I’ll preface this by saying I’m not as informed as some so if I get something wrong, apologies.

We don’t have first past the post.

Australia has federal, state and local government elections. This election was federal. Each state is subdivided into large federal regions, and we vote on representatives for our area (green ballot and lowe house). We also vote on which party we want to see in control (white ballot and upper house).

The green ballot is just counted up, and the person with the most votes wins. The white ballot is harder to explain, but basically you need a majority of seats to take government and have to win 76 seats. There’s a transfer system you can read about on wikipedia.

Idk about Albonese being a cunt but every politician in Australia is considered a bit of a dickhead. We don’t worship them here. So we vote out the biggest dickhead (Peter Dutton) most of the time (some could be lovely but most people are aware how many do very little and earn $400k salaries).

Dutton ran a campaign on nuclear power and other things I won’t go into. Nuclear power has 0 infrastructure in Australia so we’d be starting from scratch. It would take 15 years to begin powering Australia. We will have a crisis in 5 years due to population growth. This is extremely easy to point out as stupid, and hard to argue against, especially when half the country already has solar power on their roofs. They also told everyone they’d make fuel cheaper and buy more military equipment even though we have a deal to get military equipment from the US and UK. It’d be nice to have but stupid to run on it.

They didn’t have many other policies that made it to me, but I largely block ads so you could go read more about it online.

Conversely, Albonese ran on things like healthcare, the housing crisis and affordable living. Things people actually care about given the times.

Parties:

• Labor is pro union, and commonly quite centred with a slight lean left. They won the election in a landslide.
• the coalition is two parties, they’re supposed to be centred-right and conservative but they were going off the deep end and going with America/trump style politics. They ran a bad campaign is what I can say with stat’s to back me up.
• greens party is very progressive, sometimes a little to aggressive with that stance.
• there’s the trumpet of patriots who were meant to be Aus MAGA and are just annoying.
• there’s one nation who are basically racists who want white Australia to be strongly enforced again.
• independents will vote with whatever they think is right, but will often align with one party more than the others. They can win seats in government and work with all parties as they want.

TL;DR Most people would probably say the liberals ran a bad campaign, hence they lost badly. Albo is likely a cunt but he’s better than the guy we voted out who wanted to force the country to go with nuclear power, which would start producing energy 10 years after we had a shortage. At least Albo is going to do things with healthcare and affordable living. And if he fails, we’ll vote him out and get someone who will because we aren’t a cult.