Mal trashed his party and we got hangover

THERE’S nothing worse than having a throbbing hangover after a party no one really ­enjoyed.

THERE’S nothing worse than having a throbbing hangover after a party no one really ­enjoyed.

Last weekend, the nation woke with a foul taste in its mouth, and a pair of hard-boiled eyeballs that didn’t want to look out on the world. Labor leader Bill Shorten thought it had been a good night because he didn’t lose the car keys, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was walking around SD. In Sydney’s eastern suburbs, that is shorthand for Still Drunk. He had set the date, called the party, at his parents’ home, and he couldn’t recognise the absolute trashing the house had received. Some uninvited guests, from Tasmania and the Western Sydney suburbs, had stolen some valuable chairs, beaten up a few old friends of the family and had scrawled appalling graffiti over the walls. Malcolm couldn’t find the words to say. He had been advised against holding the party in the first place but had insis-ted he was mature enough, that he had grown up since his last attempt to run things had ended in disaster when that awful Tony Abbott had stripped down to his red budgie smugglers in his parents’ bedroom, challenged Malcolm to take him on, and bloodied young Turnbull’s nose with a calculated jab before taking off with all of the merrymakers. Damnit, Malcolm had plotted and planned to make sure he would make Abbott pay, and he did. He wooed those who had followed Abbott, and Abbott, still a bit of a lad at the surf club and in the fire brigade, hadn’t tended to his day job as well as he should have and found himself undermined. Malcolm had managed to pull together another gang, ­attracted by his flash, his sense of arrogance. He was the brightest bloke they knew, as he reminded them. He toppled Tony and while he might have thrown a victory party last September and invited all his new besties, he chose to send out invitations well in advance and let everyone stew for eight weeks before the big night. Unfortunately, he didn’t do the rounds and ensure everyone was still happy about his party, he had never planned such an event but assumed that someone in his gang had (another mistake), and he didn’t really explain why he felt it was so important to hold the bash though he had ­initially promised it was all about showing the thugs from Shorten’s mob that they had to toe the line. And that, readers is why Malcolm came a cropper last Saturday. It requires a particular temperament to run a good party and a good government. As Australia’s experience with the last great Liberal prime minister John Howard demonstrated, you don’t have to crow about being the brightest person in the room, you don’t have to be arrogant, you don’t have to be superior and you don’t have to love the ABC. But you do have to know the Australian people and understand their needs, their fears and their hopes. Turnbull is in many ways the ultimate product of the NSW Liberal division, a stinky inbred outfit of door openers and sweaty-palmed lobbyists which has successfully ­installed candidates in safe Liberal electorates against the wishes of the local party members. State president Trent Zimmerman, who was parachuted into Joe Hockey’s former North Sydney seat where he promptly announced his support for homosexual marriage, was a total non-performer across the division, the largest in Australia. Michael Kroger, running the Liberals’ Victorian division showed what a leader could do. Following Turnbull’s biz-arre election night address (which will remain a reminder of his inability to grapple with reality), he belatedly took ­responsibility for the disaster which included the loss in NSW of Eden–Monaro (6.4 per cent swing to ALP), Lindsay (4.6 per cent swing), Macarthur (12.6 per cent) Macquarie (6.9 per cent), Barton (4.1 per cent), Dobell (5.5 per cent) and Paterson (11.1 per cent). In marginal Labor seats the swings against the Liberal Party were as telling. Parramatta saw a 6 per cent swing to the ALP, in Greenway 3.5 per cent, and in Kingsford Smith 6.3 per cent. The NSW Liberals disaster owed much to the infighting, the ousting of Tony Abbott, to the poorly researched campaign and the lack of agility and nimbleness in the under reaction to the Mediscare ­campaign. Whether the campaign strategy was federal director Tony Nutt’s, or Turnbull’s, Liberal MPs say it was hopeless, unscripted, unplanned with no day-to-day policy announcements to keep it alive. Turnbull worked the campaign on bankers’ hours, he provided the ammunition to his opponents, the GST scare, the attack on superannuation, and the great Mediscare. In his wake, Abbott is entitled to feel somewhat vindica-ted as the far better, indeed, the most formidable campaigner since Howard, having led the Liberals to a dead heat and a smashing victory. Bob Katter’s decision on Thursday to support the ­Coalition “with no great ­enthusiasm” should provide the slender but workable margin Turnbull needed to go to the Governor-General to seek to form government. It’s not a great outcome for the nation. There will now be no building and construction commission, which was the original reason for the double dissolution election. Malcolm smashed his party for nothing.