And just like that, the election is over. And all the predictions and prognostications about how the electorate was feeling have been answered. And the result has become quite clear. And now the opportunity to write endless commentary on what it all means presents itself. Forgive us for taking the opportunity to add our thoughts to the torrent because there are inevitably implications for Common Endeavour.
The big picture
The new government and the size of its majority is, on face value, a great result for the approach of offering positive options. A post-election piece by Laura Tingle suggests that in the election campaign the government spoke with understanding of people's concerns and the challenges in their lives, and offered thoughtful, if modest, solutions and remedies. In contrast, the opposition highlighted only the reasons why people should feel unhappy while only providing shallow solutions that did not seem to be well founded.
It obviously also helped that the government faced an unpopular opponent that ran a terrible campaign — and that there is much uncertainty in the world right now, which tends to encourage people to stick with what they've got.
Given the final outcome it's hard to remember that for much of last year and early this year there was a sense that the opposition had a real chance of winning this election. In the end though, this election once again showed that Australian voters should be trusted to make the right call when things are looking a little dubious.
Labor's thumping, fragile win
Nobody really knows why voters cast their votes the way they do but we have a pretty good idea of what voters did — and because we have compulsory, preferential voting in Australia, that gives us a good indication of the electoral arithmetic.
The numbers tell us that the new government has won 62% of the seats in the House of Representatives — which chooses the Prime Minister and sets the legislative agenda. This is a thumping win in any assessment.
It did so with 55% of the two party prefered vote, which is where you add up voters' preferences for the last two candidates in the count in each electorate. A nice thing about our preferential voting system is that there are no votes wasted — although it may be your fourth or fifth preference that gets counted if you had the last two candidates in the count way down your list!
The truly interesting result though, is that Labor's 55% of the vote in the final count was based on less than 35% of voters choosing a Labor candidate with their first preference. This means that fully 20 of the new government's 55% final count vote was from voters for whom the government was their second choice at best. Or, put another way, 65% of voters did not pick a Labor candidate as their first choice so of the 55% of votes that ended up with a Labor candidate, 20% were from voters who preferred someone else more.
This is, at its heart, a tentative endorsement.
And that is our preferential voting system at work. It says that while 2.6% more voters prefered Labor to the Liberals and Nationals, unlike the 2010, 2016, 2019 and 2022 elections when the country really couldn't decide who it wanted in government and small, if any, parliamentary majorities were the result, in 2025 the bottom line sentiment is crystal clear, if we can't have who we'd really prefer, then we'd really rather have Labor.
It is good to know, when push comes to shove, who Australian's would really rather have running the country but there is no avoiding the fact that these numbers show some serious begrudging support at work. When we focus on which option voters prefer up front out of Labor or the coalition, one whole third of the country said neither.
This groundswell of distaste for either of our usual party of government options shows a considerable desire for a different choice. In 2022, much of this sentiment went to community independents in most of the country and to the Greens in Brisbane. In 2025, the momentum from that surge in support for the Greens and independents has stalled — even as the "someone else" vote increased to historical levels.
The 2025 result suggests that there is a limit to community independents' and Greens' ability to meet the substantial desire among voters for an alternative to the existing party of government options.
An encouraging outcome
A feature of the preferential voting system is that you get to know what voters would prefer if they can’t have their first choice. And on this occasion, it is encouraging that they didn’t really want to go the way the United States is going at the moment. It’s good to know they didn’t want to reward the kind of negativity and division that was used to defeat the Voice referendum. And it’s good to know that voters were not swayed by policy-free assertions — that if you are going to tell people you’re going to do something, they want to know what that means. How are you going to do that?
That we can see these things reflected in people’s voting preferences, even if it took their second, third or later preferences, is an encouraging aspect of our electoral system and democratic processes. It is also incredibly encouraging about the communities in which we live and the people we share this country with.
Common Endeavour works to honour the wisdom and care of Australia's voters. For Common Endeavour, the goal is to provide the Australian voter with the options they ultimately chose in 2025 as a first choice in future elections; to be a party that people can be proud to vote for, not the party that’s the better option if you can’t have what you really want.
This means doing the hard work of engaging with communities to build trust that we can tackle the difficult challenges that we face, with tax reform, climate change, and national security among the more pressing.
Then we will again see governments’ first preference vote proportions reflecting their electoral success. Then governments’ thumping electoral wins will again be based on voters' first choice at the ballot box.
