On election night on level five of the Sofitel in Sydney is a secret room where they put all the blue-blooded Liberal supporters.
Every now and again the group, a large number of whom were in their 20s, would cram into the lift to go to someone’s hotel room. They looked like guests at a posh wedding – girls in expensive, Sloaney taffeta with complicated bustles and silk dresses, long ironed hair; boys in suits with foppish fringes, suits and scowls.
When I asked this bunch of malcontents, all of us crammed in a lift, what event they were attending, one actually answered that they were at a wedding.
But later that night after Turnbull gave his weird midnight hour speech, the ruse fell apart. Level 5ers were going up and down between floors – to private parties in rooms, to the ballroom on level one, to sit on the couches in the lobby with glazed eyes and pursed lips.
At 1am, one couple looking like they’d climbed through a hedge on someone’s country estate, waited for the very slow lift on level 10.
“So which seats are in doubt?” the Tory guy asked tersely.
“I don’t know, they keep changing,” said his friend. She sounded as if she might sob.
This was no wedding. It was more like a funeral.
At the start of the evening, journalists were put in an area as wide as the margins of the basketball court – roped off from the party that was occurring across the barrier.
And what a party it was. A dozen or so people standing around drinking bitter champagne, the canapes gone cold hours ago, but trays still circling – bad beef sliders, soggy rice paper rolls, hard mini-quiches.
This sprinkling of guests were a curious bunch. Were they fake Tories, brought in while the real ones on level five had hot hor d’oeuvres and real champagne? Or a Double Bay rent-a-crowd?
It was like a networking event for mid-level executives at a firm that may go into receivership. I mean, you go to these things right, with your business cards and your rictus grin – but they’re anxious, slightly fraught affairs, where dread is a feeling that settles over the night early and no amount of free booze can shake it off.
And so it was on Saturday night.
People barely glanced at the televisions. It’s as if they didn’t care. They seemed – at best – disengaged, uninterested, bored. The lack of energy in the room was palpable. It’s as if no one there had skin in the game, that nothing was at stake. When Wyatt Roy lost his seat there was not even a murmur of distress. Was this the best the Liberal party could offer?
Whatever it was, the canape to guest ratio was too high to call the party a success.
As usual, it was left to the journalists to drink the booze and create the fun. Staff had ejected the highly recognisable Oz sketch writer James Jeffrey (he of the iridescent blond mop of curls) and Buzzfeed’s Mark Di Stefano from the canape area – as it was “not for journalists”. But the ban was half-hearted. The empty space at the heart of the Liberal party victory party was too embarrassing to endure. Soon enough the majority of people at the party were journalists and the talk was all shop – where the swings had happened, when they had to file, who was tweeting what.
So it was unsurprising then to open the Sunday Telegraph and see a big photo of the “party faithful licking their wounds” – when it was in fact a Guardian journalist and a Fairfax columnist in the canape zone. It says it all really.
The ballroom was more film set than gathering of the faithful – empty of spirit and passion, where the PM, when he finally arrived, spoke across (not to) the rent-a-crowd and a bunch of journos, to the cameras. The stricken faithful were at their private parties, in other rooms, pretending they were at a wedding until 1am in the lobby, vivid with exhaustion and anger, they couldn’t pretend any more.
Every now and again the group, a large number of whom were in their 20s, would cram into the lift to go to someone’s hotel room. They looked like guests at a posh wedding – girls in expensive, Sloaney taffeta with complicated bustles and silk dresses, long ironed hair; boys in suits with foppish fringes, suits and scowls.
When I asked this bunch of malcontents, all of us crammed in a lift, what event they were attending, one actually answered that they were at a wedding.
But later that night after Turnbull gave his weird midnight hour speech, the ruse fell apart. Level 5ers were going up and down between floors – to private parties in rooms, to the ballroom on level one, to sit on the couches in the lobby with glazed eyes and pursed lips.
At 1am, one couple looking like they’d climbed through a hedge on someone’s country estate, waited for the very slow lift on level 10.
“So which seats are in doubt?” the Tory guy asked tersely.
“I don’t know, they keep changing,” said his friend. She sounded as if she might sob.
This was no wedding. It was more like a funeral.
At the start of the evening, journalists were put in an area as wide as the margins of the basketball court – roped off from the party that was occurring across the barrier.
And what a party it was. A dozen or so people standing around drinking bitter champagne, the canapes gone cold hours ago, but trays still circling – bad beef sliders, soggy rice paper rolls, hard mini-quiches.
This sprinkling of guests were a curious bunch. Were they fake Tories, brought in while the real ones on level five had hot hor d’oeuvres and real champagne? Or a Double Bay rent-a-crowd?
It was like a networking event for mid-level executives at a firm that may go into receivership. I mean, you go to these things right, with your business cards and your rictus grin – but they’re anxious, slightly fraught affairs, where dread is a feeling that settles over the night early and no amount of free booze can shake it off.
And so it was on Saturday night.
People barely glanced at the televisions. It’s as if they didn’t care. They seemed – at best – disengaged, uninterested, bored. The lack of energy in the room was palpable. It’s as if no one there had skin in the game, that nothing was at stake. When Wyatt Roy lost his seat there was not even a murmur of distress. Was this the best the Liberal party could offer?
Whatever it was, the canape to guest ratio was too high to call the party a success.
As usual, it was left to the journalists to drink the booze and create the fun. Staff had ejected the highly recognisable Oz sketch writer James Jeffrey (he of the iridescent blond mop of curls) and Buzzfeed’s Mark Di Stefano from the canape area – as it was “not for journalists”. But the ban was half-hearted. The empty space at the heart of the Liberal party victory party was too embarrassing to endure. Soon enough the majority of people at the party were journalists and the talk was all shop – where the swings had happened, when they had to file, who was tweeting what.
So it was unsurprising then to open the Sunday Telegraph and see a big photo of the “party faithful licking their wounds” – when it was in fact a Guardian journalist and a Fairfax columnist in the canape zone. It says it all really.
The ballroom was more film set than gathering of the faithful – empty of spirit and passion, where the PM, when he finally arrived, spoke across (not to) the rent-a-crowd and a bunch of journos, to the cameras. The stricken faithful were at their private parties, in other rooms, pretending they were at a wedding until 1am in the lobby, vivid with exhaustion and anger, they couldn’t pretend any more.
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