Part of the problem is people - including yourself it seems - not understanding what actually happened.
Virtually all the vaccine mandates in Australia were imposed by state governments (the heaviest ones by socialist state governments) and were opposed by the conservative federal government. Unfortunately because of the way the Australian constitution works, all the power in this case was with the state governments - they have total power and responsibility over matters of public health - and so even though the federal government opposed the mandates, they had no power to stop them.
Unfortunately a lot of people - including a lot of Australians - don't understand this - and so, yes, some people wrongly blamed the conservative federal government for things that were being done by the states.
And, frankly, it didn't help us that sites like Freerepublic were constantly pushing the narrative that Australia as a whole had gone crazy over COVID, when it was really only two Labor governed states where 95% of the stupid crap was happening.
The election though, was mostly about other issues - it is unusual for a government in Australia to win a fourth term unless they are seen as having done a spectacular job.
Australia also didn't ban guns in the 1990s, but that's another argument. There were some overly restrictive gun law changes in the late 1990s and it is certainly true that the conservative Prime Minister of the time, John Howard, pushed for those, but they were nowhere near as restrictive as a lot of Americans seem to believe, and they certainly constitute a ban on guns - at most, a fifth of guns in the community were removed (and it may have been less than that) and many of those were still legal and could have been retained - it was just there was also a generous buyback at the time (quite a few people sold old guns and bought new ones). And again, it was actually the state governments that passed most of the laws - the federal government passed some that tightened laws around the importation of firearms, but again, constitutionally most of the laws were state laws.
Well, my is ass sure red. :=O
As for guns what a heard was, correct me (but spare the whip please!) if I wrong, what I heard was you needed a reason to own one “other than self-defense” and the National Party leader got himself burned in effigy over supporting it.