The 2010 election was the first in Australia to feature a female prime minister. It came only 24 days after Julia Gillard replaced Kevin Rudd in an unprecedented, overnight deposition of a sitting prime minister. It also produced an unusual result – a hung parliament and two weeks of machinations and deliberations before a minority Labor government was formed. Understandably, the more unusual elements of the campaign attracted most attention but there were still familiar patterns including an important paradox, which is explored in this book.

For those interested in following the campaign, more detailed and constantly updated information was available from multiple news sources. Yet there was also a sense that the election was playing out before an unusually disengaged electorate. On this latter point, the signs were mixed. The percentage of people casting an informal (invalid or blank) vote in 2010 went up, but not all of these were deliberate protest votes. Voter turnout only went down slightly, but this masked a bigger problem – declining voter enrolment. Over a million eligible Australians were missing from the electoral roll.

Of those who did vote, over 80 per cent gave their first preference to one of the major parties. However, a 4 per cent swing to the Greens, their success in winning a lower house seat for the first time, and the role four independents played in determining government encouraged claims that a ‘new politics’ was being forged out of a growing disillusionment with the major parties and ‘business-as-usual’ politics.