This is Scott Morrison’s only hope to win the Federal Election, writes Joe Hildebrand

Opinion polls have Labor and Liberal neck-and-neck in the lead up to the Federal Election. But this masterstroke can win it for the Coalition

The election is over. It has already been won and lost. Or has it?

A week from now Bill Shorten will be the Prime Minister of Australia and Scott Morrison will be Opposition Leader.

The result was set in stone when the Liberal Party rolled Malcolm Turnbull just nine months ago. As Lady Bracknell would say, to lose one prime minister is a misfortune. To lose two looks like carelessness.

Besides, nine months might be enough time to produce a fully-formed baby but not enough time to produce a national leader. This is why ScoMo will likely stay on — he still has too much left to prove.

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Scott Morrison’s beaming face, proudly supporting former PM Malcolm Turnbull before he was ousted, has been at the forefront of Labor campaigns. Picture: Kym Smith

For Labor, victory is now assured. Shorten has hardly been inspirational but that was never his style, nor his intention — all he had to do was not screw up and he has easily succeeded in that.

Even if Shorten were to fall under the proverbial bus, Labor’s fortunes would only improve under his more popular presumptive heir Anthony Albanese, the Bob Hawke to his Bill Hayden.

And even without all the somewhat doughy determinants of elections like momentum and sentiment and confidence, there is what John Howard famously described as the cold hard laws of arithmetic that govern politics.

The fact is that even if the government were to hold on to every seat it had, it would still go backwards. Not only is it already in minority government — thanks to losing the Wentworth by-election — but a redistribution has made a further two seats nominally Labor.

On top of this, it is likely to lose between five and eight seats in Victoria.

Even if we assume the lower number, that means the Coalition needs to actively pick up an extra eight seats and not lose a single other one just to scrape over the line.

And it needs to do all of this on a two-party-preferred vote of at best 49 per cent.

This is mathematically impossible and so for Labor, the election is unlosable. As unlosable as the 1993 election was for the Liberals a quarter of a century ago.

The only slight catch is that the Liberals lost.

Scott Morrison was keen to talk numbers as much as possible during the Leaders’ Debates. But the reality is, the odds aren’t really stacked in his favour at this point. Picture: Kym Smith/News Corp Australia

Long before Paul Keating was threatening to lop off the heads of security agencies and pop Australia on a barge to Beijing, he was the most brilliant political strategist of his generation.

Unblessed by his rival Hawke’s natural charisma, Keating cultivated a rare combination of conviction and cunning. When he finally wrested power from Hawke after four full terms of Labor in power — a record achievement — it looked like his only reward would be to steer the Titanic to its inevitable destiny.

But for Keating, the son of a boilermaker who left school at 15, destiny was always something to be forged, not followed.

At the heart of the 1993 campaign was then-opposition leader John Hewson’s “Fightback!” policy, infamously dubbed “the longest suicide note in history”. Because at the heart of Fightback! was a 15 per cent GST.

It was the Liberals’ very own “great big new tax” and while voters hardly liked Labor after ten long years and one long recession, they liked the GST even less.

And it was right in this sweet spot of two competing negatives that Keating swung his killer blow.

The fear was that Australia — always a nation of punters — would try to have an each-way bet. They’d boot Labor out of government in the lower house but rely on the Senate to block the unpopular tax. It was a win-win.

Second guessing such a sentiment would be beyond the ken of the current generation of political plodders — masterminds who knife prime ministers and are then flabbergasted when the ex-leaders go loco — but the wily Keating was always two steps ahead.

Against all conventional wisdom, he realised that the GST was so toxic Labor had only one chance at survival: It would support it.

And so he declared that if Labor lost the election it would not oppose the passage of this new tax through the Senate. It would respect the Coalition’s mandate and wave it through.

Both logically and ideologically it was a hopelessly untenable argument but politically it was a masterstroke. There would be no halfway house for the Australian electorate, a gun was at their head. If they wanted to dodge a 15 per cent price hike on everything they bought, the only way out was to vote Labor.

It was classic Keating as he himself described it: “Downhill, one ski, no poles.”

People said he was crazy and it would never work. History shows who was right.

Paul Keating’s move was all or nothing; but it really paid off. Will the Libs try and do the same? Picture: AAP Image/Darren England

This is now the only option available to Morrison government if it wants to survive, even as a minority.

Given the damning yet deserved disillusionment with the major parties — close to a third of voters will not give their first preference to either of them — the Senate will be its usual basket case.

The only certainty of either Labor or the Coalition getting anything through is if one supports the other.

If the Coalition was to “respect the mandate” of what it calls Labor’s tax hikes — technically the abolition of tax concessions — and say they would wave them through, it could give middle-class retirees and property investors the last minute scare they need to cling to power. It might not be logical, it might not be ideological and it might not even be moral; but it would certainly be powerful.

Still, it is all but certain that they won’t. And maybe they couldn’t, even if they tried.

Because the problem with pulling off a sly political masterstroke is that it only works if you start from a position of trust. It takes a cleanskin to cheat at cards; the known cheat is always stopped at the door.

Ironically, we have a culture so beset by base skulduggery and backflips that there is no political capital to spend on sophisticated skulduggery and backflips.

There is no point threatening something if nobody believes you in the first place.

There is no trust left to betray.

These days daring has been replaced by dirt and flair has been buried by flung mud.

And so the election is over. It has already been won and lost.

And so have our hearts and minds.

— Joe Hildebrand co-hosts Studio 10, 8.30am weekdays, on Network Ten and is editor-at-large for news.com.au. Continue the conversation on Twitter @Joe_Hildebrand