Strewth: The day after

The wait for Malcolm Turnbull to emerge was a bit longer than it was on election night in 2016 but it was worth it.

The wait for Malcolm Turnbull to emerge was a bit longer than it was on election night in 2016 (possibly because, unlike 2016, he wasn’t being hectored by Alan Jones into getting a wriggle on), but it was worth it. Following the non-success of Trevor Ruthenberg in Longman, Brett Whiteley in Braddon and Georgina Downer falling victim to Mayo nays, the opening question during the PM’s press conference arrived with a certain inevitability: “Prime Minister, you look at these results and it’s difficult to escape the conclusion that you are a lame-duck Prime Minister marching towards defeat sometime in the middle of next year, isn’t it? You are the underdog now?” Not in the slightest, said the PM. It all seemed a very long way from that day way back in the mists of, ooh, July 12 when he had this exchange on ABC Radio Brisbane.

Rebecca Levingston: “So if the Labor voters are about Bill Shorten, are those in the LNP voting for Malcolm Turnbull?”

Turnbull: “Of course … The contest is between me and Bill Shorten as the Prime Minister and the Opposition Leader.”

Paper tiger

At least one of One Nation’s two-dimensional army of cardboard Pauline Hansons in Caboolture came to a sad end on election day, when two ruffians paused to tear off its head and souvenir it. Others just went missing. One Nation candidate Matthew Stephen yesterday attributed these mishaps to (ahem) “secret Pauline lovers”. As he sunnily said yesterday: “A few went walkabout, but I’m sure they’ve found a place in loving homes.”

Speaking of sunny, we once wrote that Christopher Pyne “could be caught in a tornado of excrement and piranhas and still come up smiling”. Tanya Plibersek became the latest to officially recognise this aspect of the Defence Industry Minister’s character when she followed him yesterday on ABC television’s Insiders, though to our regret she worded it differently. Host Barrie Cassidy reiterated Pyne’s point that Labor had done “no more than what oppositions have done for almost 100 years”. Plibersek began to reply. “Christopher Pyne is …” Then she paused briefly — when you’ve laid a foundation as solid as those three words, there is an almost bewildering array of options as to how to build the rest of the sentence. Having perused her options, Plibersek settled on this: “You’ve really got to give him credit, don’t you, for being able to see the glass half full. It was a very Pollyanna-ish performance just then.” Surely this is the moment that marks the true beginning of Pyne-mentum.

The lyin’ king

We offer a small salute to Turnbull’s much cherished phrase “shocking lie”. Was there a harder working pair of words through the campaign? He parked the word “lies” in the vicinity of Shorten’s name in all sorts ways — we had “dreadful lies”, we had “desperate lies” and “outrageous lies”. We had unadorned “lies” by the barrel, we had lies enhanced with “grotesque”. We had the almost baroque splendour of “this base, this extraordinary, outrageous lie”. Yet somehow “shocking lie” — imbued with all the “Mediscare” anger Turnbull has carried with him since the 2016 campaign like echoes of the Big Bang — stood above them all as king. Though ultimately it proved a purely ceremonial figurehead rather than an absolute monarch.

Video stars

Speaking of salutes, we offer one to a whole bunch of special people on social media. On Friday, you’ll recall, Turnbull and Ruthenberg had a slightly bumpy encounter with voters at a pub. It was robust but fun, a welcome burst of real life in what had been an interminably long campaign. Among those there were yours truly and our delightful colleague Rosie Lewis. We both videoed it and between us we captured the argy-bargy in its entirety. Listening back on it, we’re still impressed by how much feeling can be packed into the two syllables of “bullshit”. We posted the videos on Twitter within minutes. Rosie promptly wrote a story for this organ’s website (the electric organ, as we like to think of it), and the video was included. Your humble correspondent wrote a Sketch for Saturday’s paper (we apologise to anyone scarred by the pumice-and-passage mental image). The ABC borrowed the audio from our video for its coverage. Ten ran something on it, as did Fairfax Media, The Daily Telegraph, and so on. So hats off to everyone on Twitter who complained that the dreaded “MSM” (mainstream media) was refusing to report on the incident because we are all trying to protect Turnbull. Extra points to the legions who said it directly in response to the video we had just posted. As Freddie Mercury sang, it’s a kind of magic.

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