I read Bulldozed by Niki Savva in 2022. That book, by the Australian journalist, dissected the 2022 Australian Federal Election which proved to be a landslide for the Australian Labor Party who swept into government with an absolute majority in the Lower House. see https://timsbestreads.blogspot.com/p/bulldozed-by-niki-savva.html.
Three years later and Labor won again, with an even bigger margin.
Here's how Scribe publications described the book.
Labor’s landslide victory on 3 May 2025 wreaked havoc across the political landscape. It triggered ministerial assassinations, trashed reputations, destroyed careers, fractured the Coalition, and threatened to fracture it again. It took the Liberal Party to the brink of extinction and turned Anthony Albanese into a Labor hero.
When the Coalition government was overthrown in 2022 after nine years in office, it was tempting to portray the loss as merely a personal repudiation of Scott Morrison. Then, when opposition leader Peter Dutton torpedoed the referendum on establishing an Indigenous Voice to parliament, his standing as a political leader improved and the prime minister’s nosedived. That was when, according to Niki Savva, the conservative Coalition thought it had the upcoming election in the bag.
But Niki had noticed the ground shifting: the emergence of the teal independents and the long-term threat they represented to the Liberals; the false dawn of Dutton saying no to the Voice referendum; and the overlooked reality, even back in August 2023, that, ‘The 2022 federal election result was no ordinary defeat … It delivered last rites to the broad-church party that Robert Menzies created.’
In her highly popular columns, Niki Savva captured all this and more in her typically uncompromising, penetrating, and prescient way. Now, following on from So Greek, The Road to Ruin, Plots and Prayers, and Bulldozed, she also provides a detailed, considered analysis of what went on behind the scenes, accompanied by her trademark access to important players and eyewitnesses, of an election that transformed Australian politics.
The first half of the book is a regurgitation of her weekly newspaper columns from The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald over the 3 years leading up to the election. The second half of the book is her analysis of Australia’s epoch-making 2025 election.
This structure, however, does not make for a good book. So many of the major talking points and significant milestones are discussed in both the first half and the second half and some of them get discussed even more.
The first half of the book should have been cut entirely, because the analysis section in the latter half of the book simply revisits the same events and repeats the same arguments. The analysis itself often reads like an overlong Savva column, stretched to 200 pages instead of 800 words. Key points recur, and major events are described several times. The book might have worked as a collection of columns or as a focused analysis of the election. By trying to be both, it manages to be neither.
I think this Goodreads review summarises my feeling towards the book
Overall, it's better than nothing. There's a good book here somewhere, but it's about half the length and probably more in the format of Mark Distefano's Shorten/Turnbull campaign diary. As it is, this is a particularly poor effort from one of the few people in Australia who's political writing I tend to enjoy. Hopefully whatever she puts out next is better, because this is far beneath her usual output.
So for me, its only 2.5 stars out of 5.
