2007 Australian federal election
Updated: Wikipedia source
A federal election was held in Australia on 24 November 2007. All 150 seats in the House of Representatives and 40 of the seats in the 76-member Senate were up for election. The election featured a 39-day campaign, with 13.6 million Australians enrolled to vote. The centre-left Australian Labor Party opposition, led by Kevin Rudd and deputy leader Julia Gillard, defeated the incumbent centre-right Coalition government, led by Liberal Party leader and Prime Minister, John Howard, and Nationals leader and Deputy Prime Minister, Mark Vaile, by a landslide. The election marked the end of the 11-year-long Howard-led Liberal–National Coalition government that had been in power since the 1996 election. Howard lost his own seat, becoming the first sitting Australian Prime Minister to lose his seat in nearly 80 years. This election also marked the start of the six-year Rudd–Gillard Labor government. Future Prime Minister Scott Morrison, future opposition leader Bill Shorten, and future Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles entered parliament at this election. This would be the last time the Labor Party would win a majority at the federal level until 2022. This remains the most recent election in which both major parties won over 40% of first preference votes. It would also be the last time the Labor Party was ahead of the Liberal–National Coalition in first preference vote until 2025. Rudd became the third Labor leader after World War II to lead the party to victory from opposition, after Gough Whitlam in 1972, Bob Hawke in 1983, and before most recently Anthony Albanese in 2022. Although the Coalition was defeated, the results in Western Australia bucked the national trend. While there was a swing against the Liberal Party and to the Labor Party, which allowed Labor to gain the seat of Hasluck from the Liberals, the Liberals managed to gain the seats of Cowan and Swan from Labor.