By the time this magazine appears on the newsstands, the results of the Australian federal election will – or at least should! – be known. According to the opinion polls – which are not exactly known for their Delphic accuracy – Labor has won government, either in its own right or after an arrangement with the repugnant Greens, whom they eagerly preferenced. If Labor has won minority government, it will be arguably even more dangerous than having won a majority, given that there will be elements of the Greens ‘sitting around the table’. Any discussion, it should be noted, in which the opinions of any member of the Greens is sought or taken into account is by definition disastrous for Australia’s future.

As we have argued on this page repeatedly, there is of course the possibility of a Coalition victory. The combination of preference voting and an unpopular government can still throw up any number of unusual and unexpected results across the spectrum. As with the Voice referendum, there is every possibility of a ‘shy Tory’ vote, in which those who intend to vote for the Coalition have kept their opinions to themselves, most of all from pollsters and journalists. Perhaps. We shall see.

But several points can already be made about this election which either result will not nullify. The first and most obvious is that the Labor party has run a disgusting, mendacious and unedifying campaign. Former senator Graham Richardson may claim that all political parties do ‘whatever it takes’ to win every vote, but if the Australian public not only accepts but also rewards the sheer volume of lies Mr Albanese has uttered and the audacity with which he delivered them over the course of the campaign, then Australian democracy is in serious trouble. Many of the lies have been called out – the Liberal party website listed some 88 of them in the dying days of the campaign – but by and large the fourth estate were quite happy to treat them as gospel. Fabricated numbers, such as the ridiculous $600 billion price tag slapped onto the Coalition’s nuclear policy, were endlessly repeated and other figures, such as the $78 billion Morrison deficit, were simply wrong or misrepresented. Lies abounded around healthcare, as always, plus hospitals and education, along with any number of scares surrounding supposed Coalition ‘cuts’.

Most egregiously, Mr Albanese clearly lied when asked by Sky News Australia host Kieran Gilbert during the first leaders’ debate – at the suggestion of this magazine’s editor – whether or not Labor had plans to revisit the Voice. The Prime Minister dismissed the suggestion with an abrupt ‘no’, but in this final week of the campaign we learned the obvious truth from his close ally Senator Penny Wong. Speaking on a podcast, Ms Wong described the introduction of the Voice and other elements of the Uluru statement from the Heart as certain to happen after describing Mr Albanese’s commitment to indigenous leaders. In other words, get ready for Voice 2.0 under a re-elected Labor government – precisely as predicted by Rebecca Weisser in her Speccie column of 5 April. Under Labor re-elected, the Voice will be introduced without a constitutional amendment, but with everything else intact. Again, this threatens to seriously corrupt Australian democracy.

As for our financial future, should the Labor party win we will have the obscenity of a tax on unrealised profits, a truly sinister policy that is the inevitable end point of governments who believe that all individual property actually belongs to the state. Or to give it its proper name, socialist totalitarianism. Communism. And it sets the precedent that governments can essentially tax whatever they damn well please.

As many have pointed out, taxing profits that may never be realised is not only unethical, but should actually be criminal. The negative effect on investment, innovation and enterprise is almost incalculable.

And what of the Coalition? If it loses, the first lie will be that this was because of the ‘Trump effect’. This erroneous concept has already been widely trotted out both in terms of the narrow Conservative loss in Canada, as well as as an excuse for the Coalition’s poor performance here. Yet it is as illogical as it is wrong. As James Allan rightly pointed out on Flat White, ‘it is obviously false to think that Trump’s tariffs and taunting drove conservative voters to the left. Poilievre scored the highest popular vote tally of any Conservative since 1988. The right-of-centre vote did not collapse, it gained. To have any chance of winning in the first-past-the-post system the Conservatives needed the progressive vote to splinter between the Libs, the NDP and the Greens, as it had been doing. But instead, after Trudeau resigned, the left-of-centre vote coalesced around the Davos Man, ex-central banker, investment banker millionaire Mark Carney.’

No conservative leader is less like Mr Trump in personality and campaign style than Mr Dutton, and no centre-right leader, other than Mr Poilievre, has been so determined to distance himself from Mr Trump.

No, Donald Trump is not to blame if the Coalition does, sadly, lose. We’ll have plenty more to say about what did cause the loss and three long years in which to say it. So let’s hope and pray they win.