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DANIEL:

From Schwartz Media. I’m Daniel James, this is 7am.

A week ago, most pundits were betting on a hung parliament. Instead, Labor has claimed one of the biggest majorities in modern history - eclipsing even Bob Hawke’s first-term result.

Anthony Albanese now commands near unquestioned authority inside his party. But as the celebrations settle, questions are already emerging about how his government will handle the mandate and the risk of hubris that comes with it.

Today, columnist for The Saturday Paper, Paul Bongiorno, on the ins and outs of Labor’s historic win, and how quickly triumph can turn to trouble.

It’s Friday, May 9.

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DANIEL:

Paul, what a difference a week makes. Last week we were taking predictions and most bets were on a hung parliament. So do you think the enormity of the win has started to sink in yet for Labor people that you've been speaking with?

PAUL:

Well, it is quite extraordinary. For one thing, Anthony Albanese has returned the best election result of a Labor leader since the war. Better than Labor heroes - wartime heroes - Curtin and Chifley, and even better than Bob Hawke. So it's historic from that point of view. Labor was always considered to be on track to win either in minority or majority. Although I was talking to Wayne Swan, president of the Labor Party, and he did confirm to me that Labor's polling had them on track for majority government basically from the beginning of the campaign, but he had to admit they knew there was a swing, but they didn't think it would be that big. In other words, maybe 80 seats, but what are we heading for now? The prediction is they'll get to 90, maybe 92, and that's the sort of landslide you saw from John Howard or Tony Abbott in 2013. And the enormity there thrills them, but it certainly took them by surprise.

DANIEL:

Given the size of the win, we've heard a lot about the mandate Albanese now has. So what has he said this week about his first priorities in the second term?

Audio excerpt – Anthony Albanese:

“It is great to have the honour of being back in the prime minister's courtyard and I do want to thank the Australian people for the very clear mandate that they've given my government.”

PAUL:

Well, Albanese has done a couple of things, actually. Right from the word go on on Saturday night and through a big news conference he did in the prime minister's courtyard on Monday, the first thing he does is he's humble, right?

Audio excerpt – Anthony Albanese:

“I promise to be a prime minister for all Australians, those who voted Labor, those who didn't, and hope to earn the trust of the Australian People on an ongoing basis. We are deeply humbled by the result on Saturday, and we don't take a second of it for granted.”

PAUL:

I'm not getting carried away. It's steady as you go. The way the Labor government acted in the first term is the way it's gonna act in this term.

Audio excerpt – Anthony Albanese:

“Look, we're not getting ahead of ourselves. I didn't get ahead of myself in the last three years. We had a clear mandate to govern. We had a lot to turn around.”

PAUL:

He will endeavour to fulfil the mandate that he got from the people and he said that there'll be no shocks or surprises now my reading of that is on Taxation for example everyone believes that there's some more should be done on taxation especially the Multi-billion dollar concessions on negative gearing and capital gains tax Unless there is built up an enormous political pressure for the government to do that, you won't see it do it.

DANIEL:

And of course, everyone loves a winner, Paul, especially one Donald Trump. He said this week that Albanese is very good and that the two are friendly.

Audio excerpt – Donald Trump:

“Albanese, I'm very friendly with him. I haven't...I don't know anything about the election other than he's very good. He's a friend of mine.”

DANIEL:

On the other hand, he said that he has no idea who the person is who ran against him, which must've been a bit brutal for Peter Dutton. But what is the task for Albanese now when it comes to managing our relationship with the United States?

PAUL:

Well, I've been fascinated to see how Albanese has already begun to manage this even before the election. You might remember they played a word game with Albanese and Dutton, I think it was on Channel 7. Mark Reilly put to him, when I say Donald Trump, what do you think? And Albanese immediately said, President. So in other words, Albanese wants to keep this on a business footing.

Audio excerpt – Reporter:

“Prime Minister, were there any promises from Donald Trump in your discussion this morning, especially when it comes to tariffs?”

Audio excerpt – Anthony Albanese:

“It was a very warm discussion about the friendship between our two nations, that's so important. I've had three conversations with the President. I won't go into all of the personal comments that he made, but he was very generous.”

PAUL:

He understands that he's the prime minister of Australia, dealing with our principal strategic partner. And he has to manage this partner in such a way that any damage to the relationship comes not from the Australian side, but from the American side. And I think in this, there's a big difference between us and Canada. What Trump's doing with Canada is directly damaging to Canada, while what he's done to us, in a sense, he's already given us a concession by hitting us only with 10% tariffs and not higher ones. Although Albanese, and this is interesting to note as well, his response to that was not to say, oh goody goody, you didn't hit us harder, but to point out that that was not the act of a friend. Albanese really is a bit of a rough diamond in many ways, but it is clear from his history in politics, and people who do deal with him, whether they're independents, indeed Adam Bandt the Green said this during a campaign, Albanese is an extremely good negotiator. So that's the approach I think that we're going to see going forward. From him in regard to the American alliance and our relationship with the mercurial Donald Trump.

DANIEL:

As you said, Paul, Albanese wants to stay humble and not get ahead of himself, but given the scale of Labor's majority, is there a risk that he actually could start getting ahead of himself?

PAUL:

Yeah, well, look, there's absolutely no doubt that all of the doubts that were fuelled by the very bad campaign he ran in 2022, that sapped him of authority within the Labor caucus, the Labor Party. But now that he's had this massive win backing his own assessment of how Labor could win, his authority within The Broader Labor Party has been mightily enhanced.

Audio excerpt – Sarah Ferguson:

“Are you worried about hubris?”

Audio excerpt – Anthony Albanese:

“What I'm concerned about is making sure that we seize the opportunity that we have to take this country forward. We have an opportunity to renew faith in our democracy.”

PAUL:

Now while we're hearing all the right things from Anthony Albanese, how he's not going to get ahead of himself, how he’s humble and he's here to serve, as one senior cabinet minister said to me, politicians can start to believe their own mythologies.

DANIEL:

After the break - the election's surprise winners and losers.

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Audio excerpt – Adam Bandt:

“A short time ago I called the Labor candidate for Melbourne, Sarah Witty, to concede, to congratulate her, and to wish her all the best as the next member for Melbourne.”

DANIEL:

Paul we heard this week that Greens leader Adam Bandt has lost his seat, the seat of Melbourne which he held for 14 years. What do you make of that result and what impact will it have?

PAUL:

Well it's interesting, in one sense the result for the Greens in the lower house has been a disaster. Bandt's primary vote fell 4% in his seat, and Labor's primary vote came up 6%. But what we also should note, not only in Victoria, but up in Queensland as well, the Liberals preferenced Labor, not the Greens.

Audio excerpt – Adam Bandt:

“We needed to overcome Liberal, Labor and One Nation combined, and it's an Everest that we've climbed a few times now, but this time we fell just short.”

PAUL:

The other point is, it really puts the Greens back to what you might call the keep-the-bastards-honest party, the balance-of-power party in the Senate. And the Greens come back to the Senate with all their senators in place and with the balance of power in their own right. In other words, if Labor wants to get legislation through, it can do it either by negotiating directly with the Coalition, but if the Coalition's playing hard to get, then the 11 Greens can deliver the votes.

DANIEL:

And there of course are a number of other seats that are on a knife’s edge this week. The Liberals have clawed back some ground and some key contests with the Teals. So how significant has that been?

PAUL:

Well you'd have to say it's pretty significant certainly from the Liberals' point of view that they were given a slither of light in the teal-held seat of Goldstein in Melbourne.

Audio excerpt – Tim Wilson:

“I’m very proud… (holding back tears) genuinely very proud to say that we are pleased to accept that we have won the seat of Goldstein back from the Liberal party.”

PAUL:

Zoe Daniel, a teal independent there, defeated by the former Liberal incumbent Tim Wilson. Now, that's important for a few reasons, especially for the Liberals. First of all, it gives them something to be happy about. But Tim Wilson is quite a political operator. I noticed that Jeff Kennett in an interview in Melbourne on Thursday described Wilson as an attack dog. Back in the 2019 election, he was the one who very effectively ran the campaign against Bill Shorten on franking credits. He'll come back into the parliament. He won't be in government anymore. So he won't have all those levers to pull. But I wouldn't be surprised if maybe they make him deputy leader. We'll just have to wait and see on that.

But look more broadly, what we've seen in the Australian Capital Territory. The safe seat with a 14% margin of Bean is still teetering to a Teal independent. But it also happened over in Perth in the traditionally safe Labor seat of Fremantle. Now it looks like Labor will hang on there, but rather than having a 20 per cent or 16 per cent margin, it's down to one or under one per cent. Then we go to New South Wales. We see that three of the Teal independents hang on. And we see that in the seat of Bradfield it looks like the Liberals might just scrape over the line. Interestingly, in that seat the former incumbent, a white middle-aged man, he quit the seat and the Liberals endorsed a woman and she ran the sort of campaign in Bradfield that the Teals run. So neither of the major parties can rest on their laurels. They all now have to treat every seat as one that they may well lose if they don't perform.

DANIEL:

So the independents and the Teals are here to stay. What role will they play in this Parliament though given Labor's massive majority?

PAUL:

Well, in the House of Representatives, not a key role. I mean, Labor will be able to get everything at once through the House Of Representatives. However, what we did see in the first term, of course, Labor had a majority, but it was only a single-seat majority after they appointed the Speaker. Albanese went out of his way to... Interact with the Teals, even engineered often that the Teals would be allowed to or encouraged to amend government legislation. So I think what we're going to see is more of that from the Albanese government in the lower house, bit of insurance in that, but also I think Albanese is very keen to show that he runs an inclusive government, and this will be key, of course, to him not getting too big for his boots, as we were talking about a bit earlier.

DANIEL:

And finally, Paul, Labor now commands a huge majority, but history shows us how quickly big majorities can sour. Is there a danger that could happen?

PAUL:

Absolutely, there is a danger for it. You might remember that Tony Abbott in 2013, he had 90 seats in the House of Representatives, had a massive landslide, but his own party room got rid of him within a year after he and Joe Hockey's treasurer bought in a budget that broke every promise they made and was brutal austerity.

Audio excerpt – David Koch:

“Do you need to apologise to the public and say, yeah, I've let you down, I did lie to you, I did break a lot of promises, but hey, I'm going to rebuild from here?“

Audio excerpt – Tony Abbott:

“Well, Kochie, I... Obviously we are determined to improve on these things but no one said the task of budget repair was going to be easy.”

PAUL:

There's even history going back to Paul Keating who won the sweetest victory of all. Keating had close to under 90 seat majority then, but he was wiped out by John Howard three years later. There is one difference in my view here, however. The elections that saw Labor defeated by Howard and then Tony Abbott were at the end of a very tired old Labor government that had pulled itself apart over egos, not over policy, not over direction, not over identity. So once Labor sorted out the egos this time we really do have the Liberal Party looking like it's in its death throes unless it really does come to terms with who it is, what it wants to be, and whether it wants to look to Sir Robert Menzies or to Peta Credlin and Sky After Dark.

DANIEL:

Paul, thank you so much for your time.

PAUL:

Thank you, Daniel. Bye.

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DANIEL:

Also in the news…

MPs have arrived in Canberra ahead of Labor’s first caucus meeting in Parliament house later today, where the prime minister is expected to finalise his next ministry.

Albanese says he expects the new ministry to be sworn in at Government House on Tuesday next week.

And

Peter Dutton has made his first public appearance since losing his seat in parliament … returning to Canberra to briefly thank his supporters.

When asked to comment on who should replace him, the former opposition leader said he would maintain a dignified silence.

7am is a daily show from Schwartz Media and The Saturday Paper.

It’s made by Atticus Bastow, Cheyne Anderson, Chris Dengate, Erik Jensen, Ruby Jones, Sarah McVeigh, Travis Evans, Zoltan Fecso.... And me, Daniel James

Our theme music is by Ned Beckley and Josh Hogan of Envelope Audio.

7am will be back on Monday. Have a great weekend.

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