2001 Australian federal election
election
A federal election was held in Australia on 10 November 2001. All 150 seats in the House of Representatives and 40 seats in the 76-member Senate were up for election. The incumbent Liberal Party of Australia led by Prime Minister of Australia John Howard and coalition partner the National Party of Australia led by John Anderson defeated the opposition Australian Labor Party led by Kim Beazley. As of 2024, this was the most recent election to feature a rematch of both major party leaders.
Future Opposition Leaders Peter Dutton and Sussan Ley entered parliament at this election.
Background
Throughout much of 2001, the Coalition had been trailing Labor in opinion polls, thanks to dissatisfaction with the government's economic reform programme and high petrol prices. The opposition Australian Labor Party had won a majority of the two-party-preferred vote at the previous election and had won a series of state and territory elections. Labor also recorded positive swings in two by-elections, taking the Queensland seat of Ryan and coming close in Aston.
However following the September 11 attacks, and the Children Overboard and Tampa affairs, Polls swung strongly toward the coalition after the "Tampa" controversy but before the 11 September attacks.
In fact, voter concern with terrorism in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks in the United States was noted, with the rise in the combined primary votes of the major parties
from 79.61% at the previous election in 1998, to 81.17% at this election.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “2001 Australian federal election” as election. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as election. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q679653. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2001, 2024 and 1998.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “2001 Australian federal election” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.