Niki Sava's Earthquake is a compelling account of the election that shook Australia

As federal polling day approached on May 3, 2025, the ground was silent but the people of Australia were stirred, some anxious in fear, others longing for a change of government. History favors the incumbent. There have not been single-term governments at the national level since the interwar years.

Deep within the foundation of Australia's political establishment, forces were growing.

In 2022, despite his weak campaign, Anthony Albanese was favored, narrowly, by voters desperate to see the end of a dishonest coalition government. He received a very low primary vote (32.6%) and a majority of only two seats. Repeating this uncertainty, as Prime Minister, could be politically fatal.

On paper, it could be a close call again, given the variables: a shaky government winning the 2023 referendum; The inaccuracy of opinion polls in many recent elections, which led to failure to measure external dissatisfaction; A fierce competitor is Peter Dutton, who leads a united team energized by his success in the referendum.

Review: Earthquake: The election that shook Australia – Niki Sava (Author)

Ultimately, this will be an election like no other, and one that will produce results like no other.

As the days counted down, it became clear that Team Dutton was working on nothing more than men's energy, a risky and unaffordable nuclear power policy, and insanely higher taxes.

The Albanians have started well and are becoming more confident as things progress, despite an unusually large proportion of undecided voters. Labour's campaign was calculated and methodical. Its family-focused promises – such as an $8.5 billion health care boost – were repetitive and not new, but at least they were well calculated and carefully explained.

When the results came in, the electoral ground moved, the Liberal Party was expelled from the ACT and Dutton was booted from Parliament.

Identity crisis

In her long-awaited new book, Earthquake: The Election That Shook Australia, veteran journalist Niki Sava charts the journey to the election result that took everyone by surprise. But Earthquake is also a journey into the dead heart of Trump's and the center-right's identity crisis.

In hindsight, the opposition's failure was clear. “By election time, people knew what the liberals were against,” Sava wrote:

Either what they couldn't say anymore was what they were for, or if they could, they couldn't take it anymore. The Liberal Party simply did not look, think, talk or act like mainstream modern Australia.

This damned cash grinds and produces like a San Andreas bug under Sava's brutal and educated commentary. Perhaps more than any promise or tactical blunder, it explains the career-ending result and changing terrain.

Savva's account features an advertising tone for its brand. It chronicles the aggressive failings of a Liberal Party that has veered from its enviable position as the mainstay of post-war Australian governance to what could soon make it a historical footnote in its current trajectory.

Decomposition seems entirely avoidable, but it arouses no less urgency or even less courage internally. It points to a strange and disastrous disease: a conservative party at war with the modernizing society it seeks to represent, especially women and younger voters, but immigrants too.

How do you finish? Is it possible that a split in the once great Liberal Party is occurring or even imminent? This may have already happened – not in the usual or expected way with the defection of existing MPs, but through the emergence of junior Liberal rivals, who have taken over the party's key urban jobs and a large section of its professional base. It is an electoral division like an earthquake: destruction from the ground itself.

Tectonic force

Sava's authority is convincing. She is a long-time gallery journalist, old enough to cover the sacking of the Whitlam government. She also worked for former Prime Minister John Howard and former Treasurer Peter Costello. Her resume lends her journalism deep corporate knowledge and a certain conservative credibility within the tent.

Perhaps this rare combination explains why so many people agreed to talk to her. As a critique, the earthquake gains its tectonic force through the breadth of multiple testimonies and examples.

One is an account of the politically disastrous moment when Senator Jacinta Nambijinpa Price, a “darling of the hard right,” linked the Coalition to US President Donald Trump by declaring that Dutton would “make Australia great again” if elected. “Dutton knew immediately how things were going to go, that she was going to hurt him, but because he was loyal to her, he had to act as if he was pleased with her performance,” Sava notes.

“It's been said, and it can't be hidden,” Dutton later told People. “It was not helpful. It was directly in Labour's interests.”

Another example is the assessment of the Dutton campaign by former minister Karen Andrews, who was aghast when its leader told a friendly talk host that he would be living on Sydney Harbor at Kirribilli House, not in Canberra. “That was the basic political question you were going to be asked, and it wasn't even a difficult question,” Andrews told Sava.

Sava writes with clarity, but also with evident regret for the lost moral core of a party that, at its best, maintained a prominent, if not entirely dominant, liberal tradition. Now, its liberalism remains largely in its name: a practice that is in equal parts marketing and whimsy.

Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton in the final leaders debate of the 2025 federal election campaign, Sydney, 27 April 2025. Lucas Coch/AAP

Some readers may be tempted to skip the first half of the book, which begins with the Sava newspaper columns. Earthquake only begins on page 219 with its detailed retrospective analysis of the separate election campaigns and their stunning conclusion.

However, these shorter essays make the book at least partly contemporary rather than merely the wisdom of hindsight. It displays the author's well-trained instinct for political subterfuge and her disdain for cases of outright change of form. Sava wrote about Dutton in mid-April, a few weeks before the poll:

At first, he was against working from home, then he wasn't. At first, he wanted a series of referendums, then he didn't. At first, he was very pro-Trump, then he wasn't.

As the saying goes, there's a lot where that came from.

On message, off target

The Liberal Party has failed on almost every level, from its choice of leader, to its absolute acceptance of its bizarre suburban strategy – which involved handing over cities to competition between Labor and Green Labor – to its inane campaign, which was based more on discontent than hope for the nation.

As Sava says, voters always get it right.

One key insight is the extent to which Dutton's aloof personality and the weakness of his front bench combine to leave no one sufficiently weighty and impartial in charge of strategy.

While Labour's Paul Eriksson worked closely with Albanese and his office to coordinate political announcements, announcements, visits and debates, far too many senior Liberals acquiesced to their leader, cheated, just as he had been, by the outcome of a voice referendum in 2023. Under this license, Dutton made poor decisions on tax policy, nuclear power stations and defense spending, allowing himself to be repeatedly outmaneuvered by Albanians.

As Nick Minchin, the respected Liberal Party member, pointed out in his book Earthquake, “You should never let the leader run the campaign.”

Meanwhile, Sava notes, Dutton continued his habit of speaking to conservative-friendly media outlets, such as the hosts of Talkback and Sky After Dark, where conversations often dragged him into fringe territory where there were no undecided voters to persuade.

Nikki Sava. author

Even when he was on message, Dutton was off target. He succeeded in cutting temporary fuel taxes, and images of nighttime gas stations reinforced his sense of men in trucks, while Labor talked about affordable early childhood education, cheap drugs, and big bills.

Constantly giving up the initiative is a strange way to run from behind, but that is what Dutton set out to do. Key political announcements were left too late, attracting negative attention for their absence, rather than positive coverage for any advantages they might have had.

Labor's campaigning approach was relatively dynamic, even when the election was postponed by Cyclone Alfred which struck the Queensland coast and, more importantly, in the marginal seat of Dutton.

Sava points out that the delay has benefited Labour, because the expectation of a poll in April has already brought greater scrutiny to Dutton. So, when it emerged that he had “headed to Sydney to fundraise”, it not only revived memories of Scott Morrison's Hawaiian holiday in 2019, but gave Labor the devastating punchline that the Liberal leader had “sold out his constituents” by leaving his electorate to Dixon in a moment of crisis.

“He was filling the Liberal Party's moneybags while his community was filling the sandbags,” then-Labour Agriculture Minister Murray Watt charged insiders.

Both sides of the fence

'Earthquake' is an important account, incorporating insights from a wide range of parliamentary and election campaign insiders on both sides of the fence.

In its long-form journalism – telling the story through key players on the record – and its accounts of human failures under extreme pressure, it is a crucial political science adjunct to the study of the Australian election and other analytical work by psychologists.

Will the election outcome determine future actions? Given current behaviour, it seems that the only people not shaken by the earthquake are the rest of the coalition MPs. Indeed, any remedial transformation of the Federalist Party in its wake could be described as a regressive act.

Already, the Liberals have abandoned their Morrison-era commitment to cut carbon emissions by 2050, rejected quotas for women, redoubled their efforts on nuclear power (as a way to demand continued support for emissions reductions), and viewed reducing immigration as a priority, despite the risk of further alienating immigrant groups.

However, the earthquake should be read as a cautionary tale for both sides. Its concrete silos are half empty. Their Truth Pills were no longer an essential item in the world of shifting loyalties and ephemerals.

We cannot rule out the collapse of the Labor Party, nor can we rule out the devastating effects of the government's arrogance in defying the transparency and accountability it promised. The next election could lead to a return to orthodoxy, with the Liberals regaining support in inner-city seats. Possible, although it would require another tectonic shift.

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