Conservatives, God bless them, are rightfully saying that threats to religious freedom was one reason why the Coalition, who never won an opinion poll, did win the one that counted, making the election a kind of Trumpish affair:
https://www.conservatives.org.au/the_shy_conservatives_sang_out_loud_and_clear
https://www.spectator.com.au/2019/05/ten-reasons-labor-lost-the-unlosable-election/
6. “Israel Folau and ‘freedom of speech’. The elephant in the room throughout the entire election campaign was the saga involving Israel Folau and Rugby Australia. All of a sudden the issues of freedom of speech and freedom of religion were brought to the fore. Up until recently Labor had been riding the high moral ground of championing everything LGBTIQ. But with Folau’s trial and termination came the public realisation that ‘tolerance’ had morphed into denouncing any other opinion.
7. Religious Freedom. Following on from the previous point, many private schools took the extraordinary step of urging parents not to vote Labor as it would strip them of their right to employ staff who shared their ethos. This was because Labor’s legal affairs spokesman, Mark Dreyfus, said that:
A Shorten government would remove key legal protections for religious freedoms, fuelling concerns schools will find it more difficult to insist teachers agree to uphold their core values.
8. The Gender Commission. Dr David van Gend outlined the implications for parents in regards to Labor’s transgender policy brilliantly here in The Spectator Australia. But he was obviously not alone. Kerri-Anne Kennerley also unleashed an extraordinary attack on Labor’s plan to fund a National Gender Centre. As Kennerley said:
These kids out there who are gender confused, and there’s a percentage of people out there gender confused, they will put up this Commission and we, like Tasmania, will have a child and it won’t be male or female, it will be gender-free. That’ll be national…
And if your child is confused, the rights of your child will go tothem, you will have no rights as a parent. That child will go, ‘I want to be either a boy or girl, please give me whatever I need’ and you as a parent will have no choice.”
1. Tanya Plibersek’s aggressive policy of extending abortion. While the subject of abortion may have been viewed as too ‘controversial’ and ‘divisive’ for the Coalition to tackle, for many conservative religious voters such as myself, this was the real deal breaker. Especially when the deputy leader, Tanya Plibersek, promised that if Labor won the election then they would offer free abortions in all public hospitals.
2. Scott Morrison. Credit where credit’s due. Because Labor didn’t merely lose the election; the Coalition actually won it. In his acceptance speech Australia’s first Pentecostal Prime Minister acknowledge that, in keeping with his theology, “I’ve always believed in miracles”. In fact, Dennis Shanahan wrote in The Australian:
Morrison didn’t just beat Labor in this election. He beat the Zeitgeist, the vibe and the emotional appeals while leaving Clive Palmer and the Greens failing to live up to expectations.
Bill Shorten’s political career ended last night but Morrison’s is just beginning.
In scenes, reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s defeat at the hands of Trump, many leftist progressives had a complete emotional meltdown. For instance, Dr. John Dickson, formerly of the Centre for Public Christianity, issued the following tweet in response to the hysterical nastiness of Jane Caro:
But enough of the schadenfreude, or should that be as Stephen MacAlpine labels it, ‘Shortenfreude’.”Australia has dodged a bullet and we’ve been given the benefit of a conservative government for another whole term. Now that we’ve seen how unreliable all of the pollsters are, maybe we can even stick with the same Prime Minister for an entire term.”