Australia's left-leaning Prime Minister Anthony Albanese basked Sunday in his landslide election win, promising a "disciplined, orderly" government to confront cost-of-living pain and tariff turmoil.
Residents clapped as the 62-year-old and his fiancee Jodie Haydon visited his old inner Sydney haunt, Cafe Italia, surrounded by a crowd of jostling photographers and TV journalists.
Albanese's Labor Party is on course to win at least 82 seats in the 150-member parliament, partial results showed.
Opposition leader Peter Dutton's conservative Liberal-National coalition had just 36 seats, and other parties 12. Another 20 seats were still in doubt.
"We will be a disciplined, orderly government in our second term," Albanese said.
"We've been given a great honour of serving the Australian people, and we don't take it for granted, and we'll work hard each and every day," he said.
Dutton, a hard-nosed former policeman — who critics tagged "Trump-lite" for policies that included slashing the civil service — endured the rare humiliation of losing his own seat.
'One for the ages'
US President Donald Trump's trade tariffs, and the chaos they unleashed, may not have been the biggest factor in the Labor Party victory — but analysts said they helped.
"If we want to understand why a good chunk of the electorate has changed across the election campaign over the last couple of months, I think that's the biggest thing," said Henry Maher, a politics lecturer at the University of Sydney.
"In times of instability, we expect people to go back to a kind of steady incumbent."
The scale of Albanese's win took his own party by surprise.
"It's still sinking in," Treasurer Jim Chalmers said.
"This was beyond even our most optimistic expectations. It was a history-making night. It was one for the ages," Chalmers told national broadcaster ABC.
But the win came with "healthy helpings of humility", he said, because under-pressure Australians want "stability in uncertain times".
Albanese has promised to embrace renewable energy, cut taxes, tackle a worsening housing crisis, and pour money into a creaking healthcare system.
Dutton wanted to slash immigration, crack down on crime and ditch a longstanding ban on nuclear power.
