Is an unremarkable election campaign really a bad thing? Not this time around (2025)

In almost every campaign, there comes a point where commentary turns to how miserable, how uninspiring, how visionless the offering is. This is the commentary of “Seinfeld elections” – of small political leaders adopting small-target strategies, of scare campaigns crowding out serious policy. I’ve written my share of it over the years.

It’s not that the available scorching criticisms are false this year. Indeed, the main one is correct: this election is taking place against a backdrop of enormous global upheaval in which the whole world order seems up for grabs and our place within it is unsure.

These circumstances demand serious answers to seismic, complex questions. And yet this campaign is dominated by various forms of retail politics: handouts, rebates, small-picture spending, tax cuts here and there, untethered to serious reform. The biggest ideas – such as the Coalition’s nuclear energy policy – are beset by a lack of rigour and now relegated well down the list of talking points in any event.

The world is asking us for a manifesto, and we are responding with an emoji.

But that conceded, there are some modest things to celebrate. This campaign is not merely a more anaemic version of the lamentable campaigns that have come before. It is different in some important ways. Good ways. Not by design, you understand. By circumstance. But it’s importantly different nonetheless.

It begins with the fact that, probably for the first time this century, this is a campaign in which there is broad agreement on what problems we’re trying to solve. So thoroughly has the cost of living eclipsed all else, no party has the choice to avoid it. That yields the unusual situation in which the parties cannot shape the agenda in their own image. They must respond to a matter of unambiguous, shared national concern. The agenda is in charge of them. There’s a certain virtue to that. It means it’s harder for parties to confect crises to suit them.

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This helps explain why, in relative terms, this has been a campaign devoid of culture wars or of histrionics about the existential threat of the other side. Indeed, it has been an oddly civil affair – by my reckoning the most civil for decades. The closest we’ve gotten to a dog whistle is probably this absurd bipartisan determination to reduce the number of international students studying at our universities, but it’s basically the only salvo on immigration in this campaign. Even then, it must now be couched in economic terms – as a response to the housing crisis – rather than cultural ones.

For all the heat generated during this parliament about a crisis of social cohesion, the campaign has not veered anywhere near exploiting that. Put another way, the politics of culture and identity that has dominated this century has given way to a moment of material politics. Not so much a politics of wealth and aspiration as a politics of dollars and cents and food and shelter. To the extent the Coalition has stuttered, it is because it misread that moment.

Its opening gambit – to rid the public service of some 40,000 people and deny the remainder in Canberra the right to work from home – had all the hallmarks of a culture war foray. It trades on presumptions about government employees as aloof, overpaid, elite bureaucrats, frequently lazy, usually doing pretend jobs. That this had a Trumpian echo in Elon Musk’s government efficiency mission only added to the sense the Coalition was attempting to profit from the “vibe shift” Donald Trump’s re-election heralded.

The trouble was, the electorate was in no mood for this. Australians’ attitudes to the Trump administration have quickly soured; polling published in this masthead this week showed it is hurting the Coalition. Importantly, this seems to have accelerated once Trump threatened the global economy, not least the stock market, where Australians have their superannuation. In this, Trump became something other than an icon for a certain kind of cultural politics, or some anti-woke resistance, he became real. He became economic. He became dollars and cents and upheaval and anxiety.

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At a time like that, talk of sacking people and restricting their options to work in ways that suit them strikes the ear in a particularly jarring way. Perhaps some voters were deceived by Labor’s attempt to create the impression that the Coalition’s policies would apply to everyone. More likely, they didn’t like where the policy was coming from. If working from home is now presumed to be some kind of inefficient and wasteful rort, what does that say about the 36 per cent of Australians who do so regularly? And what might it mean for their livelihoods if their employers were invited to share that view? In this environment, public servants ceased to be faceless others, and instead became voters’ future selves. Thus rebuked, Peter Dutton retreated.

This election is not, as so many elections are, a battle for each party to get the game played on its turf. It is not Labor wanting to talk health and education while the Coalition talks about boat people and deficits. It’s not the NBN versus the carbon tax. It is not the familiar dance of each party seeking to neutralise issues that don’t suit them, so as to amplify those that do. There is value in that sort of election from time to time, but when it becomes the default, elections become this spectacle of parties talking past each other.

This year, voters’ very real, singular concerns give Dutton and Anthony Albanese no choice but to talk to each other, as we have seen in both leader’s debates.

I don’t claim they’re doing it well. I don’t deny they’re avoiding some enormous, essential questions of our age. But these criticisms are available in most election campaigns. Meanwhile, if we squint, we can discern the seeds of something a bit more like a country in deliberation. And if we pay attention to that, we just might see that seed grow.

Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author and academic. He is a lecturer in politics at Monash University and co-host of Channel Ten’s The Project.