Liberals and Nationals lose loyalists in Victoria. Swing biggest in safest seats Demographer and former Labor Senator John Black says Victorian Liberals lost their base: ...a lead-footed, hesitant Coalition government got clobbered by an effective and populist Labor campaign. On the current political settings, the same thing is likely to happen to Tony Abbott in 2016 for the same reasons.... Saturday's Victorian swing of 2.5 per cent was not big enough to be emphatic; nor was it concentrated on 2010 Coalition marginal seats, where it picked up six or seven seats out of a dozen marginals.... This means the biggest swings to Labor came from hardcore Coalition voters in seats such as Sandringham, Hawthorn, Bass, Caulfield, Nepean, Benambra, Gippsland, Murray Plains, Werribee, Kew and Warrandyte. Get the picture? Labor didn't win this election. Hardcore Liberal voters chucked out their own. Just as hardcore Labor voters chucked out state Labor governments during the chaotic Rudd/Gillard era. The swing to Labor overall was indeed 2.5 per cent. But the swing in many of the safest Liberal and Nationals seats was much higher. The swing in Shepparton - 32.5 per cent. Sandringham - 8.3 Hawthorn - 8.1 Caulfield - 6.7 Murray Plains - 6.2 Warrandyte - 5.6 Kew - 5.6 Brighton - 4.5 Malvern - 4.3 Yes, Hawthorn and Kew had sitting members quit. Special factors were at play in Shepparton, with the Nationals losing to an independent. And, of course, fewer people are rusted on these days, as Labor has already found. But the message seems clear: the Victorian Liberals and Nationals did not have a happy base. That's very true of the Nationals: The National Party faces losing party status in Victoria, with its state-wide primary vote reduced to about 5.3 per cent, compared to 6.8 per cent in 2010. Although thousands of pre-poll votes are still to be counted, the Nationals appear to have lost the seat of Shepparton, which it has held for 47 years, to rural independent Suzanna Sheed after suffering a whopping 32.5 per cent swing. The seat of Morwell is also under a cloud, with Nationals incumbent Russell Northe suffering an 11.6 per cent swing. Which suggests Abbott's big push on the Monday after the Victorian election is exactly not what's needed if he wants to inspire his own troops to fight: TONY Abbott has stepped up the campaign to recognise indigenous Australians in the Constitution with a passionate and direct appeal to constitutional monarchists, the group most against reforms and the constituency he successfully led to defeat the 1999 republican referendum. Delivering the Â­Neville Bonner Oration to Australians for a Constitutional Monarchy on Friday night, the Prime Minister argued that as a "constitutional conservative" he did not want to change the Constitution, just "complete it..." "The challenge is to find a way to acknowledge Aboriginal people in the Constitution without otherwise changing it," he told the private function in Sydney. In an ardent appeal to the group he once led against constitutional change, Mr Abbott said: "I invite the friends of the Constitution to suspend scepticism..." That Abbott is explicitly and openly taking on conservatives says everything. This is not a winning strategy - to antagonise your allies without placating your foes: Indigenous leader Mick Dodson ... criticised the Abbott government for contributing to a "discourse of negativity" about Aboriginal people and ...said the government's focus on child protection, community safety and employment in indigenous affairs emphasised failure. The negativity actually makes people sick.... John Black continues: Which moves us neatly onto Abbott. His erratic leadership of a cabinet of angry old men is reminding me more and more of the last few months of John Gorton. The problems for Abbott lie not just with his cabinet, an ineffectual Treasurer, an unsellable budget, a bogan Senate and duff policies. The problems for Abbott start with Abbott himself. ABC presenter Jon Faine, a Greens sympathiser, gloats that the Victorian result shows elections can't be won from the radical right, and this was the "last roar of the dinosaurs" of the Liberals. The Liberals must move to the centre. We know why Faine, who offered no such analysis following the fall of Labor, would want this to be true. But what makes that analysis so transparently self-serving is that is relies on imagining the Baillieu and Napthine governments as radical right-wing. The exact opposite is true. Faine has form. This is the same ABC radical who, after the fall of the Howard Government, asked the editor of the Herald Sun if he'd then have a "cleansing" of his conservative columnists (of whom there were but me and Terry McCrann): JON FAINE: I want to expand our discussion to another aspect of media which I think is quite intriguing as the Rudd Government is about to start it's first session in the parliament, and that is whether or not the media needs to go through a bit of a rethink, as it would seem, according to last year's election, the nation has. Have things moved on and have some of the staples of the media in the Howard era worn out their usefulness as we enter a Rudd era? ... I'm going to talk in particular about columnistsâ¦ and Bruce you have some notorious ones of your own? ... so you're not going through a cleansing process? But Faine called for no "cleansing" of "notorious" Leftists at the ABC or Fairfax (like himself) when Labor just five years later lost the federal election and was left in power only in South Australia. There was no talk then of the "last roar of the dinosaurs." To celebrate this morning, Faine gives a very kind interview to the Greens, with none of the rude heckling that he invariably gives to Coalition MPs. The Greens look like holding just one of the 88 seats in the lower house. Too transparent, Jon. Excellent piece by Roger Franklin: Advance your enemies, betray your friends â that might be another epitaph worth inscribing on the Liberal headstone. As to the next four years, well, it is a horror-show script. For starters, the incoming government has sworn that it will shut down much of the state's coal-burning capacity to generate electricity. Plus, there are some $30 billion dollars worth of promises, a union thugocracy waiting to issue orders, and emergency service workers to be lavishly rewarded for their truculence with pay raises that will set the scale for many, many more of similar size to come. If Victorians wish to glimpse the future, look not to Andrews" promises but across Bass Strait, where Tasmania's basket-case economy sets the benchmark. Thanks to reader Gab.