Contrary to popular opinion, the wheels didn't fall off the Turnbull election bus. In fact the bus was jacked up and the wheels stolen while he was sitting in it. Australia looks headed for a hung Parliament after Malcolm Turnbull seemingly lost some 20 seats in the House of Representatives plus a handful of senators.
Queensland played no small part in this political heist. The LNP started with 22 of the 30 seats in Queensland, with six held by Labor, plus Bob Katter and the hapless Clive Palmer. Some of those 22 seats have definitely been lost, while others are precarious at best.
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The official LNP line is that they have achieved generational change, replacing a number of retiring, long-serving MPs. However, the goal was never generational change, but winning government. This has not been achieved.
Part of the blame must lie at the feet of the LNP in Queensland for running what was an uninspiring and unresponsive campaign on the ground. In March, I warned that the LNP needed to change its campaign techniques, or they would do poorly in the Federal election.
Despite furious denials, very little changed. The LNP did a poor job in creating a dialogue with voters. Posting comments and videos on a candidate's Facebook page is not smart campaigning. It is certainly not listening and responding to what voters have to say. The same is true of the millions of dollars spent filling letterboxes with flyers that went mostly unread. The result, sadly, was exactly as I predicted.
The other part of the election failure must be attributable to the Prime Minister himself, and his unique mix of political naivety and personal hubris.
I first became acquainted with Malcolm Turnbull's persona 30 years ago. He had been at my college at Oxford a few years before me, and was notorious for phoning one of the tutors to boast about how clever he had been in the Spycatcher case. Malcolm always did think he was the smartest man in the room.
Fast forward 30 years to the 2016 election.
![Malcolm Turnbull speaking to the media three days after the federal election.](/web/20160909162211im_/http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/content/dam/images/g/p/z/2/v/5/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gpz90h.png/1471398483493.jpg)
Dogged by an obstructionist Senate, he championed voting reforms designed to make it harder for minor parties to get elected. Then he called a double dissolution. This halved the number of votes needed to get elected to the Senate, and resulted in the election of more cross-bench Senators, who will be more difficult to deal with, than the ones they replaced.
Surely he understood the consequences of halving the Senate quota? If he didn't three months ago, he does now.
Of course, the reason for the double dissolution was the refusal of the Senate to pass legislation to deal with union corruption, specifically the Australian Building and Construction Commission. This was the first double dissolution in nearly 30 years, so one would have expected Turnbull to campaign heavily on the issue, but he was almost silent instead.
It is not as though the building unions haven't left a trail of destruction in their wake, but they were let off the hook when they should have been the focus of a relentless campaign focused on them and their links to the ALP.
So, too, Labor's plans to abolish negative gearing. The Coalition had some 20 real estate chains campaigning against Labor on the issue, but failed to make it a focal point in the campaign. Once again, Labor was let off the hook.
Then there was the marathon campaign itself. Wiser heads warned that this would merely turn voters off the government's message, and that is what happened. It also gave the Labor Party more time to run their scare campaign, which they did very effectively. It was a strategy that was flawed from start to finish.
We now have a Parliament that will be held captive to those who represent a tiny minority of the population. It will be intransigent, ineffective, and often irrational. If he is on a journey to nowhere, in a bus with no wheels, Malcolm Turnbull can take consolation in the fact it is a journey of his own invention.
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- Bill O'Chee is a former senator for the Nationals.
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