Earthquake

The best of Niki Savva's columns from The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, along with riveting new chapters, about an epoch-making period in Australian politics.

When the Coalition government was overthrown in 2022, it was tempting to portray the loss as merely a personal repudiation of Scott Morrison. Then, after Antony Albanese's initial honeymoon period, the Labor government became increasingly unpopular while having to negotiate a period of high inflation and a cost-of-living crisis while not provoking the Reserve Bank to either increase interest rates further or delay lowering them. And when opposition leader Peter Dutton torpedoed the referendum on establishing an Indigenous Voice to parliament, his credibility as a political leader improved at the expense of the prime minister's.

That was when, according to Niki Savva, the conservative Coalition thought it had the forthcoming election in the bag. What followed was a sequence of events that resulted in an improbable triumph for Labor and a historic drubbing for the Liberal Party.

Niki had noticed the ground shifting. Back in December 2021, she flagged the emergence of the teals, and the long-term threat they represented to the Liberals: 'The Liberals could lose some of their best and brightest male MPs - if not at the next election, then probably the one after - to female candidates who, once upon a time, they would have killed to recruit and now deride as stooges.'

In March 2023, she warned that, 'Saying no to the Voice referendum will win the applause of the Sky After Dark sirens, whose counsel will only lead him (Dutton) to another glorious defeat.'

And in August 2023 - 20 months before the 2025 election - she noted that, 'The 2022 federal election result was no ordinary defeat, not just part of a normal cycle of wins and losses. It delivered last rites to the broad-church party that Robert Menzies created.'

By early May 2025, she could see signs of the earthquake to come - quoting Labor strategists' confidence that Dutton could be beaten in his own seat of Dickson, she wrote that, 'Removing Dutton would be a considerable coup. So would Labor winning Menzies in Victoria, held by Keith Wolahan on a margin of 0.4 per cent, where Labor reckons Dutton is even more unpopular than Scott Morrison was - a big call, hotly disputed by Liberals on the ground. Still, if Labor won both Dickson and Menzies, it would, in one election, eliminate the Liberals' present and potential future leadership.'

Every word of this came to pass. In her highly popular columns, Niki Savva captured all this and more in her typically uncompromising, penetrating, and prescient way. Now, in addition, she provides a considered analysis of what went on behind the scenes, accompanied by her trademark access to important players and eyewitnesses, before an election that transformed Australian politics.

Earthquake by Niki Savva is an essential read for understanding the seismic shifts in Australian politics during this period.