Urban decay
With the election now over, debate has begun over what swung the result so heavily in Labor's favour and what the Coalition can do to recover, especially in Australia's biggest cities.
When the historians of the future look back on the 2025 election campaign, they may well agree that the defining moment took place more than 15,000 kilometres from Australian shores.
Donald Trump’s sweeping 'Liberation Day' tariffs, unveiled in the White House Rose Garden just days after the election was called, sent global markets into a tailspin and hijacked the news cycle. The shocking scope of the announcement and the uncertainty it created clearly benefited Australia's incumbent Labor government. The Coalition was never able to generate any kind of momentum after that point.
There’s also an argument that the defining moment came just a few days later when Peter Dutton abandoned his plan to ban public servants from working from home. As Capital Brief revealed at the time, the deeply unpopular policy, which echoed moves by Trump’s DOGE, never went through the shadow cabinet in the first place. It was a sign of the operational dysfunction within the Coalition that was laid bare on Saturday night.
Or perhaps, when we look back on the 2025 campaign, Anthony Albanese’s jubilant victory speech at the Canterbury-Hurlstone Park RSL club, where he repeatedly emphasised “Australian values”, will be the moment we all remember. Time will ultimately tell. We all knew that one way or another, the result of this election would be historic, but few expected it to be this historic.
