Pundits, predictions and punchlines; the best of election night TV

To its accidental credit, Seven got the tone right for Coalition supporters, offering up something called a Situation Room, and a so-called “election needle”. Liberal senator Jane Hume, who looked inclined to enter one to plunge the other into the eyeballs of fellow panellists Tanya Plibersek and Bill Shorten, spent a goodly part of the night reminding viewers that the contest wasn’t over because pre-polls and postal votes accounted for up to 50 per cent of the vote. When it became apparent that even the boss was headed for a Centrelink queue, she changed tack, accusing them of dancing on Peter Dutton’s political grave: “You are feeding on the entrails before the chicken is gutted!” she shrieked.

Speaking of catastrophic messes, Nine’s Dunk Tank looked like a thought bubble generated by a malfunctioning AI-generated political science graduate after a particularly heavy night on the turps. If you covered a 1990s arcade skill-tester with a roll of Bunnings contact in a fetching shade of fake wood, you’d go part of the way to explaining the device that was used to “dunk” MPs who’d lost their seats earlier in the day. So far, so hilarious, no? To their eternal credit, all the network’s panellists looked mildly mortified, with the ALP’s Chris Bowen jumping in to remind the chortling masses that politicians were actual people with actual feelings and that, in fact, forced unemployment wasn’t especially funny anyway.

At Network Ten, nobody was laughing either, although that might’ve had something to do with the eyeball-dryingly dull commentary proffered by the pink-clad teal, Kylea Tink. She spent much of the night earnestly explaining why the Coalition’s policies weren’t resonating with voters to Liberal senator Dave Sharma. He, in turn, was giving the air of a distracted parent pretending to listen to one of his kids, nodding at timed intervals while frantically doomscrolling on the phone.

And that, friends, brings us to Sky News, where Peta Credlin’s magnificent eyebrows were given the workout to end all workouts as she contemplated the Coalition’s shockingly quick demise. After using Labor’s Murray Watt for a casual spot of target practice (“your mouth is writing cheques that your brain can’t cash”, she snapped), she and her fellow panellists embarked upon an impromptu autopsy. The result, they declared, was inevitable, given that the Coalition were up against (in no particular order): history, Donald Trump and Labor’s lies, vote-thieving teals and Greens, and political traitors of assorted other shades.

And speaking of those who started the night in the red and ended it in the pink, the last word went to Labor’s Graham Richardson, who watched proceedings from the comfort of the world’s largest, beige-est armchair. With the air of a man who’d (repeatedly) incurred the wrath of Peta Credlin’s eyebrows and lived to tell the tale, he shrugged nonchalantly when asked for his impressions of the outcome: “I didn’t find it terribly difficult. I always thought Albo was going to win.”

Michelle Cazzulino is a writer.

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