No one saw it coming. Polling had the election as a win for Labor.

Internal polling from the parties had it this way and external polling also had it so.

Exit polls had a 13 seat majority for Labor last night.

They were all wrong. As we saw with Trump and Brexit, polls don’t always know best.

Last night the Coalition held on.

It secured an election comeback that would have been unbelievable a month ago. It was unbelievable just two days ago.

Some said last night it was an even greater comeback than the 1993 election in which Paul Keating defied all the odds.

The Coalition had last night secured 75 seats to Labor’s 66 with voting still counting late into the night.

Five seats were still in doubt with 55.6 per cent of the vote counted. A hung parliament was still live possibility.

Bill Shorten lost the “unlosable” election and it may have been the polls that were his downfall.

One senior strategist said: “The only thing we can put it down to is that people no longer have a landline and so it just can’t be relied on the way it used to be.” Another said: “Those sleeper conservatives don’t appear to be represented in the polls.”

Labor seriously miscalculated and the result of a hung parliament, if that ends up being the outcome, would be horrible for democracy.

In 2010 when we saw the Gillard Labor government deliver a hung parliament result it resulted in three years of chaos.

Rob Oakeshott and a gang of other independents took 17-days to deliver a result for who would form government and the Labor government was beholden to the Greens and the independents during the three years that followed.

But the fact we are even in this position is a testament to how much work Scott Morrison had done to turn the Coalition’s fortunes around.

In August when the nation saw yet another leadership spill and more division within a governing party, confidence in a Coalition victory was at an all time low.

Morrison worked diligently and tirelessly in his one-man presidential-style election race. He will go down a Liberal Party legend.

But if we do have a hung parliament, it will be bad for democracy. Our politicians need to do better to secure more votes and deliver a majority next election. And we all need to pay less attention to the polls.