Tony Abbott has conceded defeat in Warringah to independent Zali Steggall, revealing he feared his political career was over months ago but saying he "would rather be a loser than a quitter".

• Mr Abbott had held the seat since 1994
• He and Ms Steggall fought a brutal campaign, which Abbott called 'pretty personal'
• For live results in Warringah, click here click here

ABC chief elections analyst Antony Green called the seat for Ms Steggall less than two hours after polls closed, and Mr Abbott made his concession speech just after 8:30pm.

With more than 80 per cent of the ballots counted, Ms Steggall's primary vote was about 45 per cent — enough for her to claim a comfortable victory.

Mr Abbott's primary vote had collapsed, and was down about 13 per cent.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-18/federal-election-2019-tony-abbott...

Hopefully global warming will come faster than we ever could imagine and wipe the smile of god's own bullshit man — Scummo's — face... "God bless Australia?" What? Fuck off god... at least Abbott is gone... and between you, me and a lamppost, Scummo "will be happy about this", because he would have had to know that Abbott would have undermined Scummo's leadership within a few months...

From Rod Dreher (in Sydney)

All week I’ve been hearing from Australians — conservative voters — that the Australian Labor Party (ALP) was going to win today’s national election. Even tonight at my speech in Sydney, voters were downcast about the expected results. And then we all went home and turned on the TV, and learned that the conservative Coalition incumbents led by PM Scott Morrison had pulled off an upset. (N.B., the Liberal Party is the conservative party in Australia). Read this report from The Australian:

The Coalition’s bombshell triumph comes after repeated polls placed the ALP ahead of the Morrison Government, and the Prime Minister’s demise appeared assured.

Swings to the Coalition in Queensland turned the election on its head as early figures suggested the Government could hold on.

Labor scrutineers told news.com.au older voters have punished the party for its higher-taxing agenda. States where the economy is not thriving – such as Queensland, WA and country areas – have backed the Liberals’ agenda focused on the economy and jobs.

“A bold agenda is now dead forever in Australia,” a Labor scrutineer says as it became clear the election was turning against [Labor leader Bill] Shorten.

As the votes came in confidence began to grown among Liberal supporters. At the official Liberal Party function in Sydney exuberant young Liberal supporters were heard chanting that the Liberals were “an election winning machine”.

“Labor used to be party for the workers, now it’s a party for people who don’t work,” one said.

Great line.

It will be interesting to see if the social conservative/religious vote will have been decisive, given the controversy this week over Israel Folau, the Aussie rugby player sacked by the league for posting to Instagram a Bible quote that offended gays. A few days back, Bill Shorten, the Labor standard bearer, attacked opponent Scott Morrison for not condemning Folau unambiguously. And on Friday, the rugby league formally ended Folau’s career, causing a lot of anger among Australians who believe he was robbed of his livelihood because of his Christian belief.

There could be no doubt that a Labor victory would have been bad for religious liberty in this country. Alex Deagon, a law professor, wrote in The Age this week:

Rugby Australia’s verdict on its punishment for Israel Folau, due on Friday,  will highlight broader religious freedom implications – and these may have an impact on the federal election this weekend. Folau’s case will likely end up in court, but this saga goes far beyond the career of an individual player and his attempt to assert his right to call for sinners to repent.

Most significantly, Labor has pledged to remove the religious exemptions in the Sex Discrimination Act, which allow religious schools to directly “discriminate” against staff and students in the process of upholding a religious ethos.

Senior Labor figures have attempted to reassure religious schools that they will still be able to maintain their ethos through the indirect discrimination exemptions. The religious schools sector remains sceptical – for good reason.

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/shock-conservatives-win-a...

This is total Christian propaganda bullshit of course, helped by the most disruptive man on the planet, Uncle Rupe... The Australian NewsRag is Uncle Rupe's omw baby. Most people want to work, but not like slaves and without any safety net such as security of employment. In regard to the schools, the Scummo government had been promising MORE CASH to the Catholic schools and LESS CASH to public education, while Labor had promised a more equitable share.

There was no need to panic re "religious freedoms" because most of the Labor Party is run by Catholic dudes who value social equity a bit more than the Liberals (CONservatives) who value GREED, GOD AND GUNS before anything else — and in this order. The Folau event might have played a small part, but what actually might have tipped the scales was the death of Bob Hawke, who despite having done great thing, was a booze swilling, a philanderer who would have been at the top of the #metoo awful list.

BUT what swung the pendulum was the great skill of adman Scummo to sell repeat bullshit while the Labor Party did not fight back on ALL THE LIES PROMOTED BY SCUMMO. The complicit media, apart from a timid editorial here and there, did not help either. The saturation advertising by Palmer, the fact that the Liberal (CONservative) party chose the ratbag Palmer as their new buddy shows how shonky the Scummo team is...

Note: this household could predict the win by the Libs (CONS), but possibly not by such a margin. Australian people may live in "the best country in the world" (Scummo's bullshit) but they are a majority of the dumbest people on the planet... Yep... Greed, god, guns, bullshit, baseball caps, barbecues and cultivated ignorance.

With Scummo now in charge of "progress", in parallel with Trump, we have to start again our revolution from back then in the 1830s

...

By 1837, Marx was writing both fiction and non-fiction, having completed a short novel, Scorpion and Felix, a drama, Oulanem, as well as a number of love poems dedicated to Jenny von Westphalen, though none of this early work was published during his lifetime.[53] Marx soon abandoned fiction for other pursuits, including the study of both English and Italian, art history and the translation of Latin classics.[54] He began co-operating with Bruno Bauer on editing Hegel's Philosophy of Religion in 1840. Marx was also engaged in writing his doctoral thesis, The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature,[55] which he completed in 1841. It was described as "a daring and original piece of work in which Marx set out to show that theology must yield to the superior wisdom of philosophy".[56] The essay was controversial, particularly among the conservative professors at the University of Berlin. Marx decided instead to submit his thesis to the more liberal University of Jena, whose faculty awarded him his PhD in April 1841.[57][2] As Marx and Bauer were both atheists, in March 1841 they began plans for a journal entitled Archiv des Atheismus(Atheistic Archives), but it never came to fruition. In July, Marx and Bauer took a trip to Bonn from Berlin. There they scandalised their class by getting drunk, laughing in church and galloping through the streets on donkeys.[58]

Marx was considering an academic career, but this path was barred by the government's growing opposition to classical liberalism and the Young Hegelians.[59] Marx moved to Cologne in 1842, where he became a journalist, writing for the radical newspaper Rheinische Zeitung (Rhineland News), expressing his early views on socialism and his developing interest in economics. Marx criticised right-wing European governments as well as figures in the liberal and socialist movements, whom he thought ineffective or counter-productive.[60] The newspaper attracted the attention of the Prussian government censors, who checked every issue for seditious material before printing, as Marx lamented: "Our newspaper has to be presented to the police to be sniffed at, and if the police nose smells anything un-Christian or un-Prussian, the newspaper is not allowed to appear".[61] After the Rheinische Zeitung published an article strongly criticising the Russian monarchy, Tsar Nicholas I requested it be banned and Prussia's government complied in 1843.

Read more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx

Back to square one... See also:

looking over your head... in when he died, one knew for sure scummo was going to win...

By Sarah Gerathy

Opinion polls showed Mr Abbott was deeply unpopular with voters, but his ability to capitalise on the internal Labor chaos saw him lead the Coalition to a decisive victory.

He became the nation's 28th Prime Minister, telling Australians in his victory speech "we will not let you down".

He promised he would lead a "no surprises government" and set about delivering his promises to stop asylum-seeker boats, and get rid of the carbon and mining taxes.

He wanted to be known as the "infrastructure prime minister" and backed major road projects such as the upgrade of the Bruce Highway. 

Although highly contentious, the introduction of Mr Abbott's boat turnback policy saw the number of boat arrivals in Australia almost disappear, from 300 in 2013 to one in 2014.

Read more: 

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-19/election-results-tony-abbott-live...

Gus:

Tony Abbott only got elected because of all the support he had from the Murdoch media. He lied about anything he was going to do, including the budget of the ABC and SBS — which he "was not going to touch" but cut as soon as he was elected. He was a political lying bastard first class. Same with Scummo, who also had an aggressive sidekick in Clive Palmer who saturated the media with lies in advertising against Labor. 

"...his [Abbott's] ability to capitalise on the internal Labor chaos saw him lead the Coalition to a decisive victory...." is a bit rich. True he did capitalise on this, but this "internal Labor chaos" had been managed and inspired by the Murdoch media with clever manipulations of people, all explained on this site. Without Murdoch's media, neither Tony Abbott (not "Turdy" anymore since he's history) nor Scummo would have passed the post. Most of the other media being 50/50 on the surface but really 65/35 in favour of Scummo, Bill Shorten was not going to cut it "despite the polls"...

Read from top.