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There are reasons aplenty why Labor flushed its chances on May 18, but these strike us as the most telling.
11. Bob Brown’s motor convoy from Tasmania to the Galilee Basin in April to protest the Adani mine
Rural Queensland locals were hostile, organising their own counter-protests and denying the convoy accommodation and food. They resented southern blow-ins telling them what they should do. Coalition Resources Minister Matt Canavan summed up the outcome: “I want to thank Bob Brown for getting us all together. He’s done an excellent job of combining and uniting the whole Central Queensland community in favour of jobs.”
10. Shorten’s offer to public broadcasters of massive bribes to guarantee their support
$40 million cash upfront to the ABC and $20 million extra to SBS, plus an $84 million waiver of the Coalition’s indexation pause. This was not lost on audiences, especially after ABC News responded with ingratiating coverage of Labor proposals, plus an hour-long session with Tony Jones and a tame audience on Q&A. Shorten used the appearance to try to show what a tough guy he could be by responding to some of Jones’s questions with transparently feigned irritation.
9. The shredding of Israel Folau’s $4 million rugby contract for quoting the Bible’s disapproval of homosexuality
A demonstration that the raging ideological war against religion by the “progressive” political class would spare no dissenters. Shorten used what seemed, to everyone outside radical LGBT circles, an appalling injustice as a bid to wedge Morrison for not joining the rabble. “I cannot believe that the Prime Minister has not immediately said that gay people will not go to hell,” Shorten volunteered at a press conference, even though most of Australia’s rugby fans, and most Australian Christians, were on Folau’s side.
8. The Tasmanian Parliament’s decision in April to drop the sex of babies from birth certificates
This reminded voters how far the gender-fluidity movement has penetrated social policy. The Australian Christian Lobby pointed out that Labor’s policy platform endorsed the Yogyakarta Principles on human rights law, meaning LGBT content in all school sex-education classes must stress and accept all sexualities and gender “identities”. It also seeks to remove exemptions to discrimination law that currently allow religious schools to teach traditional sexual ethics, and to ban government funding from sporting bodies that differentiate between men and women on the basis of biology, rather than gender “identity”.
7. Clive Palmer
While it appears the extraordinary sums expended in pursuit of seats – $70 million by some estimates – have failed to produce even a single one, not all that money went to a pointless end. Palmer consoled himself thus:
The goal for the United Australia Party was to ensure the Labor Government did not get into power, introducing more than $1 trillion of new taxes.
As cow pox prevents smallpox, so might we celebrate the noxious entity behind the United Australia Party for boosting the electorate’s resistance to the far greater national ailment of Prime Minister Shorten & Co.
6. The birth of royal baby Archie to Meghan and Prince Harry on May 6
Once again displaying his tin ear and tactless timing, Shorten promised to hold a plebiscite aimed at making Australia a republic. This was despite the fact that support for republicanism has all but died since the two princes, William and Harry, came of age, married and started families, giving incalculable public support to Australia remaining as it is — a completely independent, liberal and democratic Commonwealth, with the Crown as sovereign. The measure of republicanism’s decline is its leadership, a middle-aged clown with a red pirate’s scarf on his head, and its refusal to recognise that its outdated slogan, “An Australian for a head of state”, has long been fulfilled by the existing head of state, the Governor-General,
5. As a slogan, “Real action on climate change” turned out to be a loser
Except for the state capitals’ inner-cities and the Sydney seat of Warringah, where a multi-million dollar and legally dubious campaign by the overseas-funded activist group GetUp! succeeded in ousting Tony Abbott, the catastrophist rallying cry fell on indifferent ears. Buoyed by (unreliable) polling research, Shorten then went a step further and, off the top of his head, announced that by 2030 he would make sure half the cars on Australian roads were electric. As soon became apparent, he had no idea of the time, expense, and infrastructure required to recharge these vehicles. He came undone even more badly when pressed how his target to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 45 per cent by 2030 would be realised, and at what cost. Rather than information, he answered with a rhetorical question: “How can you discuss the cost of real action on climate change without also discussing the cost of doing nothing.” This was no match for the effort by former head of the Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics, Brian Fisher, who calculated that Shorten’s plan would see at least 167,000 jobs lost and up to $264 billion wiped from the economy by 2030.
4. The children’s climate marches
Parents send their kids to school for an education, yet television audiences saw Labor figures and their Greens allies encouraging children to play the wag and clog the streets while, in some cases as the cameras rolled, shedding anguished tears for what youngsters are being taught is a diseased and dying planet. As a further indication that the chalk-dusted stewards of young minds aren’t delivering what might be expected in return for all those billions in Gonski dollars, there were thickets of often obscene signs directed at the prime minister and all who dispute that climate doom will be upon us by Tuesday.
3. Taking the politics of social division as his key to The Lodge, Shorten set out to divide voters by age
His brainwave would support the young by punishing the old. Someone should have told Shorten that, since the “baby boomer” generation was now moving into retirement, there would be a corresponding boom in the ranks of elderly Australians. Between the 2011 and 2016 censuses, Australians 65-and-over increased by no less than 664,500, considerably more than the population of Tasmania. Shorten’s tax plans would have substantially reduced the retirement incomes of half of them. If they didn’t like it, his shadow treasurer Chris Bowen said, they could take their votes somewhere else. They did.
2. His revival of once-dormant class warfare
This was embodied, to cite but one example, by the 100,000 unionists and supporters who brought Melbourne’s CBD to a standstill on April 10 with an ACTU show of strength. Disrupting traffic and forcing cancellations of tram and train services, the protestors marched through the city centre to Parliament House where they were addressed by Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews and three federal Labor MPs. Shorten’s election platform included giving unions much more say in wage determinations and agreements. Late in the campaign he intensified his attack on retirees, property investors, big business and the wealthy. In his final public speech, he made a bid to lock in Labor’s traditional working class supporters by targeting “vested interests” and “the big end of town”. This ignored the fact that many workers now perceive union leaders as members of both groups, thanks to the rivers of gold flowing into industry superannuation funds that have turned union bosses into multi-millionaires.
1. Shorten’s most divisive trump card: women
While he believed his espousal of women’s interests would give him the winning hand, it was actually his biggest mistake. Whenever possible, Shorten tried to wedge Morrison on the status of women in politics, especially in the Liberal Party. Then, in his one-on-one interview on ABC’s Q&A, he made a big play about how much he owed to his mother, claiming she forewent a lustrous legal career for financial reasons and was obliged by need and society’s sexist stereotyping to become a humble teacher. The story was meant to be taken as one of cruelly thwarted ambition and human potential. If listeners deduced Ann Shorten was also a single mum, rather than the spouse of an unmentioned marine engineer who managed Melbourne’s largest drydock, the aspiring prime minister didn’t set them straight.
She had wanted to do law when she was 17. She didn’t get that chance. She raised kids. At 50, she backed herself. She discovered in her mid-50s that sometimes, you’re just too old, and you shouldn’t be too old, but she discovered the discrimination against older women. My mum would want me to say to older women in Australia that just because you’ve got grey hair, just because you didn’t go to a special private school, just because you don’t go to the right clubs, just because you’re not part of some back-slapping boy’s club, doesn’t mean you should give up.
Two days later, Anna Caldwell of Sydney’s Daily Telegraph called him out for not mentioning that his mother became a barrister in her 50s, after a twenty-five year career as an academic at Monash University, where she gained a PhD and rose to senior lecturer in education. Shorten thought he could milk this piece of Murdoch media “filth” for all it was worth. At a press conference two days later he staged the most dramatic act of the campaign. Fighting back tears, he called the Telegraph story a “new low” in the campaign, playing “gotcha shit” with his mother’s life story.
Shorten’s obvious aim was to appeal to women electors, which he probably did. But he was just as likely to have lost more men – that is, more heteronormative men – than he gained from this act. The great majority of men love their mothers, but they can talk about them without resort to tears, especially when fronting a camera. Shorten’s reaction looked stagey, even rehearsed. It would have lost him the respect of a great many men he might otherwise have kept onside. Politicians attracted to gender-identity tactics should remember a simple fact: those with XY chromosomes vote too.
Clive Palmer May well have vaccinated Australia against the deadly Labor/Green pox, but I think it is smallpox rather than chicken pox that cow pox prevents.
You are quite right, DT. That error on my part has been fixed.
Trump, Brexit, Italy, Brazil, Farage, Canada – the PC warriors just don’t get it, do they? They are a fringe who stole the limelight for far too long, but their time has passed as real people can see the effects of their games and the Orwellian, totalitarian future they envisage for the ‘little people’.
https://morningmail.org/agenda-destroy-australia/
In light of the 2019 election result. let’s see if Morrison can now do the necessary seven ‘sins’:
1. Gut the ABC and sell of 90% of it.
2. Cut immigration and DISCRIMINATE on who we allow to come here.
3. Cull al grants, projects, studies and subsidies to everything involving the toxic term “Climate Change”
4. Cancel Snowy 2.0 as a total waste of time and build either a coal-fired power station (or a nuclear one)
5. Cancel the Clownfish Class of ‘Pyne-Box submarines as HMAS Cane Toad (the first off the slipway in about a century from now) will be toxic to all dumb enough to sail in her – once.
6. Revamp Defence by sacking every weepy warrior with pink fingernails, high heels and a conscience about killing our enemies. Cancel the F-35
7. Rebuild Australian manufacturing and determine those strategic industries we MUST have (including oil refining)
and two bonus actions:
8. Pass a law that makes all who obtain court injunctions to delay, stop or prevent the development of ‘strategic assets’ totally accountable for the costs of lost businesses
9. Build nuclear reactors in every state (on federal property)
That should cause enough rage among the woke to guarantee three more terms in government
The people (Deplorables) got it wrong.
They must be dismissed and a new peoples appointed immediately.
[Bertolt Brecht … and now the ABC]
Love what en passant says – he is especially right about Defence.
Thought on Adani:
The election results in Queensland delivered a strong verdict on the Adani mine. Queensland voters are smarter than many of their affluent city cousins. In the endless comment on Adani, one point has been ignored. The market for its coal is India rather than China. Our overseas trade is far too dependent on one customer, namely China. As a matter of commercial prudence, it will be good to diversify and increase India’s share. Geopolitical tensions make this even more desirable. Coal burn is determined by the number of coal power stations not the number of coal mines. India is building coal stations galore.
The practice of strewing obstacles in Adani’s path should now end so this project (and others) can stride ahead.
I think you have missed the point. The reason for Labor’s failure was the extreme economic policies aimed at ushering in an era of hard left socialism, redistribution of income and socialisation of wages. These were wisely rejected by the Australian electorate.
That’s all fair enough, but another reason not noticed except in Bill Leak’s cartoons a while back is that Bill Shorten has a slightly asymmetrical face. On TV it creates a bad subliminal effect.
Palmer has significant coal and iron ore investments. I reckon he’ll get a good return on the $50-80m spent trying to keep Labor out.
Reminds me of the Tip O’Neill comment. ‘All politics is local’. Sure there are intervening issues as QED cites but in the end its jobs and personal security. I suspect Bowen’s kind invitation not ‘ to vote for us’ resonated with those not keen on either arrogance or authoritarianism.
Andrew Bolt reports that someone called Jane Caro has tweeted that those of us who voted ‘to turn backwards’ are ‘truculent turds’. That’s a badge I’d wear with pride!
I cannot know how many read them, or whether they had any effect, but just days before the election, both The Australian and Herald Sun had on-line articles on the revisiting of the Shorten/Kathy Sherriff issue, but both were shortly after taken down – “404 Unfortunately the page you’re looking for is not here”.
.
Peter Faris, former head of the National Crime Authority is a formidable lawyer to have in your corner – interesting to see what eventuates.
I guess it’s too much to expect that this whinge-addicted periodical could ever acknowledge that Morrison WON the election because he achieved the seemingly impossible – within a few months he had settled the Coalition factions and restored the conservative base. No, it was all Labor’s doing.
The fact is that Morrisson wouldn’t have WON the election if he hadn’t rebuilt the Party, no matter how stupid Labor was. Give credit where it’s due for once.
There are always many reasons but the two major reasons the Coalition was re-elected were:
Clive Palmer’s dirty and expensive campaign against Labor and
the Coalition’s dirty, name-calling and fear-mongering campaign against Labor including the invention of Labor policies which did not exist, i.e. lies.
Australia lost on election day because the Liberals laid the foundation for campaigns without policies, sourced in slagging the opponent and encouraging fear in the public. The saddest thing of all is how well it worked. Doesn’t say much for the country.
We will see Governments without the guts to implement policies and campaigns with colourless people playing it safe and no policies beyond promises of tax cuts, along with lots of fear-mongering and slagging of opponents. What a brave new world.
However, pgang, we should also remember Napoleon’s wise advice: “Never interrupt your enemy whilst he is making an error.”
The Coalition did run a well-controlled campaign in which there were no glaring blunders, undisciplined off-the-cuff statements by candidates or revelations of political insouciance.
By contrast, the ALP campaign was riddled with the kinds of errors (at least eleven) listed. And the Coalition did not interrupt them once. 🙂
rosross, I disagree.
The current level of government interference in the affairs of the populace requires substantial pruning. I would dare to say even wholesale hacking away at the tentacles of intrusion. It is time to return government expenditure levels to below 20% of GDP and preferably to somewhere near 15%.
It is the heavy hand of government that drags the nation down.
I loved this comment from “Jonno”
.
When people get shouted down for their views, they don’t change them, they just keep quiet. And then they vote.
talldad, yes, Labor were terrible and the Coalition campaign wasn’t terrible (nor was it brilliant). But Labor could still have won if Morrison hadn’t led a Party that was considered electable.
His work in resurrecting the un-electable Coalition in what was effectively zero time was a monumental achievement that the left-leaning media and defeatist conservatives seem unable to acknowledge. The campaign was only a part of the story. The real story was what went on before.
‘Australian and Herald Sun had on-line articles on the revisiting of the Shorten/Kathy Sherriff issue, but both were shortly after taken down – “404 Unfortunately the page you’re looking for is not here”.’
A wise and fair move.
He is innocent unless proven guilty.
Evidence has to be present and tested.
If the same saga inflicted on Pell is repeated,our body politic will have a fatal wound and the chance for the innocent to go free will be lost to any accusation.
I too love the Jonno comment. Must remember for the future.
As for “fear mongering”, well Labor were experts on that one – remember Medicare 2016?
However, we were afraid, very afraid.
a) Tax hikes well over $300 billion,
b) Insulting SMSF retirees by classing them as “big end of town” and taking franking credits from them while exempting union run superfund.
c) Massive spending on renewables that are not reliable. Selling us the line that they have a plan but not telling us the plan. It was a bit like “I’ll build you a home, don’t know how much it will cost but don’t worry, I’ll let you know when its finished.”
d) Closing down our major export earner.
Yes we were fearful, fearful for our futures, our children’s future , the economy and our nation’s future.
” rosross
There are always many reasons but the two major reasons the Coalition was re-elected were:
Clive Palmer’s dirty and expensive campaign against Labor and
the Coalition’s dirty, name-calling and fear-mongering campaign against Labor including the invention of Labor policies which did not exist, i.e. lies.”
Well I guess you made a fortune backing the return of the Coalition. After all, these factors were presumably obvious before polling day.
Lewis P Buckingham – you’re missing the point. Kathy Sherriff hasn’t been allowed to present her case in court, and it’s much stronger than the one against Pell.
Dear Winston No I heard exactly what the barrister, who is so carefull he does not want to run the case, said in his interview on 2GB.
Interpolating his view, with the #meto movement women are now more likely to be believed when they make these allegations. The reason the case was rejected was because it was unlikely to succeed, but now, with the Pell case, the police investigated and prosecuted anyway. She is a good witness and has uncovered more witnesses.
My view is that this is all allegation and should not see the light of day unless first tested by the Office of Public Prosecutions.
We only have an opinion that the witnesses are available or the plaintiff cogent.
It was wise not to run this in an election campaign.
Look what happened in Malaysia.
The suggestion was that as the Pell case succeeded[so far], this one should be prosecuted as well.
My point is that if ‘success’ in the Pell case is used as a plank to pursue prosecution, no one is safe.
It is a dangerous precedent.
Turned on the ABC to see if I can last out watching Q&A, even with Jones and Joyce making it the best panel I’ve read of. Banner on screen reading “ABC predicts Coalition majority of 77 seats”. Do they even have basic literacy?
45 minutes to go before it starts and I’ve carried on celebrations all day – think I’ll sleep and watch a podcast tomorrow.
I sat down this afternoon before reading this article in the evening and jotted down some reasons why Labor lost and I scored 4 out of the 11 mentioned in the above article. These were class warfare, trying to wedge Morrison on religion, the schoolies’ protests and Bob Brown. I thought the birth of the royal baby was going a bit too far as having an impact, but I had some other moments which I thought were pivotal points in making up people’s minds. They were 1.the little girl sobbing convulsively at the prospect of the world ending in 12 years time (disgusting brain washing by people who should know better) – akin to child abuse. 2, The inability of the shadow foreign minister to shake hands with an opposing Parliamentary colleague following a debate. How on earth could she exercise diplomacy with some of the characters she would be bound to meet if she became Foreign Minister – collapse in tears? Irrespective of Julie Bishop’s views on climate change and choice of shoes, she was a competent and effective Foreign Minister. 3. Bill Shorten refusing to tell us the cost of the ALP’s high renewable target, let alone how to achieve it at the same time as closing down power stations. 4. Bill Shorten fence sitting on the Adani mine – possibly yes in Queensland – a decided no in Victoria – like the Marx brother’s classic – I have principles . If you don’t like those ones, I have others. 5. Non-gender applications to the Public Service for employment (you’ve gotta be kidding). 6. Immigration of retired parents of young migrants – visits yes but full migration – no. 6. Dramatic changes to our way of life, particularly for those in retirement or planning for retirement. 7. Bad and anti-social behaviour of GetUp and Green supporters, like trying to egg the PM or foul defacements of Tony Abbott’s election posters. This sort of anti-social behavior is associated in the minds of mainstream voters with people suffering brain damage from abuse of methamphetamine and/or other illicit drugs. And how naïve was that mob of inner city trendies and veganistas going up to Queensland with Bob Brown to attack Adani? The Coalition should send a thank-you note to GetUp and Bob Brown for their assistance in getting them elected. What a bunch of no-hopers are those clowns, if they could not see the backlash against their infantile behavior, but I am glad they couldn’t.
Another thing that struck me as perhaps not being as coincidental as it seems was the massive pre-election propaganda effort to promote climate change. First we had the school children taking to the streets, then we had Britain declaring a “Climate Emergency”, followed the media report that the ACT government had also declared a “Climate Emergency” and an item on ABC News showing that the Torres Strait Islands were being inundated by the sea. But the icing on the pre-election cake was the visit of the UN Secretary-General to New Zealand to praise them about their wonderful efforts in combatting climate change (inference that Oz was not doing its bit), followed by a meeting with Pacific Island leaders, some of whom diplomatically hinted to SBS and ABC questioners that Oz could do more. Despite this apparently well co-ordinated big gun fusillade Australians were not intimidated and voted as they saw it. Finally, en passant – your 9 suggestions are excellent and should the incoming government act on them the Coalition would get in at the next election – well, perhaps 8 suggestions – I don’t have a problem with Snowy 2 – the Austrians have been doing that type of electricity generation for decades , and it works.
lloveday – any articles that are missing you may be able to find on the wayback machine: https://archive.org/web/ if you think an article is important, it’s worth saving on wayback manually, just to be sure.
The reactions from the smarter lefties to the LNP win on Saturday now seems fairly settled into various strands.
1) Despite continual re-iteration during the campaign that it was a “climate change” election, the election loss has caused that assertion to start disappearing down the forgettery. “Climate change” cannot be abandoned, it’s a Pwecious. So that piece of hypocrisy lives on, like Frankenstein.
2) The proposed tax increases, specifically targetted to groups the ALP correctly believes do not vote for them, are fully justified (as the leftie rationalisation goes) but should not have been detailed as policy before the election. As Kohler, Richardson and many other smuggies have insisted, one should just lie.
Given these quite predictable rationalisations, one may hope that Bowen is chosen as Opposition Leader because he is now quite unelectable, although Albanese would give him a run for that. Neither now have any credibility in these areas.
Morrison’s government will also continue to flounder here, although one suspects less exaggeratedly. Postponing deterioration does give Mr. Micawber time.
labor lost because Australians can see a phony from a long distance. That and the wholesale contempt for ordinary Australians from inner-urban, ideologically-addled idiots. Morrison is the everyman for whom they show utter and complete contempt. I always used the image in our family of the arm covered in Aerogard going into the glass contained and the mosquitoes catapulting into a frenzy. We’ve shortened this to, “the arm with the Aerogard”. This is the modern Left and Morrison and ordinary Australians are the protected arm of that commercial. The Left has gone frantic and feral because they couldn’t get YOU and ME to pay for their grand schemes, cushioning their virtue-signalling and further making these oligarchs for more comfortable about who they are and whom they mix with.
The ‘fibro politics’ of the past is dead and buried and I think Mark Latham is the most articulate on this and other points. My sadness is the social division, hatred and resentment the Left carries all the time – particularly its megaphone enablers of the ABC. Remember Ellen Fanning on that panel the night after the election, “welcome to YOOZ all”. Slinging off at Queensland has become de rigueur. Are these our new ‘nice and compassionate’ people? As Dr. Peterson says, ‘these people use the veneer of compassion, which only thinly disguises hatred’.
ianl: it is the people of Australia themselves who are ‘postponing deterioration’ (Micawber style). It is their expectations and demands which will bankrupt this country.
whitelaughter,
.
Thanks for the leg-up!
Still incapable of content on AGW is our Jody. Arm waving, finger-wagging … Such a Pwecious.
Ho hum.
Even David Karoly has stopped cherry picking data (at least for flood/drought analysis):
https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S221209471930009X?token=ADD95011AA77D38F40D2EF4D985254EE0B63B6E1EBB11DBD848618C1126F305CB27EFEB7C21252D5CDC2E296EECC4B83
Honest analysis of almost 180 years of Australian rainfall data has shown that the overwhelming factor in flood/drought cycles is ENSO (Nino/Nina). Near off-shore analyses of sediments from drill cores (Peru/Argentina/Q’ld) date ENSO as occurring for at least the last 11,000 years.
About 50% of Greenland glaciers are either static or growing with a general trend of cooling:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018AGUFM.C21B1319W
It’s impossible to become rationally worried about the trivial effect of 405ppmv CO2 in the atmosphere. I’m concerned eg. about the destruction of Indonesian rain forest for palm oil plantations (I’ve seen this first hand) but I know the Indonesians regard this as highly valued export earnings.
It’s irrational hysteria, uninformed by detail, that’s been clobbered in this election result – and so, the wagons are circled yet again, with previous rash statements such as “It’s a climate change election” pushed into the forgettery.
ianl: I’m not interested in AGW. And if you don’t think it’s the Australian people squandering national prosperity through exponential increases in debt and the “I can have it all” mentality then you’re obviously not going to be the one affect. With the emphatic “the one”!!
Cut the climate crap and build the Bradfield scheme drought proofing Australia? A practical centre right conservative application, nothing less.
I have friends who are Labor voters – rusted on. They cannot bring themselves to utter the word “Coalition”. They believe in “fairness” – which means ME giving the government money (they’re all mostly on generous defined benefits SUPER sans any risk whatsoever) and them being the beneficiaries. We are mightily relieved we will not lose our franking credits and, as a friend observed today, the “retiree tax” worked spectacularly well because people who were not affected were terrified that they might be!!!
These voting-Labor friends are mostly all retired public servants and I gather they’re not as well off as my husband and myself. Prudent investing, risk-taking and very hard work (24/7 for 23 years in our own business) is our back-story and I’m not about to hand our assets to any bloody government no matter how ‘fair’ those who are less well off think it is. I have to avoid having my blood boil so I refuse to discuss politics with any of them – relatives includes. The very hide of those resentful of what one has EXPECTING it to be handed to those who are regarded as more ‘deserving’. It’s great to have friends on the same page and this more than compensates for the urban socialists!!
You forgot the biggest reason – His policies were a national economic suicide note. Middle Australia woke up just in time. Maybe you lost of 11 drew their attention to the impending disaster.