Federal Election 2019: Defeat, surrender and Labor’s epic failure, Mark Kenny writes

Grief, humiliation, and in short order, recrimination — it’s the feelings of the Labor Party on the Sunday after the horrors of the night before, writes Mark Kenny.

• HOW IT HAPPENED: Scott Morrison wins back power
• THE MORNING AFTER: Morrison’s fight just beginning
• LABOR IN CHAOS: Albanese puts hand up for leadership

The Labor Party is lost. Courage is dead. Hope, gone. And vision? It left the tent during the storm mumbling, “I may be some time”.

A crushing pall of averageness hangs over the nation.

Given a choice between complicated somethings and a simpler nothing, voters scurried for the latter, figuring, at least it’s familiar.

That’s what the morning after feels like to Labor’s true believers after their leaders bungled a historic opportunity, managing somehow to lose the unlosable election.

Grief, humiliation, and in short order, recrimination.

As one senior loyalist remarked late Saturday night, “now, all these years later — what is it, 26 years — now I know how the Libs felt that night in 1993 after their (John) Hewson Fightback debacle, Christ!”

The historical symmetry was not lost on Peter Dutton who turned Paul Keating’s immortal words back leftward, labelling his result in Dickson on Saturday, “the sweetest victory of all”.

So much for driving a stake through Dutton’s “dark political heart” as Keating had colourfully urged on voters.

For those on the winning side, and even for the vast swath of voters in the middle who don’t much care who’s in charge as long as they are reassuring and seem competent, election 2019 is done and dusted, no harm done, business as usual.

Bill Shorten, flanked by his wife Chloe Shorten concedes defeat. Picture: Scott Barbour/Getty Images

Scott Morrison’s “miracle” victory was just that.

The accidental prime minister of just eight months standing — his riven party’s third choice after the war between Malcolm Turnbull and Dutton — is an instant Liberal legend.

Morrison, deserves enormous credit.

His campaign was, like the advertising man he is, perfectly tailored for his niche market, needling away at seniors, investors, small businesses.

Morrison ran it almost single-handedly, reducing complex multi-layered policy considerations to simple ideas like “Bill’s bill” and “Shorten’s retiree tax” (or “death tax” in one disreputable TV ad) while also making the election a trust and popularity contest between himself and Shorten.

Labor paraded its highly credentialed team, its senior women, its undoubted ministerial experience.

Morrison, like the obsessed assassin played by Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, refused to engage, insisting this was personal, between him and Little Bill.

Meanwhile, the intelligentsia wallowing in what we now know was dubious poll data, swapped “conventional wisdoms” about the inevitable effects of leadership turmoil, policy paralysis, and the Coalition’s grinding social conservatism that was so out of step with the electorate.

Morrison ploughed on becoming, for example, the first PM to visit Tasmania on election day since Joe Lyons in the 1930s. This was a fully Labor state.

Not any more, after the two northern jewels of Bass and Braddon turned blue.

The day before, he’d visited Labor-held Longman in Queensland — hardly the act of a besieged leader in sandbagging mode. It fell too.

Labor gains in Western Sydney, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, and WA, all failed to materialise, while the losses feared did occur.

With a primary vote nationally of just 34 per cent, Labor has been thrashed — it was an epic fail.

Now it looks to the future amid talk that big ideas will never again be tried — least not from opposition.

Defeat, and surrender too.

Originally published as Federal Election 2019: Defeat, surrender and Labor’s epic failure, Mark Kenny writes