Federal election 2016: this looks like a job for good Malcolm

Illustration: Stuart Krygsman

On Saturday night, when it was clear nobody had won the election, when it looked like Bill Shorten had come close to savouring the sweetest victory of all, one senior Labor man was clear about how they had succeeded in chopping off Malcolm Turnbull at the knees.

Labor, he said, (with the ­unions) had made one million phone calls, knocked on a half-million doors, raised more than $1 million through crowd funding, all while the media, particularly the ABC and News Corp Australia, had patronised and scorned Shorten and, above all, underestimated him and the way his messages had resonated with voters.

“The whole new economy mantra that Turnbull goes on about goes down like a lead fart for most people,” he told me, noting that while city folk responded well to talk of innovation and agility, it made others barely clinging to their jobs only more anxious.

This battle-scarred veteran, a close ally of Shorten, reckoned the political establishment could no longer communicate with the public and, if any proof of that was needed, One Nation and the Palmer United Party provided it. He was right about that, and while Labor benefited in an immediate sense on Saturday night, both major parties should rue the Americanisation of Australian politics that fosters grievance and divides people according to class.

He brushed aside the little matter of the Mediscare. He was on a roll, pumped and predicting that Shorten could very well end up as prime minister by the time it was all done and dusted.

That is improbable, but what we do know is Labor’s campaign worked, the lies worked, fear triumphed over hope, Shortenomics worked — the idea that you can have it all and not pay for any of it proved too seductive to resist. But you wouldn’t call it a glorious foundation on which to build a prime ministership.

It is not a good foundation on which to build any kind of leadership, full stop, as Shorten is wont to say, because of what it does to ­political currency and the standing of all politicians.

It may turn ­voters off the other guy, but they sure as hell won’t respect you in the morning.

Shorten was at it again on Tuesday claiming Turnbull was planning a snap election, knowing full well the parliament would first have to meet and confidence in the government be tested. The Governor-General would need to be convinced it was unworkable before he could agree to any dissolution of the lower house — a process that constitutional law expert Anne Twomey says could take at least six months.

Amid the recriminations over the conduct of the Coalition campaign, Liberals insisted the three factors that worked in their favour were, in this order, Malcolm Turnbull, economic management and Shorten. The last explains why Shorten’s colleagues, including Tanya Plibersek, even on Saturday night, stopped short of re-endorsing his leadership, and why Labor’s primary vote hovers around the mid-30s.

Although Turnbull stopped short of saying it outright when he finally accepted responsibility for the result, it is also true that Labor’s campaign would not have worked nearly as well if not for the erosion of trust in politicians, which has worsened under Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and more recently Tony Abbott.

The last lost trust with his 2014 budget, which included the Medicare co-payment and changes to the pension, even though the night before the 2013 election Abbott, unprompted, explicitly had ruled out any cuts to health or pensions.

Labor’s scare campaign was rooted in that, so consider how much more effective it would have been against the architects of that budget, Abbott and his treasurer, Joe Hockey. We got a big clue in the Galaxy poll published the Sunday before the election, which found that if Abbott had remained leader, Labor stood to win 53 to 47: a massacre. Another big clue was the 9 per cent primary swing against Abbott in his own seat.

Surrogates, proxies and delcons spread the word of Abbott throughout the campaign and continue in their mission to destroy Turnbull. Reports that Abbott wanted defence were not plucked from thin air. They were not designed to help Turnbull.

Younger conservatives, who deserve to be promoted and are keen to advance their own careers rather than step down or step aside for Abbott, blamed what they call “Dad’s Army” for propagating the stories. Abbott nudged and winked to friends that he was the inspiration for some of the ­commentary. Were they shocked? Not really.

A return by Abbott to a Turnbull cabinet is untenable. Leaving him out risks making it unstable, but less so if people such as Zed Seselja, Michael Sukkar and Angus Taylor are promoted. They are eminently well equipped to carry the conservative banner forward.

The delcons and delconesses who pumped up Shorten and ran a campaign on super almost as dishonest as Mediscare (spearheaded by Shorten’s first best man John Roskam), will continue their bitter rants regardless.

It is a diabolical situation that will take considerable political skills to manage. The bad Malcolm, who emerged in the early hours of Sunday morning to vent his anger and frustration, cannot do it. Only the good Malcolm, who finally emerged on Tuesday afternoon, can do it, if he is lucky enough to end up with a slim majority or enough seats so that he can cobble together a majority with the help of independents and Nick Xenophon. He has to manage parliament as best he can, salvage as much as he can of his budget and watch his back. If it means agreeing to demands — such as Xenophon’s push for a royal commission into banks — he should do it. He will succeed only if the bad Malcolm dies.

He is not helped by the public dissection of the campaign, not just by his understandably angry colleagues but by the Victorian president, Michael Kroger, who also has been accused of briefing against Liberal MPs, including Kelly O’Dwyer, before, during and after the campaign. Elected politicians are free to vent in public, party officials should not. Kroger rang around Victorian MPs last September to tell them they had to vote for Turnbull. He feared the Liberals could lose at least six seats in the state. They have actually picked up one — Chisholm — and it wasn’t just because of the Country Fire Authority or Kroger’s particular campaign skills, which at various stages threatened to blow up the Coalition. The Malcolm factor plays well in Victoria.

If he wants to survive, Turnbull has to work harder to translate that to other parts of the country. He needs discipline and he needs to heed wise counsel.

Before that, right now, he has to move out of Point Piper and use the Lodge as his base and principal residence from which he can launch sustained “listening” tours around regional Australia, including deep into One Nation territory, when he isn’t holding it together in Canberra.