There were many curiosities on election night in 2016, but one stood out. The likely loser of the contest made a victory speech, and the likely winner made the diminished speech of a man who had suffered a profound loss.
Bill Shorten, who had been circled by frenemies from the NSW branch of the Labor party in the final week on the hustings, squared his shoulders as the results tumbled in, and declared the Labor party was back.
“In the past three years we have united as a party. In the past eight weeks we have run a magnificent campaign. We have argued for our positive plans and, three years after the Liberals came to power in a landslide, they have lost their mandate,” Shorten told the party faithful assembled at the Moonee Ponds racecourse.
Back in Sydney, Malcolm Turnbull took hours to appear. The frustrations of his campaign brains trust spilled over when the party’s pollster Mark Textor upbraided the electoral commission on social media for counting too slowly. “It’s 2016 FFS, AEC!”
Radio host Alan Jones, looking serene in the Seven Network studios, full of the self-satisfied righteousness of the seer, adjusted his cufflinks and looked down the barrel of the camera and told the prime minister, holed up in his Sydney harbourside mansion, to come out and face the music.
The Queensland Liberal James McGrath, a Turnbull confidant, told Jones that Turnbull would come out, of course he would, but he was just waiting for a briefing on the postal votes. Jones sneered winningly and gazed off into the middle distance.
When the prime minister finally appeared at the Sofitel after midnight, he looked like a man in shock. He hectored and brayed at the podium as if he had found himself unwittingly at some local council boilover.
The result had everything to do with Labor’s dreadful lies and nothing to do with mulish voters stuck in the old economy not buying the mantra of exciting times that could be made more exciting if only corporates paid less tax.
For much of the campaign, in public forums, Turnbull had lacked the art of small talk in mixed company.
At the first leaders’ debate in Rooty Hill, western Sydney, Turnbull had worn a bemused expression when voters asked questions that weren’t entirely logical. He looked like a person who, inexplicably, had washed up in a foreign land, where people’s observations weren’t linear.
Early on Sunday morning, Malcolm Turnbull looked out to the Australian electorate and expressed his own profound alienation from the lived experiences of the losers of globalisation – the people who had flocked to Nick Xenophon and Pauline Hanson and to Labor on the basis that the ALP had climbed down partially from the neoliberal pedestal constructed by Bob Hawke and Paul Keating.
Voters needed to understand the reality that the winners of globalisation always insist they accept, Turnbull said, fists clenched, in a hotel ballroom on the other side of midnight. They needed to take their lumps. “The circumstances of Australia cannot be changed by a lying campaign from the Labor party,” Turnbull said.
“The challenges, the fact that we live in times of rapid economic change, of enormous opportunity, enormous challenges, a time when we need to be innovative, when we need to be competitive, when we need to be able to seize those opportunities – those times are there.”
