Kristina Keneally is an ALP pol who was making a switch from the Senate to House of Reps. She was a senior party figure, former Minister. Despite ALP winning the election, she lost her seat. As mentioned, there was a swing against both major parties. The ALP's primary vote (31.9%) is the lowest on record for a winning government - even less than their losing result from the last election (down 1.4% - LNP down 6%), but Keneally's loss to an independent was still a shock.

Keneally: The most important factor was COVID and its impacts ... Fowler had the harshest and longest lockdowns in the state, supported by both Liberal and Labor, and there was an understandable sense of anger at both major parties, with people reacting with “a pox on both your houses”.

Those harsh lockdowns engendered an understandable sense of parochialism that the community had been left behind by both major political parties. And I genuinely believe that whether the Labor Party ran me or anyone else in Fowler, they would have encountered the same set of challenges.

The anger about lockdowns and vaccine mandates seemed out of kilter to what I’d seen in the rest of the country. .. And I had one or two nasty encounters, during pre-polling, where I started to think this is not going the way we expected it. But I kept getting reassurance that everything was fine.

Keneally is a veteran politician, known to be smart. Her perspective has credibility. The crazy thing is that the above issues were not raised once during the entire campaign by either major party or any journalist.

How can "the most important factor" be blanked out as an election issue? Sounds impossible, but it happened. Must be one of those "common-good" deals that the higher-ups work out in advance.

After the election was safely over, however, it's been raised a few times. Always as a reason for ALP victory. Dan Andrews (state - this was a fed election), the most risible man on earth, crowed it was a rousing endorsement of his world-record authoritarian response to Covid re lockdowns/vaccine enforcement.

That's rubbish of course. If it was such a vote-winner, why was it never once raised as an election issue? Keneally's take is much closer to the truth. Without the media's complicity, we would have seen an even more dramatic drop-off in support for either major party.