Comment

It’s like this. I speak to a friend who went through the hard times of Nauru. He is a refugee. For several years he has been in Australia. He can work but he has few other rights. He does not have a permanent visa. He does not know what will happen to him next.

In many ways, the economy is a poisoned chalice for the incoming Labor government. So much for the Coalition’s boast of being ‘better economic managers’ – perhaps they were just better economic manipulators.

Albanese brings to the job the enormous authority of leading the party out of the wilderness after almost a decade. Over the past three years there were plenty of wellwishers but also plenty of doubters. Albanese’s ‘come from behind, kicking with the wind in the fourth quarter’ strategy was a worry.

Although the Labor Party has now secured the required majority to govern, Anthony Albanese is far from having won the electorate’s hearts and minds. This will take time. Moral injury does not go away with a change of leader; this kind of injury must be addressed by truth-telling, justice and reconciliation.

After such a decisive election outcome, soul-searching about what happened and why is only natural. One of the most conspicuous failures in the campaign was the role played by the media – they certainly tried to undermine our democracy.

There has been an earthquake in Australian parliamentary democracy, which has checked the dominance of the two major parties and demonstrated two-thirds of the country were hungry for change.

The phrase was coined by a volunteer for Sophie Scamps in Mackellar, but it was just as fitting in Kooyong or Goldstein or anywhere else that people were experiencing the optimism and satisfaction of engaging for the first time in a political campaign. The phrase was ‘active hope’.

The government Scott Morrison leads has achieved less in three terms than perhaps any other in Australian history. What it has accomplished has largely made the country worse.

Now that election day has finally arrived, it’s reasonable to ask: How much better informed are voters to make their choice? The campaign has certainly been neither a contest of policy ideas, nor of visions for our country’s path ahead.

Expectations of a Labor victory today have been trimmed dramatically. Far from the landslide many were increasingly confident of just a week ago, forming a minority government is now widely seen as the best they can expect.