Let the Left’s soul searching begin

For over half the nation there was nothing shocking about Scott Morrison’s election victory. But if you ask some Australians, what transpired over the weekend marks the end of the world as we know it, writes Caroline Marcus.

The mass unhinging of the Left following Scott Morrison’s shock victory on Saturday night points to the inevitable conclusion Australia is having its own Trump/Brexit moment.

Indeed, the signs first emerged during the campaign when now outgoing Opposition Leader Bill Shorten did his best to channel Hillary Clinton’s election-losing “basket of deplorables”.

Shorten dismissed voters’ legitimate questions about the cost of his climate policies as “dumb” and sceptics as “knuckle draggers” and “cave dwellers”.

Lefties have taken to social media to vent their anger over the federal election result.

Even his would-be treasurer Chris Bowen got in on the act, arrogantly telling Australians anxious about Labor’s retirees tax: “if you don’t like our policies, don’t vote for us.”

They simply did as they were told.

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The unreliability of the opinion polls also invites obvious comparisons to the 2016 US presidential election and the Brexit vote of the same year.

The four biggest pollsters have now launched major reviews of their systems, which predicted Labor beating the Coalition 51 to 49 per cent on two-party preferred terms, while the reality was the exact reverse.

Just like with silent Trump voters and Brexiteers, “shy Tories” in Australia were reluctant to admit to pollsters which way they really planned to vote.

Can anyone blame them, when publicly declaring oneself a conservative is tantamount in some circles to confessing to having Nazi sympathies?

But it is the wide-scale hysteria among progressives to the weekend’s result that so amusingly parallels what transpired in the US and Britain.

After a brutal scare campaign at the hands of Labor, voters did what they were told to do. Picture: AAP/Joel Carrett

RELATED: Why opinion polls didn’t predict Scott Morrison’s shock victory

Back in 2016, the surprise results overseas led to demands for a redo in Britain (best of three, anyone?), an end to the electoral college system in the US, refusals to accept either outcome as the will of the people and vicious attacks on both those who had voted against political correctness and democracy itself.

In Australia in 2019, the response hasn’t been much more civilised.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison celebrated his win with former Prime Minister John Howard. Picture: Adam Taylor

On the Guardian website, Brigid Delaney — the same columnist who blamed Donald Trump for stopping going to the gym and no longer being able to open jars — wrote of a Shorten “victory party” where people were openly sobbing as if “some trauma had taken place.”

“It’s not Morrison, it’s not the Liberals, it’s not the policies, it’s not Queensland, it’s not Dutton. It’s the country that’s rotten,” Delaney wrote describing the mood of many of the event’s attendees, including one who called out, “It’s not you Bill, it’s the country.”

Incredulously, she added that younger volunteers believed Labor lost because the campaign “did not go hard enough to the left”.

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Morrison will be PM forever, won’t he?

If Twitter was any measure whatsoever of how mainstream Australians really think, Shorten would have romped home in such a massive landslide that the Coalition would have been all but obliterated.

To those on Twitter, a Shorten win was all but guaranteed. Picture: Scott Barbour/Getty

So the mood on there over the weekend was something akin to a wake crossed with a children’s cancer ward.

Author and columnist Jane Caro tweeted, “Well, Australia may be f***ed and the whole planet not far behind”, adding that “I wish I was a New Zealander.”

Caro then complained when she got a “barrage” of messages from people offering her a free lift to the airport.

It would seem New Zealand is to Australia what Canada is to the US, with liberal-minded celebrities there issuing sadly empty threats to cross the border following Trump’s success.

After her profanity-laced rant, Caro then penned a Sydney Morning Herald piece imploring the Prime Minister to lead by demonstrating how we can disagree with “civility and generosity of spirit.”

RELATED: Morrison leads Coalition to ‘miracle’ election victory

The hypocrisy is staggering.

Yet there was no shortage of famous names lining up to indulge in similar hyperbole.

Meantime, ABC radio broadcaster Philip Adams tweeted: “In an act of collective madness Australia has given its malevolent, ignorant and corrupt version of the Trump administration a third term.”

Ultimately, those grieving the Left’s loss will have some serious soul-searching to do. Picture: Tracey Nearmy/Getty

Indigenous actor and another ABC regular, Nakkiah Lui, wrote, “New Queensland tourism slogan: beautiful one day, sending Australia into a hellscape of xenophobia, sexism, populist cruelty and environmental disaster as this country disappears into the water and destroys itself.”

And Australian billionaire and Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes had some helpful advice for similarly depressed followers: “It’s going to be ok. Be sad, hug your families, decompress, step outside. How does one process and think about it?”

RELATED: How Australia fell in love with Jenny Morrison during election

Of course, the frenzied reaction to Scott Morrison’s election was only offset by the unbridled joy to former prime minister Tony Abbott’s defeat by independent Zali Steggall, a woman who has vowed to be a “climate change leader” despite driving a gas-guzzler and not even bothering to install solar panels on her own home.

ABC darling Benjamin Law tweeted a GIF directed at Abbott saying, “Bye bitch”.

While the ABC’s Four Corners had even pre-commissioned an investigative report for Monday night called “Abbott’s End”, so optimistic was the taxpayer-funded broadcaster about the 25-year political veteran’s downfall.

Ultimately, those grieving the Left’s loss will have some serious soul-searching to do, to work out why most of Australia refuses to buy into their divisive claptrap.

Caroline Marcus is a journalist with Sky News. @carolinemarcus

Update: This article has been revised to clarify that it was some Labor supporters, not Brigid Delaney, who characterised the country as rotten.