Comment

Politics shouldn’t be like this in Australia. We have a vision of the democratic process being joyful – of democracy sausages and primary school bake sales – but we’re on the edge, in some respects. We must do better to protect the process, to protect candidates and to protect voters.

Ley has one definite thing going for her: she is not Peter Dutton … A Labor campaign strategy document produced for Dutton’s seat of Dickson listed his negatives in the electorate, with No. 1 being he was not liked.

Surely this is the end, the rock bottom drunks talk about at their first meeting. For more than 20 years, the Liberal Party has staggered further and further from the political centre, stopping occasionally to bicker with gays or yell at the weather that it isn’t real.

Flyers were distributed by a neo-Nazi group in Melbourne electorates with significant numbers of Jews, including in Macnamara – the most ‘Jewish’ electorate in Victoria, held by the Jewish MP Josh Burns. Posters of Burns were defaced with red stars painted across his face.

Nations should know who they are. That’s at the heart of our compact … Dutton tilted at an Australia he did not understand. We are a practical not philosophical people, suspicious of government fiat but not of each other.

The same old questions are asked again – ‘how can the Liberal Party rebuild?’ It’s hard to know where to start. The answers are: by addressing their economic policy vacuum; their anti-women, pro-nuclear, anti-renewables, anti-equality stances; their negative and divisive culture wars. None of this is likely to happen soon. Better to turn our focus to harnessing the power of the community independents.

Colleagues have no doubt the prime minister has seared into his brain the ephemeral nature of success and the need to continue showing the same focus and discipline that has seen Labor deliver a similar drubbing to the opposition as the one meted out by Howard in ’96 and Tony Abbott in 2013.

Dutton built his leadership on a revamp of the Abbott–Credlin disaster, pursuing negativity and divisiveness on every issue and seeking to undermine the credibility of Albanese and his government.

One of the great disappointments of our election campaign has been the failure to focus more explicitly and substantively on the adequacy of our defence … If we are to take today’s threats to national security seriously, we should be having a robust public debate on defence. This opportunity has been lost.

Earlier in the day, Kevin Rudd spent time in a paddock feeding sheep. Politics is rarely subtle. That afternoon, he sat opposite Rove McManus and waited to be asked who he would turn gay for. There are some who see this as the moment campaigning changed in Australia, the point at which the trivial overtook all else and elections were emptied of meaning. It was November 18, 2007.