📊 Australian Federal Election 2025: A Data-Driven Story

Exploring Trends, Margins, and the National Shift

“Ala Naga Venkata Manikumar”
RMIT University | Student ID: s4150722

29 October 2025

What This Story Answers

The 2025 Australian Federal Election marked a decisive victory for the Labor Party.

This story explores how and where that triumph unfolded — visualising state-wise swings, flipped divisions, and the overall national trends that shaped the result.

Data & Definitions

Data is sourced directly from the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) official open datasets for the 2025 Federal Election.

Key terms:

First preferences: Primary votes each party received.
Two-candidate-preferred (TCP): Compares the top two candidates in each seat.
Two-party-preferred (TPP): Aggregates Labor vs Coalition across states.

These results are visualised to explain the story behind the numbers.

Load Data

The following datasets are loaded from the official Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) portal.

we can see one of the data set below:

## # A tibble: 6 × 11
##   Party      NSW   VIC   QLD    WA    SA   TAS   ACT    NT National LastElection
##   <chr>    <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>    <dbl> <chr>       
## 1 Austral…    28    27    12    11     7     4     3     2       94 77          
## 2 Liberal      6     6     0     4     2     0     0     0       18 27          
## 3 Liberal…     0     0    16     0     0     0     0     0       16 21          
## 4 The Nat…     6     3     0     0     0     0     0     0        9 10          
## 5 Country…     0     0     0     0     0     0     0     0        0 0           
## 6 The Gre…     0     0     1     0     0     0     0     0        1 4

All five CSVs were downloaded from the AEC’s open data portal and cleaned for analysis. They include party-level results, state swings, and division-level preferences, forming the foundation of this visual storytelling project.

National picture (seats per party, 2025)

This chart shows total seats won by each party in the 2025 election. Labor dominates nationally, securing a strong majority. Liberals and Nationals trail behind, while Greens and Independents maintain smaller but meaningful representation.

Seats that changed hands

This chart highlights all divisions that changed party control in 2025. Most flips favoured Labor, especially across Victoria and New South Wales. Urban areas drove much of the swing, while regional seats mostly remained stable.

Labor two-party-preferred (TPP) by state — 2025

Labor’s two-party-preferred (TPP) vote share was highest in Victoria and New South Wales, confirming strong urban support. Queensland remained more competitive, and Western Australia showed moderate improvement for Labor.

First-preference vote share by party — 2025 Election

Labor received the highest share of first-preference votes, ahead of the Liberals. Minor parties such as the Greens and Independents held steady, showing consistent voter bases. Preference flows later amplified Labor’s margin in the final TPP count.

Closest two-candidate-preferred contests — 2025 Election

These were the most closely contested divisions in the 2025 election. Many tight races were between Labor and Liberal candidates. Winning these marginal seats played a key role in Labor’s overall victory.

What this means

Metro momentum: Labor’s success came from strong swings in metropolitan seats and steady results in regional areas.

Rural resilience: The Coalition held many rural divisions but could not offset losses in the cities.

Long-run signal: The 2025 outcome extends a clear trend toward city-based progressive voting patterns, with margins tightening in a handful of competitive outer-metro seats.

National Summary & Key Insights

PartyNm	Flipped_Seats_Gained
Seat gains from flips — 2025 Australian Federal Election
Number of divisions that changed hands to each party
Australian Labor Party	17
Independent	2
Liberal	1

Interpretation: This table shows the number of divisions that changed hands and the party that gained them. It complements the national picture and marginal-seat analysis by highlighting where momentum shifted in 2025.

References

Data Sources

Australian Electoral Commission. (2025). Federal Election 2025 results datasets.
https://results.aec.gov.au/

Packages Used

Wickham, H., François, R., Henry, L., & Müller, K. (2023). dplyr: A grammar of data manipulation (Version 1.1.4) [R package]. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=dplyr
Wickham, H. (2016). ggplot2: Elegant graphics for data analysis. Springer-Verlag New York. https://ggplot2.tidyverse.org
Xie, Y. (2023). knitr: A general-purpose package for dynamic report generation in R (Version 1.46) [R package]. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=knitr
Allaire, J. J., & Xie, Y. (2024). rmarkdown: Dynamic documents for R (Version 2.27) [R package]. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=rmarkdown
Chang, W. (2024). shiny: Web application framework for R (Version 1.9.1) [R package]. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=shiny

Acknowledgement

Data visualisation and storytelling techniques applied in this work are based on best practices from the MATH2237/MATH2270 – Data Visualisation and Communication course at RMIT University.