Breathe in, you have no mandate. Breathe out, why aren’t you sticking with your mandate?

The Liberals declare that Labor has “no mandate“:

Federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has told a Liberal conference in Sydney that Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s Government has no mandate to govern.

Then the Liberals complain that Julia Gillard might not be implementing the policies she promised to implement if she had a mandate:

“We have Prime Minister Gillard saying that she has a blank cheque to break promises,” he said.

“What an outrage! If the Prime Minister did not believe that she could put her election committments into practice she should not have accepted a commission from the Governor-General.”

Losing the election has left the Liberal Party somewhat confused and disoriented.

Still, at least Tony has enough of a finger on the pulse to be able to advise his colleagues as to what went wrong for them:

“We lost because we didn’t win enough seats”, he told 3AW yesterday.

Well quite. And before you say, well, duh – there are plenty of people in his party who think they lost because of some conspiracy by diabolical independents DARING TO WIN SEATS THAT ARE RIGHTFULLY THE COALITION’S.

So they should be thankful they’ve got a leader who’s one step ahead, and has figured out that winning more seats would help them in their campaign to form government at some point in the future.

Fortunately for the rest of us, I doubt they stopped eating paste long enough to listen to him.

ELSEWHERE: Shadow immigration minister Scott Morrison retweets Tony’s remarks about “mandates”, so I point out:

@ScottMorrisonMP Actually, ALP won 2PP, giving them a “mandate” to govern. PS check out the Labor + Greens numbers in incoming Senate!

To which he patronisingly replies:

@jeremysear you need a majority in the HOR for a mandate – what is Labor teaching the kids in our schools

Oh, really:

@ScottMorrisonMP You’ll have to point me where “mandate” is defined in the Constitution. Wonder what they taught at *your* school.

Which prompted this response (sadly, literacy appears not to have been one of the things taught at Scott’s school):

@jeremysear. Its called forming government in you own right. I(‘s the only mandate there is that counts.

Tony felt a little threatened by Scott’s description of a “mandate”

Which did seem to deserve a reminder of reality:

@ScottMorrisonMP Says you. But then, you Libs haven’t been able to form government without the Nationals for decades.

After that, he appears to have retired from the battlefield.