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Barnaby Joyce quoted in the AFR today:

Barnaby Joyce has put the next Liberal leader on notice that he will “bargain hard” for extra National Party shadow positions after the junior Coalition partner withstood an outgoing political tide by retaining all its seats and gaining one senator.

Chiding some inside the Liberal Party for their failure to manage the fight against independents, Mr Joyce also blasted the teal independents movement for doing “an exceptional job of decapitating the moderates out of the Liberals”.

“I’m hoping they’re happy with their work,” Mr Joyce told The Australian Financial Review on Sunday. “They’ve managed to get rid of three gay guys, one Aboriginal and one Asian. Was that their game plan?”

The Nationals are on track to retain every one of their 16 lower house seats and will pick up a NSW Senate spot, taking their total to 22. By contrast the Liberals look set to lose more than 20 Senate and lower house seats, dramatically decreasing the relative weight of the senior partner.

Saturday’s Liberal Party devastation was concentrated in southern states, turning Queensland into the Coalition’s bulwark. One analyst said the Queensland LNP was set to provide as much as 40 per cent of the Coalition’s national total. If Peter Dutton survives in his seat, there’s every chance Queensland also supplies the Coalition’s leader.

Well, if there's one way to ensure a resurgence of support for the LNP in the big cities where it crashed, it's to have the climate change denying (or at the very least, downplaying) Nationals, led by a guy who faced an internal investigation into drunken misbehaviour with a woman, get more influence in the Opposition ranks!     [Sarcasm, of course.]

I see in the SMH that Barnaby had been making brave predictions about the result on the election day:

Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce started the night in a bullish mood, telling Channel 7 shortly after voting closed that the polls published during the campaign had missed a groundswell of support for the conservative side of politics.

“I think you’re going to be in for a big surprise. I think that the pollsters have got it wrong again,” Mr Joyce said.

“I think there were two different elections on here, the regional Australia election and urban Australia election and urban Australia election. I think in regional Australia there is a sense of anger.”

And now the question on every reader's mind:  does the election result mean I still see a need for a Reverse Pol Pot policy to de-populate the rural areas, as the only hope to actually crush stupid Right wing ideas?   Well, yeah, but sorry: if the people of New England can't see their way to vote out Barnaby, I don't see much alternative... 

Update:   a tweet summary of a Bernard Keane article at Crikey:

From the article itself:

Even a moment’s glance at the election results shows that Antic, Canavan, Credlin and Bolt are either incapable of simple maths or deliberately misrepresenting the outcome.

Australia shifted towards climate action, integrity and respect for women, dramatically. The Liberals lost seats to the teals, to Labor, to the Greens. Labor lost seats to the Greens, too. On the results so far, no one, anywhere, lost a seat to a more right-wing candidate. But there are plenty of ex-Liberals who lost seats to a more progressive one.

There was no shift to the right. Credlin’s claim that “one-time Coalition supporters … moved in droves to splinter parties on the right” is simply wrong. One Nation lost votes compared to 2019, despite fielding candidates in far more seats, and Hanson may lose her Senate spot. The main beneficiary of the fall in the LNP vote in Queensland was the Greens, who will take Ryan.

This Australian version of the Big Lie is the first stage of a war for the future of the federal Liberal Party, with the far-right unable to resist the opportunity to exploit the removal of so many more moderate MPs to drive the federal party away from climate action and towards culture wars, division and attacks on women and minorities.

At the centre of it will be the foreign political party News Corp. Despite its irrelevance to mainstream Australia being demonstrated by the election result, the Murdochs will continue to wield significant influence within a purged Coalition, and the company will seize on its status as an opposition party. From yesterday, the Murdoch campaign of regime change in Australia began — it’s just that the campaign extends to the Coalition as well as a Labor government.