A pair of deaf ears either side of an empty space.

Glum, sad, angry, sinking into the slough of despond on this morning after the night before? Well don’t be, because there is much for which to be thankful in last night’s massacre.

As the Coalition casts about in shell-shocked incomprehension for its next for-the-moment leader the pretenders to that hollow crown will talk about reclaiming the centre and rejecting the ‘hard right’ of which they fancifully imagine a discarded milquetoast called Peter Dutton to be an example. They will nod as the pundits pronounce Australia a bastion against Trumpian extremism, and they will swear their fealty to multiculturalism, Net Zero, censorship, upholding Section 18C, and appearing as habitually outnumbered guests to be ritually humiliated on the ABC they have refused to do defund.

The whole piece is well worth reading, even for those whose familiarity with Australian politics is as sketchy as mine.

Never forget it was the Liberals who launched the office of the eSafety Commissioner, who shunned Craig Kelly for speaking bluntly about the climate scam, who took months to decide the Voice was an abomination and joined with Labor to support laws ostensibly aimed at safeguarding children from the nastier bits of the Internet but which will mean in effect that everyone must prove their age and identity if they are to go online. Yes, it would have been preferable if the Coalition had won — preferable as is ringworm over scabies.

Now Labor has three years to do its worst, which it will without a doubt. Think here of Victoria, where the alleged conservatives stand for nothing and fall for anything. Treaty and ‘reparations’ for race-hustlers, tick. Oppose the Covid lockdowns, never. In what is now almost 26 years, the state’s Coalition parties have held power for only four of them — a period in which their only legacy is a memory of the speed with which they were bundled out of office. Premier Jacinta Allan is on the nose, the polls all say, but that disfavour proved no impediment to federal Labor not only retaining seats seen as in jeopardy but, or so it appears, quite likely picking up another one. Victorian Labor, malodorous as it is, treats the opposition with the contempt it richly deserves. When deputy leader David Southwick thinks it a good idea to boast on Twitter that his party’s policies and goals are even more carbonphobic than Labor’s, what you’ve got is a pair of deaf ears either side of an empty space.