masks a more than two-point primary vote drop for both major parties. The votes lost by the major parties have gone “everywhere”, according to pollsters who spoke to Guardian Australia. Our model estimates the support for independents and minor parties is four points higher than at the last election.

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Labor far outspends Coalition and Clive Palmer on Google and Meta ads amid calls for change to blackout laws

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Analysis of online ad data shows parties and affiliated groups spent more than $39m for political ads across Facebook, YouTube and Google search since 28 March

Labor splurged more than $11m across Google and Meta platforms to win votes, far surpassing its opponents – including billionaire Clive Palmer – and outstripping political foes in key seats in the lead-up to polling day.

New data showed the major parties have poured cash into boosting targeted messages to social media users in tightly contested electorates, including marginal seats in Bennelong, Brisbane, Boothby, Blair and Bullwinkel.

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As Australia heads to the polls, big parties brace for rise of independents

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The soft, undecided and swinging voters are at an all-time high in Australia, while support for the centre-left Labor and conservative-leaning Coalition is low

More than 18 million Australians will head to the polls this Saturday to choose between the incumbent centre-left Labor party and its conservative-leaning Liberal/National Coalition challenger.

But about one in three voters will brush off the major contenders – led by the current prime minister, Anthony Albanese, and the opposition leader, Peter Dutton – in favour of someone else altogether, in an election marked by a cost of living crisis and the spectre of Donald Trump.

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Dutton says Labor’s super plan is a ‘quasi inheritance tax’. What’s going on?

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Many countries impose a form of inheritance tax on deceased estates, but does Albanese’s policy fit the bill?

Peter Dutton has described Labor’s plan to reduce tax breaks on superannuation balances larger than $3m as a “quasi inheritance tax”.

The description was made days out from polling day, as the major parties tore apart their opponent’s policies in a last-ditch effort to win votes.

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