Australia Votes 2025: Cold sausage, wet bread, burned onions, old sauce. The choice is yours.

Who wants to eat that?

The lack of enthusiasm around this election is real. (Source: Twitter/X)

The 2025 election is today, and it’s hard to be excited about it. The corflutes are extra shiny, and the political machines are firing in their usual election day fashion. The volunteers are out in force and the sausages are sizzling, but despite all the pomp and circumstance, despite the gravity of the occasion, and despite the onions and the sauce, there’s a palpable sense that many are dragging their feet to the ballot box. The atmosphere is muted, the liveliness missing, and the feeling that this is a chore to be put behind us is hard to ignore.

According to Sportsbet, the Damoclean watch that sets the tone of our nation’s competitive analysis, Labor has shortened to $1.06 to supply the 48^th Prime Minister of Australia, and the Coalition has fallen out to $9.30, with opinion polls predicting its worst result in 80 years. Dutton has flopped in campaign mode in ways that can’t yet be fully processed, managed by a lazy campaign team, flipping out AI generated slogans like “A Change for the Better” and “Get Australia Back on Track”, while his team paraded their internal chaos for the cameras at every appearance. Pretty soon, it became apparent that the soft ball questions from the corporate press that Scomo used to hit out of the park weren’t being picked up, and even Murdoch journos realised that there was no use propping up Dutton.

The lack of enthusiasm around this election is real. We could see it around the laborious leaders debates between two of the most ordinary major party leaders you could see, in the hurried and unconvincing pitches from the party Pomeranians that jump around the country to communities that can barely muster the movement to meet them, and we could consume it in the stale and useless political punditry that no one reads anymore because they have gone beyond the pale from bushfire, to pandemic, to genocide. Compulsory voters drag their financially exhausted and morally confused hides to the local primary school to avoid a fine, and don’t think of a cheap Coles budget snag as an exciting ‘Democracy Sausage’ anymore.

Sure there has been the usual campaigning, and a bunch of seats looking to be hotly contested, but there is an audible lack of noise and excitement in the air compared to previous federal elections. Perhaps its the lacklustre performance of a Labor government after ten years of a Coalition, or the Opposition being so out of kilter with itself, or the lack of impact from the Teals in a Labor majority with blinkers on, or maybe its because in some way or another most of the elected officials in Canberra have supported Israel’s genocide in Gaza, propped up the housing bubble in unsustainable ways, conspired to sign us up for a fossil fuel future in a climate catastrophe, failed to establish a meaningful anti-corruption commission, and allowed a cost of living crisis to perpetuate along with unchecked corporate profits. Inspirational stuff.

Labor has been presenting a more coherent campaign, supported by a shrewd group of operators who have worked on an election winning small target formula that they have carried over from 2022, but that is all it is. Flashing a Medicare card around like something that can be taken away by the boogeyman is an election strategy, sure, but it’s also a tired, old, stale rehash that would’ve bitten harder already if it was ever going to. A few budgets of no grand reforms, or twelve straight quarters of record profits for the transnational elites while people lose their houses to interest rate hikes, coupled with the free gas that we have to buy back at three times the price, gets to our nerves sometimes at the robo checkouts when we drop $65 dollars to get dinner and lunch for the kids for a day. Riding on the tattered coattails of Gough Whitlam doesn’t excite an electorate that was hoping Albanese could somehow rise to be less than half the man he is claiming to be. The billboards are up, but nobody is looking, because they know exactly what they’re going to see: nothing.

The Coalition, led by mediocre prime ministerial aspirant Peter Dutton, has had its feet planted in two camps, and Dutton’s campaign has suffered for it. Initially hoping to channel the return of Trump in the White House to some advantage back at home, the LNP has not been able to hide from its ‘Make Australia Great Again’-styled start, which included policies to end working from home, and mass lay-offs to public servants. Trump 2.0 turned out to be toxic to any leader who endorsed him, as seen in the routing of Pierre Poilievre in the recent Canadian elections, who enjoyed 70% approval ratings before Trump declared his ambitions to annex his closest neighbour. Dutton tried to about face, turning like an oversized truck attempting to squeeze into a Woolies car park, and by the time he tried to throw away his ‘Temu Trump’ image, he’d already hitched a rusted Cybercaravan to his limping Dodge RAM, chewing through buckets of fuel for no acceleration, and 25c-off-a litre at the bowser was never going to make a difference.

The independent movement in this country rolls the dice again against the major party giants, some facing battles in their seats against their once entrenched major party opponents, and for others the chips may fall in their favour around places like Wannon, Victoria (Dyson) and Forrest, Western Australia (Chapman), where independent candidates are neck and neck with major party incumbents who have ruled the roost for donkeys, and are now under threat as much from their corrosive major party brands as any other force.

The odds for a hung parliament are looking pretty long ($2.75). The memory of the independents (Wilkie, Oakeshott, Windsor) that helped to guide Julia Gillard’s minority government feels almost distant, but that arrangement successfully stewarded 561 policies, including the establishment of the Parliamentary Budget Office, reform of political funding (disclosure $11,500 to $1000), and an almost $10 billion in urgently needed rural funding, amongst a swathe of other actions that were only taken due to the balance of a hung parliament.

A term of Teal independents in the house turned out to be a damp squib by comparison. Preoccupied with building fortifications to defend their recently captured seats, beset by internal struggles, starved of resources by a nasty and paranoid manoeuvre by the Albanese government, and ultimately sidelined when Labor squeaked a majority together in 2022, their time in parliament was overshadowed by the superior performances of the non-Teal-aligned Jacquie Lambie and David Pocock. The Teals were not the independents we’re looking for.

Labor may retain a majority government, it may trade a seat or two with the Greens, and snag another somewhere else, but it won’t return with the same tentative mandate it had in 2022, when it promised us something that many can’t quite see or touch, nor identify after three whole years of something that was meant to be different, but just isn’t. Albanese is the bookie’s favourite, but not the people’s favourite. He will take a second term due to the poor competition on the other side led by someone that has the nickname of ‘Spud’, combined with an apathetic, “past carin’” feel in the electorate, rather than the transformative and visionary first term PM that we were all longing for.

It’s easy to forgive the voters for dragging their feet when they get to wake up tomorrow to the Prime Minister that Anomie elected.