The Coalition is done. As far as repudiations go, it doesn’t get much more brutal than what the nation delivered on Saturday night.

The worst result for the Liberal party since Menzies. Its leader turfed out of the Parliament along with most future leadership candidates. Swings against the party in every jurisdiction and most seats, including crucially, the outer suburbs that were supposed to be the new pathway to electoral relevancy.

There is no need to ask the Coalition, or its supporters in the political landscape such as News Corp, what it thinks needs to happen about anything in the future.

As the result became apparent, commentators from within the Coalition and its media arm were arguing that Dutton lost because he didn’t embrace Trump enough.

It’s hard to tell at this point whether this isn’t just some long term embedded espionage project coming to fruition. Voters didn’t just reject Dutton and his ilk, they consigned them to irrelevancy.

But will Labor? Because we are about to find out whether Labor has the bravery to govern without the approval of right-wingers.

This victory isn’t a thumping endorsement of Labor – it’s a rejection of mask-off, hard-right politics. But history tells us Labor won’t see it that way, and that’s not good for anyone.

Labor deserves credit for a disciplined campaign. Party Secretary Paul Erickson was right to advise the parliamentary wing to hold its nerve and to let inflation and cost of living pressures appear to ease, to get Albanese out in electorates from January – and to let the inevitable flow on effects from Trump’s policies to turn flirtation into revulsion.

But just because there is now just one major political outfit in this country capable of actually running a disciplined and professional election campaign doesn’t mean Labor has a mandate to stick to its middle of the road mediocracy.

Throughout the campaign, Albanese’s net approval rating stayed in negative territory – it just wasn’t as bad as Dutton’s.

In the final Newspoll before the election day, Albanese rated -10 per cent and Dutton -27 per cent.

Combine Dutton’s unpopularity with the most disastrous election campaign in modern public memory and you have voters flocking to the least worst option.

Dutton was the inevitable end point of the Liberal party that John Howard nursed into the electorate.

Avaricious, grasping and elitist, he embraced the worst of what Howard promised. There’s a certain irony that having dog whistled for white supremacy, his entire political career – and he himself – has been replaced by a white woman born in South Africa.

But don’t be surprised if you never hear from Dutton again. A multi-millionaire many times over, Dutton has never cared for public service beyond the power it gave him personally.

His politics was cruel and brutish and he fought against inclusion, tolerance and generosity with fervour. He spent the last week of the election campaign elevating a culture war started by self-confessed neo-Nazis.

The 2022 election was a harbinger of doom for the Liberal party which it deliberately ignored. It remains unclear whether Labor will do the same.

Labor spent the past three years pretending its hands were tied on issues of integrity, religious protections, climate, sanctioning Israel, tax reform, poverty, inequality and housing because it didn’t have bipartisan support.

It was bullshit then. It is even more so now. Voters did not overwhelmingly endorse Labor.

The cratering of the Coalition makes this seem like a massive Labor win when the party barely saw an increase in its primary vote. But minor parties like the Greens did see an increase, as did independents.

It’s continuing a modern trend where third parties are emerging as bigger challengers – so much so that psephologists are finding it harder to determine who should be in the top two for electorate contests.

It would be a mistake for Labor to take this result and see it as an endorsement of more of the same. If Labor does not do something with power this time round to materially improve people’s lives and reform the country, it is heading down the same path as the Coalition.