Jeez, Morrison hasn’t learnt a thing from this going by his talk tonight. Sounded like an evangelical preacher and just went on about all the great things they were going to achieve. Mate, stop drinking the bathwater or the swing in May is going to be as spectacular.
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Read this this morning. That’s spit your coffee out funny.
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Just tuned in to this. Might have to finish the bottle of red now after all. ROFL
Can’t recall him saying what he was going to achieve, other than going to work on Monday.
Maybe he thinks that’s an achievement, given recent events
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Haha. Eat sh*t.
The Wentworth byelection isn’t just a loss for the Liberals. It’s a disaster
Katharine Murphy
6-7 minutes
Let’s not sugar coat this, the outcome in the Wentworth byelection is a disaster for the Liberals. Counting isn’t over yet, but the anti-government swing in this contest will be north of 20%, which is the biggest swing ever recorded against a government at a byelection.
It is a repudiation. A repudiation of a chaotic period in government characterised by self-obsession and self-harm. A repudiation of the party’s lurch to the right, and the hollowing out of the sensible centre.
A repudiation of amoral plots, schemes, coups, and seat-of-the-pants bullshit – a howl of frustration from voters, from the most well-heeled to the couch surfers, about the endless weasel words from their disconnected, half-deranged politicians – a group with scant respect for facts and evidence, intermittent competence and no plan in evidence to address the problems the country faces.
20 October 2018 is a clarion repudiation of Punch and Judy politics, of a sideshow signifying nothing, conducted at taxpayer expense. The good people of Wentworth have stood up as a job lot, grabbed politics-as-usual by the lapels, leaned into its smug face, and screamed get stuffed you absolute morons.
And who can blame them? It’s the only thing to be said. It is the only, intelligent, honest response to what goes on in Canberra these days.
Funnily enough, Kerryn Phelps can thank Alan Jones for her victory in Wentworth. When Jones created a storm a few weeks back by advocating advertising a horse race on the Opera House, it created a focal point for outrage that helped galvanise her people-power insurgency in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. A rolling display of government incompetence, and desperation, over the final fortnight of the campaign, did the rest – a live laboratory experiment of events inspired to depress Dave Sharma’s primary vote.
Phelps didn’t need to submit a brief of evidence that politics-as-usual, and the toxic media chorus intent on making corrosion a business model, is intent on debasing itself in the middle of the public square; it did that all for itself, and at the most convenient time possible.
Phelps just had to be Not That, and have the emotional intelligence to be something more, something as simple and as powerful as a force for good in public service, someone who could focus on the things that matter to people, someone connected enough to know what those things might be.
As a medical doctor, Phelps could diagnose the ailing polity of being in need of critical care, and propose herself as being the person qualified to provide it, and having been invited to do so, Wentworth called the ambulance.
Scott Morrison was completely tin-eared in his response to the revolution of Saturday night. Chin up he said, it’s all a bit wonky, sure, but we’ll smash those Labor bastards until the last, until the bell rings. Hurrah said his fist-pumping supporters in Double Bay – the last partisans in the village.
The people outside the Intercontinental had just voted against crude partisanship, and talking-point pugnaciousness, and the endless fighting about nothing, and embraced something else, embraced anything but that.
Unless Morrison regains consciousness quickly and works out that’s what’s happening – that the Australian people are increasingly intent on taking politics into their own hands, and reshaping it – then the swing we saw on Saturday night won’t be the last of his humiliations. It will just be the beginning.
The rise of the independents isn’t just a problem for the Liberals. Representatives connected to their communities, with a will to serve them, can take seats away from Labor too, and from the Nationals. This is a major party problem, not just an affliction confined to a government that has forgotten how to be competent.
There’s an earthquake going on in Australian politics. So far it’s just a rumble, but if the incumbents don’t hear the rumble, and start to change things up, make no mistake: the rumble will become a roar.
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I came to this thread to pick up pointers on the appropriate language and humor to use IF the Democrats win the US Congress in 2-weeks.
Mission accomplished!
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At this stage I’d say it’s odds on to do something stupid.
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Just the vague “today was bad. Tomorrow will be glorious” type garbage.
Suggest getting John Birmingham to cover it.
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Ignorance plus Arrogance, … the age old Liberal Quinella.
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49.25% to 50.75%, a difference of 1092 votes, 73.55% counted.
Called it too early? This is starting to look close.
Well that’s put a dampener on my morning…
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I’m hoping that’s the final numbers. AEC website isn’t the easiest to interpret.
Postal votes were going at 64% to the Libs.
Suggested that there are some errors in counting (if true should give Phelps a bit more margin).
Stable Government TM
Gives all the power to the various fringe right wingers. Yay.
I’m assuming postal votes were also counted last night, because otherwise it would be getting too close too call given the major parties’ money does well there.
EDIT: er, what barry_day said.
EDIT 2: pre-polling (“PPVC”???) and postal votes are included, see:
https://tallyroom.aec.gov.au/HouseDivisionPage-22844-152.htm
EDIT 3: from that page, most of the postal votes are counted - 1266 to go.
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So on the run rate seen, Phelps should hang on.
No mention on Insiders until the very end, Van Onsolen mentioned it, but it was kinda roundly dismissed as, “That’s on the AEC site”, … as if it was again rather unreliable.
Nothing about it being close in any media.
If anyone would, it would be SkewsCorp, and the latest from that lot, is this, …
Horrified shudder runs through Liberals after Kerryn Phelps win
Malcolm Farr@farrm51
4-5 minutes
THE great shudder running through the Liberal Party today is not just because it has lost a seat it had owned for 117 years.
It is also because of the realisation it now is stuck with a prime minister, right through to the next general election, who contributed to that loss.
The Liberals’ humiliation in Wentworth was caused by both the departure of Malcolm Turnbull and the arrival of Scott Morrison. And as a consequence Mr Morrison has to deal with the uncertainty of a hung Parliament and the unending burden of a still-divided Coalition.
The Wentworth disease, in varying strengths, is sure to spread to Liberals in other electorates.
It’s not his fault entirely.
A handful of vigorously self-burnished egos in the Liberal Party believed the government was heading to ruin in the next election. So they kicked out Malcolm Turnbull and confirmed their ruination forecast.
Prime Minister Morrison last night made a crass comparison between the courageous survivors in the Invictus Games and the battered Liberals of Wentworth.
“Tonight I had the great privilege to be joining those — and I don’t want to make a political point out about this — at the Invictus Games. But Invictus is all about the indomitable spirit. That’s what it’s about. And we pay tribute to all of those who were there this evening and will contest over the next week,” he said.
“But you know, we’ve got an indomitable spirit in this party.”
The difference of course is the servicemen and women were wounded by the enemy; the Liberals’ wounds were self-inflicted.
Related: Kerryn Phelps beats Dave Sharma for Malcolm Turnbull’s seat
Related: Liberal Party’s tactical blunder with Dave Sharma
Related: Malcolm Turnbull haunts Liberals
Still, Scott Morrison must carry substantial responsibility for the shellacking in Wentworth, and this is supported by a ReachTEL poll of 847 Wentworth voters late in August.
The residents were asked how they would vote in the then-hypothetical situation of Mr Turnbull quitting and provoking a by-election. Just over 43 per cent said Liberal and 25 per cent Labor, the remainder split among Greens, One Nation and “others”.
The question, an incidental part of a survey on policy commissioned by the CFMEU, was asked on August 23. The next day Mr Turnbull stood aside and Mr Morrison won the leadership ballot against Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton.
The following eight weeks radically changed that projected vote.
An accumulation of self-generated Liberal instability and policy controversy since August 24 — plus the emergence of a high-profile independent in Kerryn Phelps — made sure the by-election was going to see the party smashed in what had been a political heartland.
And the magnitude of the Wentworth swing yesterday further indicates more than just a yearning for Turnbull was involved. The August 23 opinion poll put the Liberals gaining 57 per cent of the two party preferred vote. Last night the Liberals’ 2PP share was around 48 per cent. In the 2016 election it was 67.75 per cent.
In further bad news for the Government, the election of Kerryn Phelps was a victory for Labor’s third-candidate strategy. The ALP was never going to win Wentworth, but it could make sure a strong independent did. Expect Labor to again back independents in safe Coalition seats next federal election, to be called some time before next May.
The objective won’t be to burden a potential Labor government with a big cross bench but to harness the disenchantment with major parties to reduce Coalition numbers.
And that general election won’t come early, despite Labor’s insistence the Wentworth result means one is needed now to impose political stability.
Mr Morrison won’t be keen and should be able to operate without the government’s previous one-seat majority. Wentworth has made sure he won’t want the possibility of another soul-shredding election count.
And it is hugely unlikely new chum MP Dr Phelps will want to fight another election so soon. It is hard to see her backing a no-confidence motion unless something much greater than political convenience is concerned.
— Mal Farr is news.com.au’s National Political Editor. Continue the conversation on Twitter @farrm51