Election 2016: Major parties under siege as 'voter rage' takes hold

Updated

Nothing is resolved.

If Malcolm Turnbull forms Government it will be with the barest of majorities, or in an alliance with the crossbench.

He will face enemies across the aisle and in his ranks and a Senate with at least as many weird moving parts as the one he just expunged.

In his early morning speech he invoked John Howard's narrow victory in 1998 as a talisman for how he might cobble something that looks like a victory from this ruin.

The comparison fails because Mr Howard was a consummate politician and the Prime Minister has just proved, again, that he is not.

He appealed to Australians to trust him but too many recalled the Coalition's shattered promises of the 2014 Budget.

Labor's "Mediscare" campaign was outrageous but it worked because the Coalition had provided field evidence that people had a reason to be afraid.

Mr Turnbull promised stability, expecting people to forget how he got his job.

Given he made such heavy work of his first months as Prime Minister it is not unreasonable to ask how he will navigate the rough water on the horizon.

His intellect is not in question, it's his capacity to unify his party and successfully get any of his, modest, agenda through both houses of Parliament.

It's hard to see how his company tax cuts will pass the Senate he just spawned.

Labor recovering but primary vote still at historic lows

Bill Shorten has given him a lesson in politics.

The Opposition leader likes to remind people that most in the media and many in his party had written him off.

More fatally the Prime Minister underestimated him, as Labor once underestimated the killing machine that is Tony Abbott.

Mr Shorten best defined the post-election landscape when he said, although there was no obvious winner as yet, there was "clearly one loser, Malcolm Turnbull's agenda".

But as the dust settles both major parties have been left with plenty to worry about.

Labor recovered ground on 2013 but its primary vote is still at historic lows. The Liberal primary also took a pounding. The vote for "anyone else" has climbed to 13 per cent.

Politics as usual is being rejected by a growing number of voters.

Today the Coalition's woes are writ large but Labor's gains do not disguise the pressure it is under on left and right: the seat of Batman is still under siege from the Greens and the Liberals might take Chisholm.

The same voter rage that drives support for Donald Trump in the US and Brexit in the UK has taken hold here. Some of it is a perfectly rational response to a political system that is not working for the people it is designed to serve.

Australian politics broke in December 2009 when the major parties could not reach a consensus on Labor's climate change bills.

Mr Abbott rose from the ashes of the Coalition leadership spill and so terrified Kevin Rudd that he cut and ran from "the greatest moral challenge of our time".

That massive breach of trust with the Australian people was compounded by his midnight assassination. It, in turn, fatally wounded Julia Gillard.

The parallels between the two major parties are now eerie.

Labor dispatches a first term prime minister in 2010 and emerges from an election into a hung parliament. The Coalition did it last year and now faces the same future.

Remember what happened next?

Topics: government-and-politics, federal-government, federal-elections, australia

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