Four big lessons for Scotland and UK from Australian Labor party's surprise landslide

With Reform UK benefiting from low election turnouts, more needs to be done to make it easier for people to vote – like elections on Saturdays, a new voting system and sausage sizzles

Australia has a distinctive electoral system and political culture, and the recent election produced a decisive win for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and the Labor Party, which has 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 and, while the fine for not voting is small (around £10), 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. Its introduction in the UK is unlikely but Australia provides examples of how to make it easier for people to vote.

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Labor party leader Anthony Albanese, seen holding up his Medicare card, was successful because of a focus on issues that matter to people's lives, like healthcare (Picture: Asanka Ratnayake) | Getty Images

Democracy sausage sizzles

Election day is always on a Saturday, polling booths at local schools are accompanied by fundraising fetes and democracy sausage sizzles. It is also easy to vote before the election, either in person or by post. There are also education campaigns by the well-funded and trusted Australian Electoral Commission.

The recent local elections in England provided shock results for the two major parties as Reform won mayoralties and council seats in a broad range of areas. However, the other important point is that voter turnout was very low – often less than 30 per cent of the electorate, which effectively means Reform’s platform was often only really backed by about 10 per cent of voters.

The UK Government should prioritise increasing the 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 the first-past-the-post voting system in a multi-party context to make people’s 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.

READ MORE: John Curtice: English local election results 'good news' for John Swinney and 'bad news' for Anas Sarwar

Positivity trumped negativity

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 Labor on this divisive platform.

It did not work in an election campaign context. They also announced unpopular core policies such as a US-style Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) to downsize the public sector workforce and getting rid of work-from-home policies – Opposition leader Peter Dutton even stated that “women should just job-share”.

Worst result since WWII

They also proposed drastically lowering immigration quotas and the introduction of nuclear energy, where there has never been an industry, amid 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 result was that the Liberal party recorded its worst result since its founding in World War Two, and has very few seats left in Australia’s main cities and urban areas where nearly 90 per cent of the population lives.

The choice to embrace a hard-right agenda, rather than try to win back centre-right, inner-city seats they lost in 2022 to independents, was spectacularly unsuccessful.

Issues that matter to voters

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 Labor was that they listened to voter concerns around housing affordability, soaring health costs, student debt, and the cost of living, particularly food, energy, and petrol prices.

The Prime Minister focused especially on improving free access to Medicare-funded healthcare, Australia’s equivalent of the NHS, 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 Albanese rarely mentioned Trump at all, and instead focused clearly on core voter concerns.

Media diversity is important

Finally, the media need to do better and move beyond relentless, flawed opinion polling and simplistic horse-race analogies. Nearly all of Australia’s mainstream media outlets, most of which overtly supported a Coalition win, failed in this election by suggesting the outcome would be close.

The dominance of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp in Australia – the only other significant player is Nine Entertainment – inhibits political debate and real scrutiny of what is happening on the ground.

At one point, taking from the Trump playbook, Dutton referred to the publicly owned Australian Broadcasting Corporation as “hate media”. However, 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.

Professor Ariadne Vromen is head of division in political and international studies at the University of Glasgow