Silver linings are few and far between in the 2025 Australian election outcome, but there’s a glimmer here and there. The Greens have been hammered, with their vote in the lower house all but wiped out. Party leader Adam Bandt is locked in a nail-biter to hang on to his seat. In Tasmania, the execrable Bridget Archer, a wannabe-Green who repeatedly undermined her own party by crossing the floor on woke guff like ‘asylum seekers’ has been blown out of the water.
The funniest schadenfreude, though, comes at the expense of the smug, preening teals. It turns out Zoe Daniel’s public victory dance, and Monique Ryan’s gloating declaration of victory on Saturday night were very, very premature.
Tim Wilson has become the first Liberal to turn back the teal tide, surging to the lead in Goldstein and defying the national election trend to give his devastated party hope of a future in inner-suburban Melbourne.
With Mr Wilson on the brink of victory over Zoe Daniel, colleague Amelia Hamer next door in Kooyong is also whittling away teal MP Monique Ryan’s margin, raising the prospect of two Liberals claiming back once blue-ribbon territory […]
Mr Wilson surged to a 684-vote lead on Tuesday over Ms Daniel in Goldstein while Ms Hamer has closed the gap on Dr Ryan to finish the day’s counting 1002 votes behind in Kooyong.
Neither Liberal has claimed victory but political analysts have declared Mr Wilson as the likely winner in Goldstein while Kooyong could be decided by as few as 50 votes.
So, let’s hear no more of the ‘my vote won’t matter’ stuff. There’ll no doubt be weeks of recounts before the final outcome is known, but it looks like Little Simon the Climate Svengali has blown a few hundred million of his inheritance for nowt.
It’s just a pity that it had to be Tim Wilson to knock Zoe Daniel off her perch. Wilson is just the sort of woke, wet, lettuce leaf the Liberals need like a hole in the head. It’s his ilk who’ve brought the party to its current dire predicament. His blue-green brand of soggy ‘social conscience’ bullshit might steam the knickers of the doctor’s wives in Melbourne’s old money suburbs, but it’s the last thing voters in the mortgage belt want to hear.
It’s a symbolic victory, of sorts, of course. The Liberals were devastated by losing their former blue-ribbon Melbourne seats. But knocking off the teals isn’t the answer to their current predicament. There’s just a handful of teal seats, after all: the coalition has a more than 40 seat gap to close if they want government.
If Wilson and Hamer’s likely victories encourage them to keep pandering to the doctor’s wives, it’ll just further consign the party to irrelevance. Where they need to be looking is to the outer suburbs and the regions.
To her credit, Hamer seems to get it.
Ms Hamer pointed to seat-specific factors that both candidates were able to tap into with “hyper-local” campaigns […]
Asked by the Australian how the coalition’s error-riddled national campaign impacted on Kooyong, Ms Hamer cited a lack of substantial economic policies and a failure to roll them out early enough as being negatives among Kooyong voters. “The first thing was people, especially in Kooyong, want us to have mature, sensible and coherent policies and they want to see that relatively early on,” Ms Hamer said. “But I think a lot of our policy was too little too late and the feedback I was getting from people was they would have liked to have seen more substantial economic reform much earlier.”
Goldstein in particular is a clear anomaly. One of Australia’s most Jewish seats, locals’ justified alarm at the wave of anti-Semitism simply made voting for a leftist candidate untenable.
Another silver lining, and one no doubt of greatest interest to Good Oil readers, is the strong performance of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party.
The right-wing party had racked up 764,781 national votes (6.2 per cent), recording a 1.2 per cent swing as of 1.30pm on Sunday.
While One Nation failed to pick up lower house seats, the party is hoping to increase seats in the Senate.
The most astonishing swing for the party was in NSW, with a whopping 11 per cent swing. Smaller swings, between 3.2 and 2 per cent, in Western Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory, are still respectable: indeed, almost matching the swing to the Labor party.
It’ll be even better if Pauline’s daughter, Lee Hanson, knocks off Jacqui Lambie here in Tasmania. For all her bluster and blatherskite, Lambie is no down-to-earth conservative. Anyone who thought that should have been severely disabused when she joined the pile-on pushing the Covid vaccines.
In an exclusive interview with news.com.au, [Lee Hanson] revealed she’s “had enough” of Senator Lambie “shrieking” in parliament and has taken matters into her own hands by hitting the campaign trail in Tasmania.
“(Jacqui Lambie) votes constantly all the time with the Labor and Greens. She’s not a conservative,’’ Ms Hanson said.
Readers may not remember that Lambie first rode into the Senate on a wheelbarrow of cash from billionaire Clive Palmer – and promptly deserted him. Palmer threw another few hundred million at his ‘Trumpet of Patriots’ party at this election. All he achieved was to drain vital preferences from the coalition.
Thanks for nothing, you bloviating blowhard.
