It’s true that One Nation preferenced Labor in 2016. But it’s also true that only 57 per cent of those preferences actually found their way there. That immediately tells you that One Nation can direct its preferences all it likes, but One Nation’s voters don’t necessarily obey such directions. This time the correlation was better – about 70 per cent of One Nation preferences went to the LNP – but even that is misleading. One Nation’s vote went up about 6.5 per cent. Given that Labor’s vote rose and the LNP’s fell, it’s pretty likely most of that increase was LNP voters crossing over to One Nation, then sending their preferences straight back to the LNP. That would mean there were fewer Labor-leaning One Nation voters this time than there were in 2016, and more One Nation voters who lean LNP. Seems One Nation voters did what they always do: send their preferences to whichever major party they prefer, irrespective of what the how-to-vote card says. If so, the fact that the LNP had the “benefit” of One Nation preferences is a red herring. Labor candidate for Perth Patrick Gorman leaves the Highgate polling station alongside his wife Jess and their son Leo on election day. Credit:AAP What we’re left with is a pretty standard byelection result. Namely, a swing to the opposition of 3.6 per cent. The average since 1949 is 3.8 per cent.

To regard this as a crushing blow requires us to buy a substantial amount of hype. The fact that Turnbull declared the byelection would be, among other things, a judgment on the respective leaders of the major parties was clearly an unnecessary, high-risk blunder. So, too, the declaration from Peter Dutton that the LNP would win in Longman. Precisely why we decided to take such partisan bluster as analysis is a mystery. Perhaps we reasoned that such senior government figures would not sound off like this without a very solid basis for their confidence. But that makes the risky assumption that this government makes good political calculations, and that information available from within a single seat – including the single-seat polling occasionally quoted – is reliable. Labor candidate for Braddon Justine Keay and Opposition Leader Bill Shorten hand out fliers in Devonport. Credit:AAP But you could, if you were so minded, tell yourself a very different story by looking at Braddon. There, Labor claimed a swing so tiny it is likely to be wiped out by postal votes, despite having the benefit of a very reliable preference flow from an independent. That is a historically poor byelection result for an opposition. And you could also observe that this is the sixth-poorest electorate in Australia, at a time when Labor is campaigning hardest on the fertile terrain of inequality.

That looks like a serious failure for Labor – a point some Liberals are making in trying to spin the Super Saturday results their way – until you realise that this is one of those seats that regularly swaps between the two major parties, mainly because it is a very diverse mix of Labor and Liberal strongholds. The result of this byelection basically reproduces 2016. What it says about 2019 is just about pure speculation. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video But if the results were not seismic, the political repercussions have been. Turnbull once again faces the familiar scene of a revolting backbench, urging him to dump a key policy – this time, tax cuts for big business. Fair enough, in a way. It’s a widely unpopular policy with surprisingly little data to commend it, and which clashes horribly with the times where faith in both big business and trickle-down economics is at its lowest in decades.

But let’s be clear: Super Saturday told us nothing we didn’t already know in that regard. Sure, it’s not brilliant news for the Coalition. But the point is that it shouldn’t have been news at all. Ultimately, we’re reacting to results that are bad mainly because they are measured against a false narrative of government resurgence and a series of false expectations of the government’s own creation. Illustration: Andrew Dyson That these falsities could have taken on the guise of reality among media people is more than a little concerning. It slowly reveals a political world that is overly determined by rhetoric. In this world, an unremarkable byelection becomes remarkable because of what some people had said about it beforehand. Loading

The idea that Turnbull invited this leadership speculation by making the byelection a referendum on the party leaders is an odd one. Turnbull may have described the byelection in such terms. But was it? Why should we react as though it is, just because Turnbull said something silly? In this world, polls that show a government gaining modest ground (often within the margin of error) do not merely become statistical markers, but active participants in our politics. They demand an explanation, which then masquerades as fact, which in turn influences how politicians behave. Governments frequently gain and lose “mojo” on the basis of such statistics. And so, in this world we inevitably move from crisis to crisis – even if those crises are transferred between parties in the space of a day. In the process we become more attentive to politics as a game, but we become less capable of telling a real crisis from a rhetorical one. Waleed Aly is a Fairfax columnist and a presenter on The Project.