The last week of the election has provided a sobering moment to reflect on lost opportunities. The interruption of an Anzac dawn service by a Welcome to Country ceremony highlighted the unpopularity of Labor’s indigenous virtue signalling. A poll of 50,000 people found that 65 per cent want Welcomes scrapped entirely, and 23 per cent want them reduced. Hardly surprising.

After Labor’s Voice referendum was smashed, it was clear – as argued on this page on 5 April – that ‘the Coalition’s path to victory rests on ensuring every person who voted No understands that Labor will legislate a Voice by stealth’. It pointed out that the Greens have already introduced a ‘Truth and Justice Commission Bill 2024’ to legislate a Makarrata Commission and demand reparations.

What is surprising is that three days before the election, Penny Wong admitted that a vote for Labor is indeed a vote for a Voice by stealth. She used a podcast made by the satirical Betoota Advocate to reveal Labor has no more given up on the Voice than it gave up on gay marriage. The joke is on the over four million Australians who had already voted when Wong said the Voice is like ‘marriage equality’ and that in ten years people will wonder what all the ‘fuss’ was about.

The ‘fuss’, Senator, is about Australians not wanting to be divided by race like people in Malaysia, where Wong was born, and where racial difference is enshrined in Article 153 of the Constitution. Designed, like the Voice, to protect ethnic and indigenous Malays, it has become a mechanism for race-based quotas that has triggered a brain drain as Chinese and Indian Malaysians emigrated to countries like Australia. Wong knows this. Her family joined the exodus, fleeing discrimination to settle in Australia – a nation that rejected institutional racism. Yet now she wants to import it.

No doubt Wong was buoyed by Conservative Opposition leader Pierre Poilievre’s drubbing in Canada’s election. On 22 March, the day before PM Carney called it, this page noted the paradox that Trump’s hostility to Canada had given Carney a ‘Trump bump’ and Poilievre a ‘Trump slump’. Too true. Poilievre not only lost the election – he lost his safe seat.

Peter Dutton is no Trump or Poilievre but he let Labor’s fear campaign spook him. When Labor attacked Jacinta Nampijinpa Price for saying she wanted to ‘Make Australia Great Again’, Dutton should have echoed cartoonist Johannes Leak: ‘One thing’s certain – Albanese will never make Australia great again.’ It was another missed opportunity.

The final campaign week revealed renewables’ fatal flaw. Less than two weeks after Spain gloated over powering itself with 100 per cent renewables on a weekday (16 April), the entire Iberian Peninsula was plunged into darkness for up to 48 hours.

It proved that renewables need dispatchable gas backup and that the massive duplication of generation, grid expansion and transmission lines makes them ruinously expensive. Yet the Coalition has let Labor sell its renewable energy plan as cheap.

On Monday, Standard & Poor’s took the unusual step of warning that the government’s election spending and off-budget commitments could fuel structural deficits and threaten Australia’s AAA credit rating. Thank goodness someone said it. As this page warned on 29 March, with gross debt set to cross $1 trillion next financial year, and $16 billion in HECS cuts hidden off-budget – alongside $100 billion in spending on the NBN and ‘clean energy’ – Labor’s green spending spree is ballooning propelled by Chris Bowen’s hot air, while resource projects are strangled by green, black, and red tape.

This should have been a core campaign attack. Dutton should have thundered: ‘This reckless spending must end’.

Instead, Labor attacked Dutton with bogus claims of cuts to Medicare and education. Dutton should have replied: ‘I’ll cut the billions wasted on green pipe dreams.’

This election has unfolded amid the worst strategic conditions since the second world war. Australia is woefully unprepared to deter aggressors or defend itself. Our chief ally, the US, is hostile on tariffs and silent on China threatening us – while Labor kowtows to Beijing. Yet the Coalition has hardly mentioned it will arm Aus- tralia now, not wait until 2040.

Between 2019 and 2022, Labor relentlessly turned Morrison, once a popular PM, into a liability through a dishonest campaign claiming he had a ‘problem with women’, fuelled by the sordid manipulation of the Brittany Higgins saga.

The Coalition should have followed suit turning this election into a referendum on Albanese’s lies, reckless spending, ruinous energy failures, and his sinister Voice – which he barely mentioned before the last election, but will certainly legislate if re-elected. The Coalition slogan should have been: ‘A Vote for Labor is a Vote for the Voice’.

It should also have been a referendum on the Greens because Labor only needs to lose three seats to fall into minority government. The campaign should have focused on the Greens’ economy-wrecking policies to abolish negative gearing; scrap the capital gains discount; ban new coal and gas mines; phase out fossil fuels by 2030; impose wealth and super profits taxes; tax paper gains on super, even if market losses erase them, decriminalise drugs; and open our borders to terror supporters on tourist visas from Gaza. The slogan should have been: ‘Vote Labor, Get the Greens, Destroy the Economy.’

Instead, Labor made the election a referendum on a pantomime Dutton, using nuclear costs and bogus cuts to run a fake but effective scare campaign.

This election is complex; preference flows are unpredictable, major party support is soft, the mortgage belt is screaming in pain at the cost of living, Victorian voters are disillusioned with state Labor, WA voters fear federal Labor’s heritage laws. But whatever the result, the Coalition missed multiple chances to make voters grasp the danger of re-electing Labor.