Michael Gowenda wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald that Nikki Savaa is known in journalistic circles as not relying on anonymous sources for her examination on any subject she is commenting on. Her sources are named. They speak for themselves.
Savaa is an Australian journalist, author, commentator and former senior adviser to prime minister John Howard and treasurer Peter Costello.
Savaas’ 2025 book EARTHQUAKE: THE ELECTION THAT SHOOK AUSTRALIA is a damning account of the election that shook Australia. The people were stirring, restless, with fear, some hankering for a change in government. History favours the incumbent. There have been no single- tenure government nationally since the interwar years. Following Anthony Albanese’s narrow primary vote and a majority of just two seats, a repeat of that uncertainty for a sitting prime minister, might be politically fatal.
The opponent, Peter Dutton, was leading a united team energised by his referendum success. As the election days counted down, it became clear that “Team Dutton” was running on the fumes of blokey- energy, a risky and unaffordable nuclear power policy, and crazily, higher taxes. When the results were in, the electoral earth moved, all but banishing the Liberal Party from Metropolitan Australia and eliminating Peter Dutton from parliament.
EARTHQUAKE: THE ELECTION THAT SHOOK AUSTRALIA charts the journey to an election result that caught everyone by surprise and its also a journey to the centre-right Trump addled identity crisis. “The party simply did not look, think, speak or act like modern mainstream Australia,” writes Savva. Under her savage, learned commentary, the damning critique grinds and yields like the San Andreas Fault. This was terrain altering goings-on. She further chronicles the failures of the Liberal Party that careened from its enviable position to what could soon make it a historical footnote.
Its a dangerous pathology: a conservative party at war with the modernising community it seeks to represent, particularly women and younger voters, and migrants too. What played into Labor’s hands was Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa-Price, the darling of the hard right, tied the coalition to US president Donald Trump by saying, if elected Dutton would “Make Australia Great Again”. History dictated how that played out.
Savva writes with clarity but also with a discernible regret for the missing moral core of a party that sustained a prominent, if never quite dominant, Liberal tradition. Now, its liberalism survives largely in its name. The first half of the book covers Savva’s newspaper columns, making the book, as one critic said, somewhat contemporaneous and not the product of 20-20 hindsight. Her contempt for political artifice and shapeshifting is writ large.
Even when Dutton was on message, he was off target. Constantly surrendering the initiative was a strange way to run from behind, yet that’s what he set out to do. Core policy announcements were left too late, attracting negative attention for their absence, rather than positive coverage for merits they might of had.
EARTHQUAKE: THE ELECTION THAT SHOOK AUSTRALIA is an important account with insights from a wide range of parliamentary and campaign insiders on both sides of the fence, telling the story via key players on the record.
It should be read as a cautionary tale, for both sides.
Nikki Savaa’s EARTHQUAKE: THE ELECTION THAT SHOOK AUSTRALIA has been published by Scribe Publishing in November 2025.
