Party explanations for the 2022 Australian election result

ABSTRACT

Post-election reviews provide an opportunity for political parties to diagnose the reasons for their success or failure. Since 2019, the reviews conducted by the Australian Labor and Liberal parties have been made public, and they provide an ideal opportunity to test their explanations against the evidence. This paper identifies six explanations for the 2022 Australian federal election outcome and tests them using the 2022 Australian Election Study survey. Both reviews correctly identify the importance of leadership and the pandemic in shaping the election result but underplay the importance of independents and of climate change. Both reviews over-estimate changes in voting among women and immigrants. Overall, the reviews are only partially accurate in explaining the election result.

大选后的复盘为政党提供了查得失、明成败的机会。2019年以来，工党和自由党所做的总结已然公开，正可以将他们的解释与证据做一对比。本文列举了关于2022年澳大利亚联邦选举结果的六种解释，并用“2022澳大利亚选举研究”的调查对其进行了测试。两党都正确地指出了领导者及疫情对于选举结果有着重要影响，但也都低估了独立选举人以及气候变化的作用。二者都高估了女性及移民投票方面发生的变化。总之，两党对选举结果的解释部分正确。

KEYWORDS:

• Parties
• elections
• voting

The 2022 federal election saw the Liberal–National Coalition lose office after nine years in government. For most observers, the election outcome was interpreted as a Coalition loss rather than a Labor win. During the election campaign Labor adopted a ‘small target’ approach, reducing their policy proposals to a minimum and often mirroring Coalition ones. This had the effect of concentrating discussion on the Coalition’s performance while in government rather than on the policies of the parties. This strategy worked to Labor’s advantage; voters were critical of the Coalition’s performance and the Liberals registered their worst electoral performance since the party was founded in 1944. However, while Labor won the election, they registered their lowest primary vote since 1934. In practice, the 2022 election result reflected the electorate’s negative views of both major parties.

This paper examines the explanations given by the Labor and Liberal parties for the 2022 election result. These explanations are tested against data from the 2022 Australian Election Study (AES), a major post-election national survey of voting. The findings suggest that both parties were correct in identifying the unpopularity of Scott Morrison, the Liberal prime minister, as the major explanation, along with the lingering effects of the pandemic. However, both reviews misinterpreted the significance of the success of the six ‘Teal’ independents and largely ignored the impact on the vote of climate change attitudes. Both reviews also over-estimated the impact of changes in voting among women and immigrants on the election outcome.

The paper proceeds as follows. The next section examines the reasons given by the Labor and Liberal parties in their post-election evaluations for the election result and identifies six explanations for the election result – leadership, the pandemic, the Teal independents, women, voters born in China and climate change. The second section describes the data and method, and the third section outlines the context of the 2022 federal election. The fourth section tests the six explanations using the survey data while the conclusion places the findings in the broader context of election evaluations.

How the parties evaluated their performance

How do the major Australian political parties evaluate their performance in an election, with lessons for the next election? Up until 2019 the speeches that the respective major party directors delivered to the National Press Club have provided a ready source of information. These speeches deliver a (usually) frank assessment by the party’s campaign director of their electoral performance. However, after the 2019 and 2022 elections the Liberal federal director, Andrew Hirst, did not deliver the traditional National Press Club address though his Labor counterpart did. In the absence of these speeches, the party reviews that are conducted after each election provide useful insights into party explanations for their performance. In recent elections these have been public documents.¹

The 2019 post-election reviews provide a benchmark for each party’s 2022 evaluation. Following the 2019 election, Labor appointed former trade minister Craig Emerson and former South Australian premier Jay Weatherill to review the party’s performance (Emerson and Weatherill 2019). They traced Labor’s unexpected election defeat to the unpopularity of their leader, Bill Shorten, together with ‘a cluttered policy agenda’ (7) and a loss of support among Labor’s ‘traditional base of lower-income working people’ (59). Labor learnt the lessons of this defeat by abandoning its most unpopular policies and instead campaigning in 2022 on the record of the Liberal government. The new leader, Anthony Albanese, continually emphasised the importance of public trust in government.

The Liberal 2019 election review was led by former senator Arthur Sinodinos and former New Zealand minister Steven Joyce. Prior to his ministerial career, Joyce had been the New Zealand National Party campaign director between 2005 and 2017. The review focused on the conduct of the election campaign and especially issues surrounding funding and candidate selection. It considered the party’s campaign strategy to have been ‘flawlessly executed’ but noted that the party would need to recover lost support in many inner-city electorates to retain office. According to the report, the election result was attributable as much to negative perceptions of Bill Shorten as to positive views of the Liberal government. Crucially, the report did not comment on policies or their popularity with voters.

Labor’s review of the 2022 election was conducted by Greg Combet, a former minister and trade union leader, and Lenda Oshalem, a former Labor campaign official (Combet and Oshalem 2022).² Labor’s election success was attributed primarily to the unpopularity of the Liberal government and particularly the prime minister, Scott Morrison. Other factors that were identified included the failure of the vaccine rollout in the second year of the pandemic, ‘Morrison’s failure to understand and empathise with the experience of women’, the lack of ‘a credible climate and emissions reduction policy’ and the ‘politicisation of the relationship with China’ (5). Largely absent from the review was any discussion of the reasons for the decline in the combined two party vote, other than to note that the success of the six Teal independents occurred in previously safe Liberal seats.

The 2022 Liberal review, conducted by former federal director Brian Loughnane and Senator Jane Hume, focused on campaign management, digital campaigning and the use of social media, and the problems the party encountered in candidate selection (Loughnane and Hume 2022). However, the review did acknowledge the unpopularity of Scott Morrison, who was regarded as ‘out of touch’ (14). The review concluded that leadership ‘became the most influential driver of voting intention during the campaign period’ (14). Other factors identified included the swing among some women voters and non-English speaking immigrants towards Labor. The success of the six independent Teal candidates in previously safe Liberal electorates was of particular concern, with their success being facilitated by campaigns that were ‘professionally run and driven by advanced technical support, including cutting-edge campaigning assistance from the United States’ (36).

While these reviews were primarily concerned with campaign management, resources and media presentation, they also included insights into what the authors believed to be factors affecting their electoral performance. From these, we can identify six explanations for the election outcome. Five of the explanations are ones that the parties agreed on, although they differ in assessing their relative importance: Scott Morrison’s unpopularity, the impact of the pandemic, the intervention of independent candidates, and the defection of women and Chinese voters from the Liberals. One further explanation – climate change – was mentioned as a factor by Labor only. These explanations are tested against the results from the 2022 Australian Election Study.

Data and method

Data

The analyses rely on the 2022 Australian Election Study survey, a national probability sample of the Australian electorate conducted immediately following the election using a ‘push to web’ methodology. The sample was supplemented by a mail-out/mail-back sample for respondents without internet access. The response rate for the survey was 44.1 per cent producing a total of 2508 respondents.³ To increase the sample size for analyses involving support for independents and Chinese voters, we combine the AES with a parallel Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) survey. The CSES survey was also conducted immediately after the 2022 election and was also a national probability sample, this time using the Survey Research Centre’s Life in Australia panel.⁴ The response rate for the CSES survey was 82.0 per cent with 3556 respondents. Both surveys are publicly available from the Australian Data Archive (https://ada.edu.au/).

Method

The multivariate analyses use multinomial logistic regression. The dependent variable is coded into three categories, Labor vote, Coalition (Liberal and National) vote⁵ and Greens vote. Respondents voting for the Coalition are the base category. The coefficients are interpreted as the difference in Labor and Green voters from Coalition voters. Full details of the variables, coding and the model estimates are provided in the Appendix.

The 2022 Australian election

By the time of the May 2022 election the Coalition had been in office since 2013, when Tony Abbott secured a 30-seat majority by defeating an unpopular minority government led by Julia Gillard (Curtin 2015; Johnson and Wanna 2015). The Liberals won the 2016 election, now led by Malcolm Turnbull, with a reduced majority, losing 14 seats (Gauja et al. 2018). The Liberals also won the 2019 election, this time with a three-seat majority and led by Scott Morrison. The 2019 election has been called ‘Morrison’s miracle’ (Gauja, Sawer, and Simms 2020) because the polls consistently predicted a Labor win. This period is also notable for the turnover in prime ministers; between 2007 and 2018 Australia had six different prime ministers, none of whom served a full term in the office (Cameron and McAllister 2023).⁶ This unprecedented leadership instability led Australia to be dubbed ‘the coup capital of the democratic world’.⁷ By 2018, both major parties had put in place organisational changes to ensure greater leadership stability.

The 2022 Australian federal election was distinctive for at least three reasons. First, the election was the first in many decades to be held in the wake of a major existential crisis, in this case the COVID-19 pandemic. While the pandemic had subsided by the time the election was held – at least as a policy issue – voters’ negative assessments of the Coalition government’s performance on the pandemic proved to be a major factor influencing their voting decision. These assessments also coloured the public’s views of the government’s leadership who were regarded as the ‘face’ of the response to the crisis and who were evaluated accordingly.

Second, the election saw a large scale-scale abandonment of major party voting, continuing a trend that has been increasing since the 1990s (Figure 1). The combined major party primary vote was 68.3 per cent, the lowest since the 1930s. The beneficiaries of this seismic shift in voting behaviour were the Greens and independent candidates. The Greens increased their share of seats in the House of Representatives from one to four, retaining their seat in Melbourne and winning three additional inner-city Brisbane seats. Independents won an unprecedented 10 seats, an increase of seven from 2019. Combining the Greens, independents and two minor party candidates who were elected, the crossbench in the House of Representatives swelled from six to 16 seats out of a total of 151.

Figure 1. The declining major party vote, 1946–2022.

Notes: Figures are the per cent first preference vote for the Liberal, National and Labor parties and for all other minor parties and independents.

Source: Australian Electoral Commission.

Third, a notable part of the rise of the independent and minor party vote was the Teal⁸ independents, a loosely aligned group stressing action on climate change, gender equity, and improved standards of political integrity. A total of 20 Teal candidates stood in the election, most identified by receiving funding from Climate 200, a mainly crowd-funded initiative formed in 2019 by a businessman, Simon Holmes à Court, to support candidates advocating policies to counter climate change. Of the 20 Teal candidates who received Climate 200 funding 10 were elected, with six new MPs joining four incumbents.⁹ The six new MPs unseated incumbent Liberals in what had previously been safe Liberal seats.

The extent of the Coalition defeat is evident in Table 1, which uses the 2022 AES to show how the vote in 2019 shifted between the parties in 2022. Of those who voted for the Coalition in 2019, slightly less than two in every three also voted for them again in 2022, with most (18 per cent) changing their vote to a minor party or independent candidate; just 7 per cent defected to Labor. By contrast, in 2022 Labor retained almost three in every four of their 2019 voters, with those who defected disproportionately moving to the Greens; most of this vote returned to Labor through preferences. In total, almost one in three voters changed their preference between 2019 and 2022, and the proportion of voters who had always cast their vote for the same party (‘lifetime voting’) declined to a record low of 37 per cent (Cameron and McAllister 2022, 22). The next section evaluates the six explanations for this election outcome advanced in the major party reviews.

Table 1. 2022 Destination of 2019 votes.

	2019 Vote
	Labor	Coalition	Green	Other
2022 Vote
Labor	73	7	17	13
Coalition	7	65	0	13
Green	12	3	69	5
Other	8	18	14	69
Total	100	100	100	100
(N)	(651)	(979)	(195)	(237)

Notes: ‘In the Federal election for the House of Representatives on Saturday 21 May, which party did you vote for first in the House of Representatives?’ ‘In the last Federal election in May 2019, when the Liberals were led by Scott Morrison and Labor by Bill Shorten, which party got your first preference then in the House of Representatives election?’.

Source: 2022 AES.

Evaluating the explanations

Leadership

There was considerable discussion before and during the election campaign about Scott Morrison’s lack of popularity. Morrison’s unpopularity had its origins in a series of events, starting with the toppling of the popular Malcom Turnbull for the Liberal leadership in 2018, the 2020 sports rorts affair when millions of dollars of government funds was directed towards Coalition-held seats (Leigh and McAllister 2021), and his Hawaiian holiday during the 2019–2020 bushfire crisis.¹⁰ Both party reviews acknowledged the pivotal role of Morrison’s lack of popularity in shaping the election outcome. The Liberal review noted that ‘the Prime Minister’s standing with voters deteriorated significantly through 2021 to become a significant negative’ (Loughnane and Hume 2022, 14), while the Labor review considered the unpopularity of Scott Morrison to be ‘the single most significant factor in Labor’s victory’ (Combet and Oshalem 2022, 5).

Using the leader thermometer scores in the 2022 AES, Table 2 shows that Morrison was easily the most unpopular leader in the election, except for the National Party leader, Barnaby Joyce. Morrison scored 3.6 on the zero to 10 thermometer scale, making him the least popular Liberal leader since at least 1987, surpassing even Andrew Peacock in 1990 (Cameron and McAllister 2022). Joyce scored 2.9 on the scale, making him the third least popular leader ever polled in the AES. Both Morrison and Joyce show considerable declines in their popularity, in the case of Morrison from a respectable 5.1 in 2019 to 3.6 in 2022. By contrast, Anthony Albanese scored 5.5 on the scale, making him one of the most popular Labor leaders in recent years.

Table 2. Leader popularity, 2016–2022.

	2016	2019	2022
Morrison	—	5.1	3.6
Joyce	4.1	—	2.9
Albanese	—	—	5.5

Notes: Using a scale from 0 to 10, please show how much you like or dislike the party leaders. If you don’t know much about them, you should give them a rating of 5.

Source: 2016–2022 AES.

What was it about Morrison that voters particularly disliked? The AES has consistently asked respondents what personal qualities voters thought the major party leaders possessed, providing a context to their overall leader rating. Table 3 shows how far these nine qualities were seen as applying to Morrison and Albanese. The cause of the decline in Morrison’s overall rating was a view that he lacked three personal qualities: compassion, honesty, and trustworthiness. For example, in the 2019 AES 51 per cent of voters regarded Morrison as being compassionate, but this fell to just 32 per cent in 2022. Morrison also shows significant declines in being seen as sensible, competent, honest and trustworthy. Leader integrity is one of the most important traits shaping the vote (Bittner 2011; Holian and Prysby 2014), so these declines significantly harmed the Liberal vote.

Table 3. Morrison and Albanese personal qualities.

	Morrison			Albanese 2022	Difference Morrison-Albanese
	2019	2022	Change 2022–2019
Knowledgeable	68	61	−7	54	+7
Intelligent	72	65	−7	69	−2
Strong leader	63	49	−14	58	−9
Competent	66	49	−17	60	−11
Sensible	65	47	−18	72	−25
Compassionate	51	32	−19	80	−48
Honest	49	32	−17	68	−36
Trustworthy	46	30	−16	64	−34
Inspiring	40	25	−15	42	−17

Notes: Per cent say personal quality fits leader ‘extremely’ or ‘quite well’. ‘Here is a list of words and phrases people use to describe party leaders. Thinking first about [Scott Morrison/Anthony Albanese], in your opinion how well does each of these describe him – extremely well, quite well, not too well or not well at all?’.

Source: 2019–2022 AES.

Compared to Morrison, Albanese had a major advantage on compassion (32 per cent for Morrison as against 80 per cent for Albanese) and on honesty (an advantage of 36 per cent) and trustworthiness (an advantage of 34 per cent). These are easily some of the largest differences recorded in the AES since 1987, the closest being John Howard’s advantage over Paul Keating in 1996 on compassion (40 per cent) and Howard’s advantage over Mark Latham in 2004 on being a strong leader (38 per cent). Morrison led Albanese, and then only marginally, on just one quality – knowledge – which reflects his incumbency advantage.

Pandemic

Both party reviews identified the problems in managing the pandemic as a factor in the election. The Labor review considered the government to have politicised the management of the pandemic and when they ‘failed on both establishing quarantine facilities and the rollout of vaccines’ this became a major negative factor for them (Combet and Oshalem 2022, 18). Unsurprisingly, the Liberal review was more circumspect in its criticism but still noted that ‘a number of issues, including some related to the management of COVID, resulted in individuals who would otherwise support the Coalition switching their support to minor parties or independents on the right’ (Loughnane and Hume 2022, 14). The review also considered the pandemic to have caused the government to lose policy focus (11).

Existential threats such as a pandemic create a ‘rally round the flag’ effect and produce unconditional support for government to counter the threat.¹¹ When this occurs, the popularity of the leader – the face of the government’s response to the crisis – increases dramatically at the outset of the crisis while party popularity remains relatively unchanged. Regular public opinion data in Figure 2 shows that this phenomenon occurred during the 2020–2022 pandemic.

Figure 2. Prime ministerial satisfaction and coalition voting intention, 2019–2022.

Notes: Per cent satisfaction with performance of the prime minister and per cent Coalition voting intention.

Source: Newspoll surveys.

Prior to the onset of the pandemic, satisfaction with the prime minister was slowly declining following Morrison’s much-criticized overseas holiday during the 2019–2020 New South Wales bushfires. However, in March 2020 the border was effectively closed, and a national cabinet established to manage the pandemic (Murphy and Arban 2021). Following these decisive actions, the prime minister’s satisfaction rating jumped from 38 per cent in February 2020 to 68 per cent in April 2020 and it remained at that level for about a year. It began to fall in April and May 2021, as difficulties with the vaccine rollout and later the availability of tests emerged. By May 2022 it stood at 41 per cent, less than the level at the start of the pandemic.

Given the Coalition’s incumbency advantage when the pandemic began, the extent to which the ‘rally round the flag’ effect failed to translate into votes in the 2022 election is striking (Bol et al. 2021; Kritzinger et al. 2021). Among 11 election issues, the pandemic was the only one in which a majority of voters thought there was no difference between the parties. However, when asked a direct question about the federal government’s performance on the pandemic, Table 4 shows that 33 per cent were neutral, with slightly more (37 per cent) saying that the government had performed badly rather than well (30 per cent). By contrast, opinions were much more positive on the performance of the respondent’s state government, with 51 per cent saying that their state government had performed well compared to 29 per cent who said that it had performed badly. The belief that the federal government had performed poorly in the latter stages of the pandemic framed voters’ overall views about the Coalition’s competence.

Table 4. Government performance on the pandemic.

	Federal	State
Very well	12	27
Fairly well	18	24
(Total well)	(30)	(51)
Neutral	33	20
Fairly badly	18	11
Very badly	19	18
(Total badly)	(37)	(29)
Total	100	100
(N)	(2469)	(2477)

Note: How well has your [state or territory/Commonwealth] government handled the pandemic?.

Source: 2022 AES.

Teals

The 2022 election was distinctive for the huge surge in electoral support for Teal candidates, most standing in previously safe Liberal electorates. While the Labor review was largely silent about the reasons for the Teal’s success,¹² the Liberal review considered the matter in detail. In addition to noting the Teal’s highly professional campaign, financial resources and large numbers of volunteers, the review commented that ‘polling in Teal seats showed voters in those electorates had a different set of election priorities when compared to traditional Liberal–Labor contests’ (Loughnane and Hume 2022, 16). The review also commented on polling which showed that Liberal defectors in Teal seats were motivated by dissatisfaction with the Liberal’s approach to gender equity (31).

Early Liberal interpretations of Teal support were of ‘frustrated urban voters parking their support as they wait for the Liberal Party to rediscover its strength’.¹³ This view was not repeated in the Liberal review. Instead, the review noted (without comment) that most Teal voters in the seats targeted by Climate 200 seats were tactical voters, who had voted either Labor or Green in the 2019 election and were voting strategically with the aim of supporting the candidate most likely to unseat the incumbent Liberal. This is supported by the survey evidence. Combining Teal voters in the AES (n = 60) and the CSES (n = 85) to achieve a reasonable sample size, shows that 20 per cent had voted Coalition in 2019, 29 per cent Labor, 25 per cent Green, and 26 per cent for another party. In other words, 54 per cent of Teal voters were tactical voters and just 20 per cent were defecting Liberal voters.¹⁴

Is there support for the assertion in the Liberal review that Teal voters had a different set of issue priorities compared to other voters? Table 5 addresses this point by listing the top four election issues for Teal voters and for all other voters. Global warming was the top ranked issue for 31 per cent of Teal voters, but for just 9 per cent for non-Teal voters. For these other voters, the cost of living was the main issue (25 per cent) followed by economic management (22 per cent). While the number of respondents is small for the Teal voters, Table 5 provides strong evidence that these voters did indeed share different issue priorities compared to other voters, with the environment and climate change attracting strong support.

Table 5. Top four election issues, teal and non-teal voters.

Teal voters	Non-teal voters
1. Global warming (31 per cent)	1. Cost of living (25 per cent)
2. Cost of living (18 per cent)	2. Economic management (22 per cent)
3. Environment (16 per cent)	3. Health and Medicare (9 per cent)
4. Economic management (10 per cent)	4. Global warming (9 per cent)
(N = 82)	(N = 309)

Notes: Estimates are for voters in the 20 electorates with Teal or Teal-aligned candidates. ‘Still thinking about the same 10 issues, which of these issues was the most important to you and your family during the election campaign?’.

Source: 2022 AES and CSES.

Women

Women’s concerns figured prominently in the election, from women’s lack of safety in parliament to issues relating to the care economy, such as child and aged care. These issues were highlighted in a mass demonstration outside Parliament House in March 2021. An inept response from Scott Morrison that ‘not far from here such marches, even now, are being met with bullets’¹⁵ highlighted the extent to which the government failed to appreciate the extent of the discontent. These issues were given prominence by the Teal candidates, and all six who were elected were women.¹⁶ It was therefore expected that the gender gap in voting would be larger than at any election in the recent past.

In the event, the gender gap in voting in 2022 was like 2019 (Table 6). More men than women voted for the Coalition, by 5 percentage points. This compares with a gender gap in the Coalition vote in 2019 of 9 percentage points. The gender gap in Labor’s vote was 4 percentage points in 2022 compared to 3 points in 2019. As has been noted in international studies, women are significantly more likely to vote for Green parties (Campbell and Shorrocks 2021), and a significantly greater proportion of the Green’s vote came from women. The gender gap therefore decreased slightly in 2022, which was not reflective of the extensive discussion of the issue during the election.

Table 6. Gender and the vote, 2019 and 2022.

	2019			2022
	Women	Men	Gap	Women	Men	Gap
Coalition	38	47	−9	32	37	−5
Labor	37	34	+3	36	32	+4
Green	15	9	+6	16	9	+7
Other	10	10	0	16	22	−6
Total	100	100		100	100
(N)	(934)	(978)		(1093)	(1033)

Source: 2019–2022 AES.

Voters born in China

As Australia’s proportion of non-English speaking immigrants has steadily increased, the immigrant vote has grown in electoral importance. The importance of the immigrant vote is enhanced by the concentration of many immigrant groups in the major cities. As of 2021, 29.1 per cent of Australia’s population had been born overseas, with the three largest groups coming from England (3.8 per cent), India (2.8 per cent) and China (2.3 per cent). Until the early 1970s, there was no distinct immigrant vote (McAllister 2011, 131ff). From then onwards, the broad immigrant groups have deviated significantly from the voting of the Australian born. Italian and Greek immigrants responded to the new mid-1970s policy of multiculturalism by moving towards Labor, as did Asians, particularly in the late 1990s when the Howard Coalition government made various negative statements about Asian immigration (Betts 2003). However, from the late 1990s to 2019, the difference in the voting behaviour of Asians from the Australian born declined significantly.

Both party reviews noted the change in the Chinese vote in the election. The Liberal review identified ‘a perception the previous Government’s criticisms of the CCP government of China included the wider Chinese community more generally’ (Loughnane and Hume 2022, 5). The Labor review saw the Coalition government’s ‘bellicose politicisation of the relationship with China’ as a factor in some electorates (Combet and Oshalem 2022, 5) and noted that

many in the Chinese-Australian community voted Labor for the first time because of the behaviour of Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton. They felt that the actions and rhetoric of Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton meant that they were not welcome in Australia and that their businesses would be affected. (43)

Both reviews made recommendations for more extensive engagement with immigrant communities to overcome these perceived problems.

By combining the AES and CSES surveys to achieve a reasonable sample size, we can gain an insight into how far Chinese voters changed their vote between the 2019 and 2022 elections. Among voters born in mainland China (n = 71), 50 per cent reported voting Coalition in 2019 compared to 40 per cent in 2022. The 2022 AES also asked an ancestry question, and among those who identified as being of Chinese ancestry (n = 88), 46 per cent voted for the Coalition in 2019 compared to 31 per cent in 2022. By any standards, then, there appears to have been a significant shift in the voting behaviour of Chinese immigrants in the 2022 election. However, except for possibly two seats, the aggregate impact of this change on the election outcome was negligible.¹⁷

Climate change

Public concern about climate change and global warming has been increasing around the world (Captstick et al. 2015) and Australia has been no exception to this trend. As an election issue in Australia, global warming has been consistently ranked behind social and economic concerns, such as economic management, taxation, and health and education (Cameron and McAllister 2022, 35; Kousser and Tranter 2018). This was especially the case after 2010 and the failure of the Rudd Labor government to legislate an emissions trading scheme as part of its climate change policy (Müller and Slominski 2017). However, in 2019 public concern about climate change increased and in the 2022 election global warming ranked as the third most important election issue among voters, behind the cost of living and economic management. Along with this greater concern about global warming, Figure 3 shows that Labor was viewed by voters as having the better policy, with a considerable 33 percentage point lead over the Coalition.

Figure 3. Global warming as an election issue, 2007–2022.

Notes: ‘Here is a list of important issues that were discussed during the election campaign. When you were deciding how to vote, how important was each of these issues to you personally?…Global warming'. ‘Still thinking about these same issues, whose policies – the Labor Party's or the Liberal–National Coalition's – would you say come closer to your own views on each of these issues?…Global warming’.

Source: 2007–2022 AES.

Evaluating the explanations

These six explanations for the election outcome proposed by the major party reviews cover most of the discussion about the election. The evidence to support some of the explanations, such as negative views of Morrison’s leadership, are unequivocal, while others, such as the defection of women away from the Coalition, find less support. To assess the relative importance of each explanation considering all others, a multinomial logistic regression (MNL) model was estimated. The model compares those who voted either Labor or Green with Coalition voters, who are the base. The parameter estimates are shown in Figure 4; the full model appears in Appendix Table A1.

Figure 4. Explaining the 2022 vote.

Notes: Parameter estimates showing how the Labor and Green vote deviated from the Coalition vote in the 2022 election. See Appendix Table A1 for full model results. **p < .01, *p < .05.

Source: 2022 AES.

Leadership was the most important factor in shaping the vote, with those viewing Morrison negatively being more likely to vote Labor or Green, in roughly equal proportions. As we would expect, positive views of Albanese were more likely to lead to a Labor vote, with a much smaller effect for the Greens vote. Bandt was a positive factor for voting Green but had a much more modest effect on the Labor vote. After leadership, the second most important factor was the pandemic. Those who regarded the pandemic as having been handled badly by the federal government were more likely to vote either Labor or Green, with a larger effect for Labor voting. Third in importance is global warming. This issue was most important for Green voters, as we would expect, mostly in the form of global warming being considered an election issue. Labor voters also saw global warming as an election issue, but to a lesser extent, and they were no more likely to regard it as a serious concern compared to Coalition voters.

The results in Figure 4 are also important for what factors are not statistically significant predictors of the vote. Gender is not a statistically significant influence, despite the public discussion it attracted during the election campaign. Nor is being born in an Asian country or possessing a university education important.¹⁸ There is a significant effect for age – younger voters were more likely to vote for the Greens – but Labor voters did not differ from Coalition voters in their age profile, once other factors are considered. In summary, then, the 2022 election outcome was shaped primarily by leadership, with Morrison’s lack of popularity being a major negative for the Coalition. This was followed by the government’s perceived failure in handling the pandemic and, especially for Greens voters, the importance of global warming.

Conclusion

How political parties diagnose their performance in an election is crucial for their future electoral prospects. Properly identifying the reasons for success or failure should lead to a revised strategy at the next election, thus avoiding the mistakes of the past and instead building on positives that can be used to future advantage. By evaluating the explanations given by the two major party reviews following the 2022 Australian election, this paper has provided an insight into the relevance of these reviews for party strategy. How accurately did the reviews of the two parties identify the reasons for their electoral performance?

The results presented here indicate that leadership was the most important factor affecting the vote and this is acknowledged in both reviews. Since the electoral impact of leadership manifested itself in the unpopularity of the incumbent Liberal prime minister, and especially concerns about his integrity, this represented a practical problem for the Liberal review. The review sidestepped the leadership question by blaming it on the ‘loss of political focus’ (Loughnane and Hume 2022, 11) due to the pandemic and by not seeking to ‘define Labor and its leader before the campaign’ (14). However, for both parties, defining an election in terms for leadership is an insecure basis for any future electoral strategy since leaders change and whoever is the incumbent invariably declines in popularity the longer they remain in office (McAllister 2003). Both party reviews also correctly identified the electoral importance of the pandemic. Once again, however, such an event is unlikely to recur so there are few lessons for the future.

Both party reviews examined the Teal independents. The Liberal review devoted most attention to them, not surprisingly since they cost the party six seats. However, the Liberal review saw the Teal success in the context of the resources, organisation and technical capabilities the independents could deploy during the campaign. Both reviews did not appreciate the level of tactical voting that resulted in the Teal’s success, which has significant implications for how both major parties approach Teal-held seats in the future. In particular, the Labor review failed to recognise the significance of the Teals – and the rise of the minor party vote generally – for their future electoral performance.

The three remaining explanations concern the changing party loyalties of women and Chinese voters, and climate change. As the analyses presented here indicate, the politics of women – while it figured in the election narrative and was examined in depth in both reviews – had little impact on the outcome of the 2022 election. Similarly, the shift to Labor support among Chinese-born voters had little effect on the election result. Lastly, climate change, while one of the top three influences on the election outcome, receives little discussion in the reviews. The Liberal review largely ignores the issue, while the Labor review – with an eye to defections to the Greens – views it as important to convince voters that addressing climate change can also create economic opportunities.

Do the reviews provide party blueprints for the future? The 2022 election was different from many previous elections because of the gap in the popularity of the two major party leaders, and by the pandemic. Future elections are unlikely to have such a wide gap in popularity between the major party leaders¹⁹ or to be held in the wake of an existential crisis. Both reviews devote most of their attention to organisational and resources issues, the role of the mass media, digital campaigning, and to candidate selection. The election saw little policy difference between the major parties and that is reflected in paucity of discussion in the reviews about policy. Arguably, this should form the core of each review, with a discussion of what policies are most likely to attract (and repel) voters. Between half and two-thirds of voters consistently say they cast their ballot based on the policies of the parties (Cameron and McAllister 2022, 25). Addressing voters’ needs ought to be the centrepiece of any election, and of the subsequent post-election evaluation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ian McAllister

Ian McAllister is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at The Australian National University, Canberra.

Notes

1 The 2019 and 2022 Labor reviews and the 2022 Liberal review are public documents, but the 2019 Liberal review is available in summary form only. A useful summary can be found at https://www.miragenews.com/review-of-2019-federal-election-campaign/.

2 There were also two panel members, Craig Emerson and Linda White.

3 Full details of the survey methodology, as well as the datafiles, can be found at https://australianelectionstudy.org/.

4 Full details are at https://srcentre.com.au/our-research/life-in-australia-study.

5 The small number of National Party voters in the AES (n = 74) make it impractical to consider them as a separate category.

6 There were eight party leadership spills over this period, an average of one every 18 months, with four of the eight spills being successful and resulting in a new prime minister.

7 The phrase was coined by Nick Bryant, the BBC’s Australian correspondent. See https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-34249214.

8 The name derives from the colour used for campaign materials by a number of the successful independent candidates in 2022, following independent MP Zali Steggall’s successful use of the colour in 2019 ‘to stand out from the major parties’. The colour can be interpreted as a combination of conservative blue and environmental green or ‘something in between’. My thanks to an anonymous referee for clarifying this point.

9 The four incumbent MPs were Andrew Wilkie (Clark), Helen Haines (Indi), Rebekha Sharkie (Mayo) and Zali Steggall (Warringah). The six new MPs were Kate Chaney (Curtin), Zoe Daniel (Goldstein), Monique Ryan (Kooyong), Sophie Scamps (Mackellar), Kylea Tink (North Sydney) and Allegra Spender (Wentworth).

10 ‘Morrison infamously told a Sydney radio host: “I don’t hold a hose, mate.” This became a metaphor for the Prime Minister’s refusal to take responsibility during subsequent crises, particularly the COVID-19 pandemic’ (Combet and Oshalem 2022, 19)

11 First advanced by Mueller (1973), a crisis must be dramatic and international in scope, and pose a physical, economic or health threat to society.

12 The Labor review did note the incidence of tactical voting in Teal seats which it said ‘cannot be overlooked’ (Combet and Oshalem 2022, 37).

13 Amanda Stoker (Liberal–National senator for Queensland, 2018–2022) quoted in Australian Financial Review, 12 July 2022.

14 There is virtually no difference between the AES and CSES samples, with the Teal vote composed of 50 per cent former Labor and Green voters in the AES, and 49 per cent in the CSES sample.

15 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-03-16/bullets-women-march-4-justice-scott-morrison/13251804.

16 The Liberal review found that ‘Liberal defectors in “Teal seats” were highly likely to agree with the statement that “the treatment or attitude towards women within the Liberal Party had a strong influence on my vote”’ (Loughnane and Hume 2022, 31).

17 The two seats were Chisholm (with the largest number of Mandarin speakers in Australia) and Bennelong (the third largest). Both seats saw Labor candidates defeat the incumbent Liberal.

18 There is a substantial effect in the figure for being born in an Asian country, with these voters being less likely to vote Green and more likely to vote Labor compared to Coalition voters, but due to the small numbers the effects are not statistically significant.

19 The gap in popularity based on the thermometer scores between Albanese and Morrison in 2022 was 1.51. This compares with a mean gap in popularity between the incumbent and the challenger of 0.71 between 1987 and 2022.

Appendix

The full multinominal logistic regression results are shown in Appendix Table A1. The variables are coded as follows. Leader ratings are coded from zero (most unpopular) to 10 (most popular). The government’s handling of the pandemic is coded 4 = very good job, 3 = good job, 2 = bad job, 1 = very bad job. The pandemic and global warming as election issues are coded 3 = extremely important, 2 = quite important, 1 = not very important. Gender, born in Asian country and university education are coded zero or one, and age is coded in single years. Global warming as a serious issue is coded 4 = very serious, 3 = fairly serious, 2 = not very serious, 1 = not at all serious.

Table A1. Evaluating the explanations (MNL estimates).

(Base: Coalition voters)	Labor	Green
Leaders
Morrison	−.506**	−.555**
	(.037)	(.048)
Albanese	.546**	.165**
	(.047)	(.058)
Bandt	.103*	.479**
	(.047)	(.063)
Pandemic
Government handled pandemic well	−.392**	−.313**
	(.080)	(.101)
Pandemic as election issue	.313**	.127
	(.122)	(.153)
Social characteristics
Gender (female)	−.004	.264
	(.170)	(.218)
Born in Asian country	.427	−.655
	(.228)	(.345)
Age	−.007	−.025**
	(.005)	(.006)
University education	.006	.178
	(.187)	(.227)
Climate change
Global warming election issue	.330*	.643**
	(.148)	(.212)
Global warming serious issue	.026	.479
	(.127)	(.176)
Intercept	−1.200	−3.192
	(.516)	(.722)
Nagelkerke Rsq	.676

***p < .01, **p < .05, *p < .10. Multinomial logistic regression estimates showing parameter estimates and (in parentheses) standard errors predicting those who voted either Labor or Green in 2022 from those who voted Coalition in 2022. See text for details of variables and scoring.

Source: 2022 AES.