The election post-mortem would reveal that there had been a large miscalculation by the Australian Labor Party, pollsters, and media alike.

This was an unusual time to announce an election, many thought the ongoing Athens Olympic Games gathering most of the public's attention.

Many pundits predicted a tight race with Michelle Grattan stating on the day of the announcement that the campaign would be "an unpredictable and exciting election in which neither leader starts with a decisive break, either could take the prize, and absolutely anything could happen in between".

The Howard government had delivered several budget surpluses and Australian's were enjoying a period of strong economic growth and low unemployment.

[2] The government afforded many tax breaks and concessions to middle-income earners, which despite not being revolutionary policy, bought them favour with large sections of the electorate.

Add to this that the Labor Party had found itself in the political wilderness since 2001, spending much of its time between 2001 and 2004 under Simon Crean who suffered consistently poor polling, and the Howard government looked as though it had a strong grip on power.

Crean resigned to allow Mark Latham to assume the position of leader in 2003 in a contested ballot against Kim Beazley.

The opposition lost ground in the outer suburbs of Sydney, areas which it once considered to be very strong for its vote.

The Liberal Party performed strongly in Victoria recording their best results in the state since the election of 1954 with 43.2% of the primary vote.

Queensland was the poorest state electorally for the Greens, while One Nation also suffered a 5.1% reduction in their primary vote.

[1] The popularity of John Howard as prime minister and the ineffectiveness of Mark Latham as an opposition leader was what ultimately drove the Coalition's electoral success.

The lack of viable alternatives as prime minister in the Coalition government helped consolidate this.

In the Howard government's third term, there had been the widely held view that the economy had been performing well, and economic security had increased.

These economic circumstances were unusual for Australia following a tumultuous decade previously, one which saw a recession occur.

Initially, the country's engagement in a war alongside Britain and the United States was met with outrage in the community.

This wasn't true, the policy ensured that the pool of independent funding remained but was distributed more to low-income schools.

Nevertheless, Latham would be scalded in the media for adopting the policy with Victoria's Herald Sun running an editorial against him stating "Mr Latham's commitments are based on the fallacious, ideologically driven premise that all parents who send their children to so called wealthy schools are themselves rich".

Many in Australia had borrowed heavily at the time to finance their home ownership and were swayed by this line of campaigning by Howard.