Commentary

A bullet with butterfly wings

Precarity obscured by an emphatic federal election result

by John Byron •

June 2025, no. 476

Commentary

A bullet with butterfly wings

Precarity obscured by an emphatic federal election result

by John Byron •

June 2025, no. 476

Last month’s remarkable federal election result has produced a metric plethora of articles explaining how it was achieved and what it means for the government, for the electorate, and for elections to come.

Despite the sprawl of red across the chamber, the result should not blind us to the degree of uncertainty that now prevails in the electorate. We are living inside a new electoral calculus and all the major parties need to adapt for future elections, or we will need another, bigger word for ‘landslide’.

John Byron

John Byron is Principal Policy Adviser at the Queensland University of Technology. He has 25 years’ experience in higher education and research policy, including as executive director of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and as a federal ministerial policy adviser in the previous Labor government. Most recently he contributed substantially to a major independent review of the Australian Research Council. He has degrees in English Literature from the Universities of Adelaide (BA Hons 1M) and Sydney (PhD). His début novel, The Tribute, was published by Affirm Press in 2021.