EDITORIAL: Lib light is off; who can find switch in the dark

We are living in Anthony Albanese’s Australia.

Saturday’s emphatic election win has set his party up, as Mr Albanese said on Monday, for at least a decade in power, an outcome that will fundamentally change the nation, and truly cast it in Labor’s mould.

The Liberals have been left a rabble. The result has exposed the folly of the party for not properly examining the reasons why it lost the 2022 election. It glanced inward and carried on.

The fact that Labor won at that time with an historically low primary vote clearly led the Liberals into a false sense of inevitability.

The reality of course was Peter Dutton’s Coalition was never any real chance of winning back enough seats at this election to form a government. They hoped they could get close to make it harder for Labor, but government was never a fair dinkum possibility.

What no one could have predicted is the absolute collapse in support for the Liberal Party, an incredible 9.3 per cent swing against it is sensational and has delivered the dramatic transfer in seats to Labor.

The underlying story for Labor is that while it has an abundance of seats now, its actual raw support, measured by the shift in primary votes has lifted only slightly, 2.2 per cent, from 32.6 per cent to 34.8 per cent. For context, the Coalition’s vote sits, with counting ongoing, only slightly lower at 32 per cent.

As we accurately predicted before Saturday’s poll, the result is collectively a substantially lower vote for the two major parties than at any other previous election.

Again, for context the Coalition won only 76 seats in 2019 with 41.4 per cent of the primary vote. Labor is on track to win more than 80 seats with a fraction of that vote.

So the story of 2025 is not how the nation has wholeheartedly embraced Mr Albanese, although it looks that way on the surface, and he is legitimately entitled to act as if that is true too.

The story is how out of touch and hopelessly inconsequential the Liberal Party now is, entirely of its own making.

And the miracle result of 2019 masked problems known to the party, such as women and youth, that it has failed to grasp really since the demise of John Howard in 2007. What kind of party is it meant to be and who is it trying to appeal to?

It’s highly unlikely the next Liberal Party Prime Minister is in parliament right now.

There is no obvious generational or directional change sitting in the ranks of the rump left behind by its devastating defeat.

Short of finding a Tony Blair-style messiah to lead the flock from oblivion and rebuild the tattered Liberal brand, the most predictable and safe course would be to see what deputy leader Sussan Ley can do with the dregs of the party up against the rampaging Mr Albanese. Shadow Treasurer Angus Taylor would be mauled by Mr Albanese and Jim Chalmers, and Victorian Dan Tehan would hardly inspire a rally of supporters. Someone, somewhere, must grab this mob, find the light switch and turn it back on.