Federal election 2016: Turnbull’s speech was a bad speech, an angry speech, by Caroline Overington.

If there has been a worse speech than the one Malcolm Turnbull delivered shortly after midnight, I’d like to hear it. No, I wouldn’t.

It was a bad speech. An angry speech, the bulk of which was spent with Turnbull whining about the result.

The police would probably have to investigate, he said. Oh boy, we all know the definition of a sore loser. Now it seems bruised winners are just as charmless. …

Having promised his party that he was the man able to lead them into a bright and shiny decade of power, he’s barely hanging on. Was he humbled? No. He was annoyed.

Turnbull spent the bulk of his speech complaining how he was robbed. How the Labor Party cheated. How text messages were sent to thousands of people across Australia, claiming that Medicare was about to be privatised. He said the police would investigate. … The “Mediscare” campaign was, he said, a “shameful episode in Australian political history”. Which it was, but this was not the time or the place.

Then he had a go at the unions. And then gave a few more reasons — none of which had anything to do with him — why the Coalition had done so poorly. …

Turnbull spent the night not in a room at the Wentworth hotel, where his supporters had gathered to honour and celebrate him, but at his harbourside mansion? Who does that? Thousands of people, many of them elderly, had been hanging around windswept schoolyards for him for nine hours, wearing blue T-shirts over their jumpers because it’s been so damn cold, and he retreats to opulence.