Only now, well after the event, has Lucianne.com run an article on the election, but oddly for such a website, which is designed for people like ourselves, they put in an article from Slate. And as you would expect from such a source, it is filled with wailing and lamentations, which makes it all the more pleasurable for that. And also very misleading, since there really is no sense of why Labor lost. Here, read it for yourself before I go in and make a few observations of my own: What the Bloody Hell Just Happened in Australia?. The sub-head is, “A shocking election upset has confused Australians searching for answers”. Actually, not really all that confusing.

Nor have the American readers at Lucianne been confused. I will select a few comments which seem right on the money.

Another Leftist mistaking their agenda as being the same as the will of the people. I’m bone tired of being thought of as some kind of freak for holding traditional values.

The conservatives Trumped the Lefty Collective “dead certainty to win”, just as they did in the USA two years ago and there is no hint of Russian interference. And the lefties everywhere, as they did with the USA, and Clinton’s 95% certainty to win, are blaming the stupid, selfish, narrow minded troglodytes “especially on climate change” electorate. The lefties would have a great time in elections if it were not for the voters and everything was left to Public Polling and the opinions of their own pundits. The Polls got it all wrong because of the way they went about organizing their “samples” relying purely on “mobile phone” contact since the landlines have just about disappeared, and the phone identification system, naturally attracts those likely to respond to “unknown phone” contacts.: i.e. mostly the young, unemployed or out of school/college at the time. That is leaving aside completely how the survey is actually put to the respondent.

Whenever progressives lose, there is a serious fairness problem. When they win, there is no fairness problem. They could’ve been talking about the Trump election and its aftermath. This entire article is a manifesto for progressives: When they win, the stars and planets are aligned and everything went exactly as it should. When they lose, nothing went right, Armageddon is near and the election is somehow tainted.

Rachel, dear, if you’d get out of your leftist bubble once in a while, you would have seen this coming.

Well, Rachel, perhaps your “climate change, marriage equality, religion, and race” agenda is only an “emerging consensus” with media and political elites. Apparently, Australia’s conservative movement isn’t as “dysfunctional” and “unpopular” as you wish it to be. You have to give the devil his due, however. Even when writing an article stating the truth of what happened, the liberal mind is so disordered that it has to convince itself that the reality it is reporting on isn’t a reality. A fascinating and frightening psychological phenomenon.

This partisan hack can’t decide whether the Labor Party’s climate policies are “not that bold” or are “serious”. Here’s how serious they are: Implementation of their climate policy in South Australia resulted in the highest electricity prices in the developed world and black outs and brown outs the year round. To this day they refuse to admit that putting wind and solar in charge of base load power is problematic. No wonder people don’t want them in power.

This is the summation of what the author had written. These are her own words:

Australia’s dysfunctional, unpopular, conservative government (the Liberal and National parties, currently in coalition, sit on the right in Australian politics) held onto power for a third term in Saturday’s national election. This happened despite the fact that most analysts expected it to lose a large number of seats; despite being (seemingly) out of step with the nation’s emerging consensus on climate change, marriage equality, religion, and race; despite a chaotic tenure in office that has seen three leaders since 2016; despite a threadbare policy agenda; despite many of its high-profile figures recently retiring in frustration or anticipation of defeat; despite betting agencies paying out Labor backers early; despite losing more than 50 consecutive opinion polls. After all of it, the conservatives won the only poll that mattered, in what reelected Prime Minister Scott Morrison, an evangelical Christian, called “a miracle.”

So let me explain what happened.

First about those fifty or so opinion polls. Virtually all of them were conducted while Malcolm Turnbull was PM. It took half the election campaign for voters finally to recognise that Malcolm was really gone, that he would not be the PM if they voted Liberal. Helping all this along was Malcolm’s son who became quite prominent in the news pushing Labor. And really, if Turnbull wanted us to vote for the ALP, that was the last thing a lot of people were prepared to do.

Second, although it has played virtually no role in the subsequent analysis, stopping the boats remained a major issue. While the Libs left it almost unmentioned, it was Labor who reminded everyone what they had on their mind, first through the response to the passage of the Medivac Bill which would bring “refugees” into Australia if two doctors stated medical care was needed, and then by the promise of entry for thousands of elderly family-related migrants. After that, the boats would not be far behind, as everyone knew. Who would trust Labor on border protection?

Third, Labor offered nothing other than more freebies. There was nothing in their policy platform that looked like making the economy work. Instead, the promise of higher wages without any prior growth in productivity looked seriously irresponsible. Neither growth nor secure jobs would come from any of it, which anyone with common sense could see.

Fourth, the raiding of retirement savings through messing with franking credits and even negative gearing set off alarm bells across the country. That was what they would tell you they were doing. There was plenty more that might turn up after.

Fifth, of course, was the green agenda which outside a few fanatics and many amongst those too young to vote, had not only no appeal, but spooked quite a few, specially when the notion was raised that 50% of new cars would eventually have to be powered without fossil fuels of any kind. Fantastic nonsense with no practical application outside the inner suburban areas where public transport is at least possible.

Sixth, unions are no longer the force they once were. The Labor Party is the party of the working class or something. Well, Fabian socialism is now oh so twentieth century. The distribution of income does not look all that skewed. There is still “wealth for toil”. No one is starving on the street, and there are jobs for those with skills, talent and a work ethic.

Seventh, socialism is now rightly seen as a scare word once again. The death of the Soviet Union at the start of the 1990s had lulled many into no longer worrying as much as they once did, but no matter how much the media ignored the Venezuelan catastrophe, people do know what has gone on, and it did worry some.

Eighth, Scott Morrison was an appealing candidate. He may not be a spellbinding speaker but he had a sincerity and authenticity that made him more than credible. He was a personal embodiment of the Judeo-Christian ethic in his professed religious beliefs. He came up on the inside because Labor completely underestimated his appeal.

Ninth, migrant communities are becoming more conservative. As they become more Australian, they are just like us as we are becoming more like them. No one thinks twice about continent of origin, or at least not in the way they once might have. We are not a “multicultural” nation. We are becoming unified as a single national polity in which racial origin have less and less to do with our identity. Yet within this, we are a cultural product of Western civilisation, irrespective of one’s own personal background.

Tenth, and possibly the most important, the problem for Labor now is that they no longer have a platform of reform on which to appeal to the community. There is nothing in their historic role of exploiting every complaint with the promise to solve it for you. They have no solutions and no one now looks to Labor to fix anything since few now think they can. Their record is one of damage and harm.