Australia election results 2025: Labor now rules the centre right. Those remaining on the left must gather their forces

Sydney Morning Herald

11-05-2025

While the Greens harbour a romance of an alliance with Labor, that is ever less likely as Labor shifts further right and delights in its utter contempt for them. The Greens, though, like a spurned lover, keep seeking to be embraced by the ALP once more. As well as preferencing Labor in almost all electorates, the Greens went into the election sounding not like an environmental party but the unloved left of Labor – the same party that election after election uses the Greens for preference harvesting and then rejects its advances. Green-shaming is Labor's political equivalent of slut-shaming.
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The only way out of this vicious dilemma that sees the two main parties continuing to decline as a popular force but dominate as an electoral force would seem to be some new alliance that seeks to create a closer working relationship between independents and Greens. With this kind of agreement, they would preference each other at elections rather than Labor, and work more closely together in parliament on the matters on which they are agreed.
None of this would be easy: while voters have liked the crossbench co-operating on issues such as gambling reform and an integrity commission, they are less happy when they think an independent is electorally aligned with others. Despite the unremitting propaganda wheeled out through the election, independents are not Greens, and on many issues are far from the Greens' positions, while the Greens in turn find some independents' positions anathema. The problem for all is that the left is becoming an increasingly Balkanised landscape. The possibility of a new national ecology party forming to pursue the goals the Greens have abandoned only worsens the picture.
Unless some way of coming together can be found, the alternative will be the spectre of the left's growing irrelevance. In an Australia where the vote for non-major parties is the size of the vote for Labor – and growing – the crossbench could begin reimagining its ranks as the place out of which governments of the future can be built. If independents could re-conceive their roles not just as individual representatives but as future national leaders, finding within themselves the ambition to ultimately aspire to create a government of allies, they may escape being condemned to the sidelines of history and show the larger, as yet unrealised, possibilities of Australian democracy.
In some ways, the plight of the left today mirrors the crisis in which crushed conservatives found themselves in the 1940s when Robert Menzies united 18 anti-Labor groups into a new, single force of conservatism that would become the most electorally successful federal political party in Australia's history: the Liberals.
Whether there is a comparable figure or figures on the left today who might bring together these disparate but important voices into some form of partnership or alliance that can hold Labor to account is a question only time can answer. But it is the question that must now be asked.
Richard Flanagan won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North . In 2024, he won the Baillie Gifford Prize (for non-fiction) for his most recent book, Question 7 . He is the first writer to win both prizes.
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