Let's re-wind the clock. It's the Tuesday before polling day and Tony Nutt, Malcolm Turnbull's campaign director, rings his Labor counterpart with an offer George Wright could not refuse: a final leaders' debate on prime time TV.
We are on the brink of a breaking point between the way politics was done in the 20th century and the way it will be done in the 21st.
I am not worried about my final years. I'm actually looking forward to them.
In both schools you learn stuff, you come out at the end, and you can be whatever you want to be.
If we were starting our political parties today, from scratch, we simply wouldn't have Labor and the Coalition.
What a sad trend for the world's most liveable city to be leading.
A policy of universal non-intervention won't solve the ethical dilemma when countries butcher their own people.
Nobody should be treated differently because of how they communicate.
Samuel Davide Hains presented a contemporary embodiment of the Australian character for the world to see: modern, multifaceted and hard to read.
Both sides have lessons they can glean from the federal campaign.
There's no evidence that South Australia or any other state will "benefit enormously from the free trade agreements the Coalition has signed", in large part because the Coalition has ensured there isn't.
Victorians now have as one of their 12 representatives in the Senate a man who has over the past 30 years been to jail twice and fined $100,000 for beaching court orders.
Many voters seem to be flocking to tough, no-nonsense women who at least seem sensible.
Younger people should be allowed to cast more votes during elections, because they have much more at stake than someone who is already retired.
The success of Labor's Mediscare in this election is worrying - but not for the reason you may imagine.
The politics of Hansonism haven't changed during the past two decades. By contrast, Australian society has moved on.
We have a unique responsibility to protect the physical as well as the digital safety of their children. We are custodians and curators of our child's digital adolescence.
Who do people think they're impressing by using the term "bedwetter" as an insult?
I regret my vote: We should have voted decisively Liberal.
Look around in Australia on the first business day after the country was supposedly rendered "ungovernable" by Saturday's election. On Monday the share market was up and so was the Australian dollar.
If he just proceeds as if "jobs and growth" is enough, he won't last the parliamentary term.
How can someone so well-read, well-informed and long untroubled by the need to make any more money keep making so many unnecessary mistakes?
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull urged Australians elect a "stable majority Coalition Government" rather than the "chaos" of a minority government during the election.
These five guys in western Sydney made a Facebook page about kebab meat, chips and garlic sauce – you won't believe what happened next.
Memo to new PM: It's not just the economy, stupid.
The Victorian government has failed to react fast enough, says Farrah Tomazin.
So you think you voted wisely.
Commerce might look different, but you're still just screwed, argues Andrew Masterson
There has been much discussion this past six months about whether we have been seeing "the real Malcolm" or a politician who has traded convictions and adopted a more conservative stance to secure the prime ministership.
It has never been entirely clear why so many people like to draw penises on ballot papers.
She was blonde, bulky and she'd been drinking. She told us with deafening certainty that it was "inappropriate" to talk politics in a New York bar.
Federal election campaigns used to be like Hollywood blockbusters, moving at such a cracking pace, people missed on all the glaring inconsistencies, writes ADAM GARTRELL.
We need to create human societies from people of many different backgrounds, writes MARTIN FLANAGAN.
If Donald Trump is elected US president, London's new mayor would be barred from entering the country because he's a Muslim, writes WALEED ALY.
The bigots who struggle with Waleed Aly's success fail to understand it has nothing to do with religion.
Population growth must be addressed to ensure future prosperity and health, writes FARRAH TOMAZIN.
The world's two greatest powers are competing for military dominance of the western Pacific Ocean and the contest is about to intensify, by PETER HARTCHER.
In emergencies, surgeons, whose training has been as realistic as possible, can make the difference between life and death, by JOHN CUNNINGHAM.
Imagine if a royal commission was held into a matter of national shame, and it spent tens of millions of dollars, produced a vast report, but the headline indicators of that shame actually went backwards.
Increasing inequality has allowed Labor to start doing something it hasn't done for decades - articulate a worldview.
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