Looking out
It is conventional wisdom among Australian political commentators to observe, and sometimes regret, that foreign policy doesn’t matter in elections in an island country with a once stable two-party system.
This is despite some critical moments in modern electoral history when this was clearly not the case. The Vietnam War provided a key campaign issue for a Labor renaissance in 1969 and 1972. Refugee management, terrorism and the Iraq war worked in the Liberal-National Party’s increased hold on power in 2001 and 2004.
And then, three years ago, the then Labor Opposition and now Labor government, managed to portray the conservative Morrison government as having “lost” the Pacific to China.
With Labor last weekend winning an unexpectedly large majority over an ill-prepared and, it now appears, ideologically disunited Coalition, foreign affairs was hardly the key factor. It is simply unrealistic to expect an international relations seminar room debate about geopolitics, given that in the heat of an election campaign both sides are tactically reluctant to debate even some key tax policies.
But the world is intruding on Australian voting, whether politicians like it or not, through the prism of the increasing activism and maturing of the country’s diverse immigrant communities.
Courting Chinese communities
While migrant community voters have long been pursued at the local level, especially in the Labor Party, this election perhaps marks the first time one such community – Chinese-Australians – has so obviously been a factor in the thinking of both major parties at the national level.
This was driven by the Liberal Party’s recognition in its post-2022 review that the swing against it in electorates with a substantial population of voters with Chinese heritage was almost double the national average. As a result, opposition leader Peter Dutton over the past three years made a distinctive shift. He transformed from being a China hawk to embracing the local Chinese Australian community and acknowledging China as an important trading partner.
Managing foreign policy towards China with a diverse community of about 1.3 million people of Chinese background now looks like a permanent new performance indicator for an Australian leader.
But during the campaign he and other senior Liberals lurched back towards presenting China as a threat at home and abroad in a bid to challenge Labor’s national security credentials. In return, the weekend vote saw even larger swings against the Coalition in electorates with a significant Chinese community than at the last election. It was just less decisive to the result over than in 2022 because of Labor’s larger majority resulting from broader campaign issues.
Senior sitting Liberals, of non-Chinese heritage but with Chinese language skills, such as Queenslander Ted O’Brien and Victorian Keith Wolahan, suffered swings against them. So did new young Chinese-Australian Liberal candidates in winnable seats with significant Chinese communities in Sydney including Scott Yung and Grange Chung.
As a result, Labor’s more nuanced policy of both competing and cooperating with China has delivered three new MPs of Chinese background to the party’s federal parliamentary caucus for a total of six, in what is probably the biggest ever Asian ethnic background group in an Australian parliament.
Managing foreign policy towards China with a diverse community of about 1.3 million people of Chinese background now looks like a permanent new performance indicator for an Australian leader.
A Muslim melting pot
Despite Labor clearly winning support from the Chinese background community, it is easy to forget that before the election there was often more focus on how it might suffer a loss of support from both Muslim and Jewish voters due to the Gaza conflict.
Labor Senator Fatima Payman left the party over the conflict. Two pro-Palestinian groups, Muslim Votes Matter and The Muslim Vote, sought to mobilise voters in Labor heartland seats in Sydney and Melbourne against the party for not taking a tougher stand against Israel. At the same time the Coalition Opposition seemed to be counting on a possible loss of Labor seats to Muslim independents in a finely balanced parliament and an increase in support from Jewish community voters.
The two independent Muslim candidates running against Labor ministers Tony Burke and Jason Clare in Sydney did win double digit first preference votes, but not enough to really threaten the ministers after preferences. On the other hand, in Melbourne, Labor’s incumbent Jewish MPs Mark Dreyfus and Josh Burns each won swings in their favour.
While the electoral forces at work here are not clear, the Albanese government’s attempt to walk a diplomatic middle path on the Gaza conflict appears to have not cost it support. It is notable that while Labor traditionally has stricter party discipline than the Liberal Party, it has given its highest profile Jewish MP in Burns and its highest profile Muslim MP, Industry Minister Ed Husic, notable room to reflect their community sentiment during the conflict.
Australia possibly has the most diverse 800,000 strong Muslim community in the world, with people hailing from Asia, Africa and Europe as much as the Middle East Muslim heartland. They may well have been more motivated by broader election issues than the Gaza conflict underlined by the creation of Muslim community support networks for Labor MPs.
The Greens vs Gaza
Meanwhile, The Greens made the Gaza conflict a major part of its election campaign, in effect appearing at times to elevate a foreign policy issue above the party’s foundation domestic issue of protecting the environment.
While there are many factors at play in the party’s loss of three out of four Lower House seats, including party leader Adam Bandt. Yet it may come to be seen as a case of a party giving foreign policy too much attention in an election rather than not enough.
Vietnamese showdown
While the battle for support from Chinese background and Muslim communities has been the main foreign policy arena in this election, the competition between two Vietnamese background candidates for the once safe Labor seat of Fowler in western Sydney is also instructive. Former Liberal Party member but now independent Dai Le won in 2022 when the Labor Party tried to insert former NSW premier Kristina Keneally into the seat over local Labor favourite and lawyer Tu Le.
Labor turned back to Tu Le at this election, setting up a rare contest between two people from the same ethnic community. Both women are the children of Vietnamese refugees. Dai Le’s victory probably largely reflects the tendency for independents to retain seats they have won off the major parties. She had the unusual combination of a Liberal background and local government experience in the ethnically diverse electorate. This wasn’t a battle over foreign policy.
But, more importantly, it suggests that while Australia’s migrant communities are generally not well represented in parliaments, that may be changing as second-generation migrant children are more able to appeal to broader communities than their parents.
We’re all Indonesian now
Re-elected Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is set to make his first post-election overseas visit to Indonesia next week, cementing the modern tradition of newly elected prime ministers making their first bilateral visit to that country.
The visit will no doubt be contrasted with Peter Dutton’s pre-election declaration at the Lowy Institute that he would have made his first trip to Washington to meet Donald Trump. But Dutton was less well reported in that same speech for having declared the Indonesia relationship to be “sacrosanct”. He later went on in the campaign to challenge the depth of the Labor government’s relationship with the Indonesian government when it was revealed Russia had sought to base military aircraft in Papua.
Indonesia's President Prabowo releases his chat with Australia's President Elect Albanese. He chats with the Australian leader on speaker phone. Albanese says his first foreign visit will be to Indonesia, to which Prabowo says,'date will be fixed'. pic.twitter.com/dYbt5a2h0D
— Sidhant Sibal (@sidhant) May 5, 2025
While this campaign spot fire ultimately rebounded on Dutton in a tactical sense, it did serve to underline how the foreign policy idea of having a stable and close relationship with Indonesia now seems to be embedded in election campaign conventional wisdom.
Both sides wanted to occupy the moral high ground of being better stewards of the Indonesia relationship. And this was only underlined when the little reported Coalition aid program cuts in the last days of the election campaign also specifically excluded Indonesia and Pacific Islands countries.
