Australia Just Voted Against Fascism — And the World Heard Us.

From Australia to the world: your fight is our fight too.

Ric and I campaigning for Monique Ryan in Kooyong on Saturday afternoon. As of writing this, we do not know if she will be victorious. Waiting hopefully and impatiently!

Something extraordinary happened in Australia on Saturday night.

We didn’t just vote in a federal election, we voted against fascism. Against fear. Against the cruelty that’s been eroding democracies around the world.

We voted for women’s rights. For climate action. For Indigenous justice. For compassion. For refugees. For hope.

And the world noticed.

I shared a spontaneous, heart-felt note on Substack the morning after the landslide results rolled in just hours after polling booths closed on Saturday night. It was full of elation and relief — and to my astonishment, it went viral. As I write this, it’s received 33K likes, 1.9K replies and 1.9K restacks. How? I have no idea.

Here’s that note if you missed it.

Slowly, I’ve been reading and liking the comments. The outpouring of love and support that followed absolutely blew me away. Messages from Canada, the UK, the US, Ireland, New Zealand and all across Europe — all cheering us on. All of you seeing what we hoped this moment could mean. Not just for us, but for everyone living under governments that see empathy as weakness, nature as a mere resource and humans as utterly dispensable.

So first, thank you. From the bottom of my heart. We heard you, and we felt your solidarity. And I want you to know: this win was for you, too.

It wasn’t just a win for Anthony Albanese and the Labor Party (though yes, it was a landslide and we’re dancing in the streets). This was a loud, proud, unambiguous rejection of authoritarian politics. Of culture wars. Of the rolling back of hard-won rights.

We voted not to return to a government that turned its back on women, refugees, First Nations people and the climate crisis. We voted to stop normalising the politics of cruelty. Sure, Labor are not perfect and there’s many decisions they’ve made that I don’t support, but they were the only option for a brighter, more hopeful and democratic future.

And in a twist of poetic justice, we also voted out Peter Dutton, the hard-right Liberal Party leader who lost his seat to Ali France, a brilliant progressive woman who ran for the third time after more personal battles any woman should have to endure. Yes, that Peter Dutton, the man who once joked about Pacific Island nations “going under” due to rising sea levels. The man who vilified asylum seekers and our Traditional Owners. Gone.

👉 Here’s a beautiful story of his defeat.

Let me pause to explain something for my non-Aussie readers, because this gets confusing:

In Australia, the “Liberal” Party is not liberal.
They’re conservative — think Republicans in the US, or Tories in the UK. The Labor Party (note the American spelling, for complicated reasons that date back over a century) is our centre-left party. So if you were scratching your head thinking, “Why are Australians cheering a Labor win and booing the Liberals?” Now you know.

And this moment? It’s bigger than us. This election wasn’t just a change of government. It was a vote for our world and a message that we will not succumb under regressive hellscapes. We will not let rights be stripped away without a fight. We will not let cruelty become the status quo.

So to those in the US where women’s rights and climate action are on the chopping block, we see you. To those in the UK wondering where the soul of your country has gone, we feel it too. To every woman everywhere who’s tired of shouting just to be heard, this was for us all.

Australia stood up. And we’re just getting started.

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