This is nothing short of a catastrophic result for Peter Dutton and the Liberal Party.
Having been reduced last year to its lowest parliamentary representation since 1946, the party has made history again by becoming the first opposition to hand over a seat at a by-election in more than 100 years.
There is no way to spin this result.
It’s a disaster for the Liberal Party, a re-endorsement of Anthony Albanese and a confirmation of Labor’s destructive ability to personalise political campaigns which the Liberal Party appears to have no capacity to defend.
On the back of the NSW election loss, the Liberal Party is now a party in crisis.
And this may not be ground zero.
The two neighbouring seats of Deakin and Menzies, both held by the Liberal Party on margins of less than one per cent, have just become key target seats for Labor at the next general election.
The odds of an early election by the end of next year has just become shorter.
And Dutton’s leadership will now surely come under scrutiny. It can’t not.
But the leader is only one of multiple problems.
There is enough disaster to go around in this result, including the complete dysfunction of the Victorian division.
The decision to deny a rank and file preselection, parachuting in a candidate, was clearly a factor.
As was its behavior this past week over the Moira Deeming controversy.
It’s now an open question as to whether the Liberal Party can hold any metropolitan seat in Melbourne, the country’s second biggest city.
This result will send shudders down the spines of suburban and regional Liberal MPs.
Forget about Teal contests.
Labor hasn’t held Aston since 1990. And it has only held the seat for six years since its creation in 1984.
The gradual redrawing of its boundaries over three decades have pushed it further to Melbourne’s suburban fringes.
It is a classic mortgage belt seat that should have been fertile ground for a cost of living campaign.
But the size of the swings in some of the booths has sent a clear message to the Liberal Party that it is speaking to an increasingly narrowing base in a state where it now holds only two metropolitan seats.
This was the first constructive road test of Labor’s longer term strategy; to portray Dutton as a destructive and divisive, oppositional figure.
It ran a deeply personal and negative campaign against Dutton.
It worked.
But this isn’t the worst of it.
The low voter turnout would have been expected to work in the Liberals favour, with younger voters the most unlikely to show, considering many may not have known a by-election was on.
Instead it has gone against them. More likely, it was conservative voters, driven by apathy and indifference that failed to turn up.
This was not an outcome senior Liberals were ever contemplating, and certainly not fearing.
Anthony Albanese now has an extra buffer on Labor’s parliamentary numbers, going to 78 seats. This is useful but largely unremarkable.
But for the Liberal Party, this is now another seat it must try and win back at a general election.
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