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How Tony Abbott Won the 2016 Election

Given this is on the internet, I’m going to assume most of you are Lefties, and are sobbing over the fact that your unimaginable worst case scenario happened: Tony Abbott won a second term as Prime Minister.

Images by Ben Thomson

Dear voting public of Australia,

How are you enjoying 2016 thus far? It’s been quite a ride. First the Google Glass Contact Lenses blinded all of America’s early adopters, then Dennis Rodman was deposed as glorious leader of North Korea. If John Kerry hadn’t managed to broker an unexpected peace deal between the Irish and the Palestinians, the whole year would have been a write-off.

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Given this is on the internet, I’m going to assume most of you are Lefties, and are sobbing into your brand name wheat-bicked cereal over the fact that your unimaginable worst case scenario happened: Tony Abbott won a second term as Prime Minister.

You’re more blindsided than you were in 2013. None of you really thought he’d win then either, but at least the signs were more obvious: Abbott, then-opposition leader, had made a variety of promises, some of which sounded good on paper even though none of them would be kept; the press all seemed to be pushing for Abbott’s inauguration months before the election day had been set; the Australian Medical Journal had announced that, following Labor’s epic in-fighting and perpetual bungling, voting for them was now considered a clinical sign of insanity.

So how did it happen? Where did Labor go wrong? (Specifically in ways relating to the 2016 election, not just in general or we’ll be here all week.)

Here’s what happened:

1. Bill Shorten

Nobody was ever going to vote for Bill Shorten, really. Sure, he seems like a nice enough guy, and most voters described him as someone they’d probably enjoy having a drink near, but even his shoutiest speeches couldn’t disguise the fact that his platform was Not Being Tony Abbott. This is the same platform that lost Kevin Rudd the 2013 election, so it was doomed to failure, particularly when you consider his backup platform was Barely Being Bill Shorten. His performance during the debate didn’t help matters. He responded to every question by looking out into the audience and saying “I dunno, what do you guys think?”, and nobody believed he was actually reading his notes when Scott Morrison broke off his leash and ran onto stage, thumping his chest and establishing dominance over a pretending-not-to-notice Shorten.

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2. The Asylum Seeker Thing

The Left made its classic mistake in assuming that everyone would see their point of view without them having to actually articulate it. During the whole asylum seeker debacle when the Government was bravely protecting our borders by putting infants into caged fences, you all pointed at it and said “See?”. The problem is that everybody who voted for the Coalition back in 2013 was also pointing to this and saying “See?”. You took this as a consensus of agreement rather than an endorsement of Abbott’s policies, and went home to continue knitting your “Shorten ’16” overalls from organic hemp.

3. Ignoring Fables

As you changed the name of your Facebook group from “Tony Abbott Will Never Be PM” to “Tony Abbott: Worst PM In Australian History” to “Tony Abbott: Days Are Numbered”, you sat back, arms crossed, legs folded, happy that you wouldn’t need to actually do anything: Abbott’s incompetence was so self-evident, he’d probably lose by 100%, right?

But given Lefties are always extolling the benefits of “reading” and “knowing things”, you’d think someone would have bothered to go back and read The Tortoise and the Hare. In this fable, the speedy Hare loses a race against the Tortoise because he is complacent in what he believes will be an inevitable win. Spoiler warning: the Tortoise wins easily thanks in no small part to a biased Mur-Duck press. Animals are cute!

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4. Invented Platforms

Labor’s always had a big problem with focus. The party concerns itself with trying to solve issues such as climate change and who should be leader, two problems the electorate either doesn’t believe in or recognises as unsolvable. The Coalition cleverly invents its own easily-solvable problems. Once you’ve invented an issue such as “too many people arriving by boat!” or “our economy can no longer sustain these specific things we’ve always been ideologically opposed to!”, finding a solution is easy. Even if you know they’re spouting nonsense, you’ve got to admire the forthright way they take care of it.

5. Listening to The Oracle

The Oracle, who was up until 2015 known by his birth name “Bob Ellis”, was the sage that Labor powerbrokers visited in order discover future events. The Oracle captured the attention of everyone in the Labor Party by being the only one who said anything with any sort of real conviction.

Sadly, his predictions included: Tony Abbott being hauled before an international war crimes tribunal for looking at him funny, Bronwyn Bishop ejecting herself from the House once even she could no longer stand her own favouritism, Joe Hockey discovered sneaking into the Australian Mint every night to shove coins into his pocket, and Christopher Pyne admitting he loves the taste of human flesh.

When none of these predictions came true, Labor officials became suspicious, particularly when Ellis would dismiss as “fantastical nonsense” anything that had actually happened in the last few years.

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6. Putting Stock In Polls

The majority of the confusion must surely stem from the fact that Bill Shorten had won many “preferred leader” polls during Abbott’s reign. The problem here is that you all took these polls seriously, because learning from history is for dorks.

Do you remember when Julia Gillard was leader and all the polls said voters desperately wanted Rudd back? What happened after that? Oh, right: once Rudd was became PM again, suddenly he wasn’t such an attractive prospect. See, people who take part in polls seem more than happy to put their preference next to a hypothetical candidate. The further removed the candidate is from office, the better. That’s one of the main reasons Harold Holt swum out into the ocean during his term; slick advisors told him that swimming away from the country he was leading would do wonders for his popularity.

It’s like when your friend is at a restaurant and says they’d rather eat horse manure than this dish. Try presenting them with horse manure and see which they eat first. Elections are the equivalent of serving horse manure.

Shorten may have been everybody’s preference for PM back when he was nowhere near the office, but the moment it became a real possibility, the polls did what they always do, and snapped to an even fifty-fifty. Voters got cold feet, and although Abbott didn’t win by the decisive margin he did back in 2013, it was still a fairly compelling victory.

It remains to be seen whether Abbott’s various election promises – “The leftover scrap metal from the dismantling of ABC and SBS will not be chopped up into even tinier portions under a government I lead”, “Power companies will not be permitted to block the sun for more than five hours out of every day”, “I promise to tell you where I’m keeping Malcolm Turnbull”, “I shall divide Australia into three portions to be given to my daughters. Which of you shall we say doth love us most? That we our largest bounty may extend where nature doth with merit challenge” – will be kept, but with another three years in the job, he’s got be feeling pretty confident.

It’s easy to mock Labor for not being able to beat the Coalition, but that’s unfair. We have the benefit of hindsight; if we’re honest, it would have been impossible for Labor to predict any of this.

@leezachariah