With so many having invested so much in the defeat of the Labor government – including the leadership of what was once the national broadsheet of this country – to be denied victory by political inches, leaving a fragile incumbent holding the most delicate of majorities and being reliant on a handful of cross-benchers representing ideologically discordant electorates, creates a result that will not be respected.Not to be confused with Bernard Keane's "Let the Wild Rumpus Begin" which reported the endgame.
What we will witness over the next 18 months or more is a Great Unhinging –an orgy of hysterics that will far surpass the duplicity, dishonesty – let alone the complete arsehattery – that substituted for public debate on matters of government during the previous 12 months.
Possum Comitatus is not the only person making this point, of course. Here's Jeff Sparrow at the Overland blog
What happens now? Obviously, expect to see a ferocious campaign from Murdoch’s flying monkeys. The Op Ed pieces are already being written, explaining how we’re all a hop, step and jump away from the gulags that Adam Bandt’s constructing from his red base of Melbourne.The rest is more soberly optimistic.
More amusing at present is the sudden obsession Coalition supporters have with democratic legitimacy, not something they've tended to be much concerned about in the past (see 1954, 1961, 1969, and 1998 - though I suppose they may have discovered a slight and fleeting interest in 1990). The more usual indifference is unsurprising amongst supporters of what is essentially a patchwork conglomeration of special interest groups, rather than a mass party, owing its electoral advantage to the regional concentration of one of its constituent parts. How sweet that on this occasion our region-based voting system has swam up and bitten them on the arse. Or would have done, if it was remotely accurate to claim that the Tories won the 2 party preferred vote this time, which they didn't.