It’s very hard, losing an election. Paul Fletcher, a Liberal moderate who survived the May election rout, is now manager of opposition business. Fletcher opened Wednesday cranky, and his mood did not improve.
He collided early with the iron-clad law that politics is a numbers game. Labor had resolved to change the standing orders to give more questions to the crossbench and fewer to the opposition. That tweak reflected the brutal representational mathematics of the May election, the conscious uncoupling of the Liberal party and its progressive heartland.
