Matt Canavan and the Coalition sank an estimated $700,000 into the northern part of the Hunter electorate, where Dan Repacholi was replacing Joel Fitzgibbon as Labor candidate, only to see the Labor margin increase. Despite Canavan attacking net zero, the Nationals went back 7 per cent in Capricornia, taking in Rockhampton, where Canavan has his Senate office.

The Nationals went back 5 per cent in Flynn, making that seat 51-49 in another area where the coal attack was supposed to gain ground. Farmers for Climate Action, set up in 2015, claims that it’s recruited 7000 members from a base of 90,000 Australian farms. Nationals now have to defend Cowper and Nichols as marginal seats after being savaged by 9 per cent and 15 per cent swings respectively.

Their climate attacks failed in the country after fuelling teal candidates in the city with their most potent argument: that Frydenberg and the others talked climate but loyally voted in parliament with Nat deniers.

A concern with climate wasn’t just a force in the wealthy enclaves dashed from Liberal incumbents by teal independents. The prime minister’s notion that only privileged people, unaffected by the economic cycle, are able to indulge themselves by voting on climate is a false construct – as if the broad electorate wasn’t watching TV footage of fires in Greece and California and floods in Germany that matched climate events in Australia. Only the urgency of climate can explain why the Coalition lost seats to the Greens.

Despite $80 million of Clive Palmer’s money and a big bogey in anti-vaxx sentiment, the resurgence of the United Australia Party was overshadowed by ballooning in votes for the Green Party. The populist right was gutted, devolving into the mutual cannibalism of the UAP and One Nation with Pauline Hanson battling for her Senate seat (though UAP might claim its first Victorian Senate berth).

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Yes, it may be a narrow margin. But according to any international taxonomy, Australia is now positioned as a centre-left nation. Of course in a democracy the categorisation only stands until the next election. But Saturday’s shift was overwhelmingly about what Martin Luther King called “a fierce urgency of now”, and the urgency was about one issue. It was only possible because the country boasts a higher civic IQ than Scott Morrison or Barnaby Joyce had calculated.

Bob Carr is the longest-serving premier of NSW and a former Australian foreign minister who retired in April as Professor of Business and Climate at UTS.

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