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The Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, has now congratulated the forthcoming UK Prime Minister, Keir Starmer. He's issued a statement on Twitter, or X, saying congratulations to my friend and new UK Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, on his resounding election victory. He wrote on Twitter, I look forward to working constructively with the incoming Labor government. Alexander Downer, of course, our former Foreign Minister and a former High Commissioner to the UK, joins us up. Thank you for your time, Mr Downer.
It's a pleasure. Did today's events shock you?
No, it came as no surprise. The only question was whether the Conservative Party would win 100 seats, having won 365 at the last election, at the 2019 election. So I can see they've just won over 100 seats. So it's a devastating defeat for the Conservatives. But
I mean, there's a lesson here and that is that if you don't govern well, the public will brutally punish you and they did not govern well. They made promises to control immigration and they broke those promises. They came nowhere near the targets they set themselves on immigration. They overshot those targets.
They raised taxes to the highest level they've been in 70 years. They ran up debts to 100% of GDP. I mean, people who would naturally...
Both conservatives regard all of that as intolerable, and they drifted away. They lost a lot of their core constituency. The Reform Party, I think, has done better than the polls were predicting. It looks like Nigel Farage's party is going to win 13 seats, but they actually, in a lot of seats, and of course it's a first-past-the-post system, a lot of seats they've finished second. Were you surprised that they did better maybe than expected? No.
Yeah, I don't think they'll win as many. That was the original exit poll prediction. I think they'll probably only win four or five seats. But yeah, they have polled pretty well. No, that doesn't surprise me either because...
A lot of people who voted Conservative in 2019, for the reasons I just described, were very disillusioned with the Conservatives, not convinced about Labour. So they parked their votes with Reform, which is a Conservative party. And as you say, it's a first-class post-electoral system, so that split the Conservative vote. Because one of the ironies of this election is that Labour...
got fewer votes than it got in the 2017 election when Jeremy Corbyn was the leader. There was an election in 2017 and then another in 2019. In the 2017 election, when Jeremy Corbyn was the leader, Labour got more votes than they got in this election. But because of the way the electoral system works and the split in the Conservative vote between Labour
the Conservatives and reform, Labor end up with a huge majority. I'll ask you about the impact of a changing government is going to have on us in just a moment. Just in terms, though, firstly, of lessons for us. Of course, they've been through that phase of having a revolving door of prime ministers. We went through that as well for a while there. Do you think there are lessons for both the major parties in what's occurred in the last 24 hours?
Well, I think there are two lessons. One of them is, yes, don't change the prime minister that the public have elected. And both the Labour Party and the Liberal Party could have told the Tories that, and probably, I mean, I told the Tories that, and now the Tories have found out the same thing as well. So that is a really bad thing to do. So I would say to the Australian Labour Party, stick with Albo until the election, no matter what.
The second thing is for major political parties, they can't afford to lose their core constituencies. People who are instinctively conservative were extremely disillusioned with the Conservative Party. And you can't assume that people who are
your way inclined, but are disillusioned with you, will vote for you. They can go anywhere else and they probably will. So the Conservatives not only kept changing their leader, I mean, they were elected with Boris Johnson as their leader in 2019, but they then went to Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak
But they lost their core constituency to the reasons I described already on immigration, on economic policy, tax policy, fiscal policy, spending way too much money and some of those social issues like poverty.
You know, transgender ideology and so on. They really sort of lost a lot of their core supporters on those kinds of issues as well. Now, on the impact for us, does it change the nature of our relationship?
Look, I don't think it does. At a personal level, the Labour Party, the Labour government in Australia would rather have a Labour government in the UK than a Conservative government in Australia.
You know, you can understand that the Liberals would rather have a conservative government, but it doesn't. I can say this as a former foreign minister in practice, it doesn't make a lot of difference. I mean, when the Howard government came to office in 1996, there was a conservative government in the UK. Then in 1997, it changed to Labour.
That didn't really change our basic relationship. And I also think that the Keir Starmer government will be pretty much business as usual. I mean, for all the rhetoric of the election, they won't change a huge amount and they certainly won't change their attitude to Australia. I think, you know, we have...
The AUKUS agreement, of course, and we have a free trade agreement, which has been hugely successful with the UK, where our trade has grown something like 18% in the first year of the existence of the trade agreement. So, frankly, I think things will probably plot along pretty well from the future. And they need a successful trading relationship with us as much as we need them, given all the fallout from Brexit.
Yes, I mean, they do. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of rhetoric about Brexit, but I mean, they've made some very good trade agreements since Brexit and they do have a free trade agreement with the EU. So they have actually seen their trade in goods and services, not just goods, but goods and services growing.
grow over the last few years. I think their trade in goods and services has grown by 11% since Brexit, so it hasn't been all downside for them. But yes, their trade agreement with Australia has been a great achievement for us and for them, and it's working very well. Well, good business as usual. Thank you for your time today.
It's a great pleasure. Alexander Downer, our former foreign minister, but also importantly, he was the High Commissioner, our High Commissioner in the UK for many years. So his analysis is that nothing essentially will change for us, of course. So one of our closest partners, critical to our exporters, our trade relationship, and now with the Orcas deal in place, going to be very, very important for years to come. So nothing should change.
