With Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce by his side he took full responsibility for the election result. He blamed Labor’s “Mediscare” campaign for the result, while conceding that something in the Coalition’s approach to health as a political issue had created “fertile ground” for what he described as Labor’s “lie” to take root.

For a party that has made an art form of scare campaigns over the past decade – Peter Dutton banging on about boatloads of illegal and illiterate refugees stealing people’s jobs being merely the latest example – it’s a bit rich for the Liberals to complain if Labor does it back to them.

Going into the election with 90 House of Representatives seats to Labor’s 55, the Coalition had every reason to expect to win on Saturday. But by going to a double dissolution election simply because it couldn’t get its latest bit of union-busting legislation – the Australian Building and Construction Commission – through the Senate, the government subjected an already sullen public to an eight-week election campaign that turned far more people off than it turned on, while at the same time effectively halving the vote that minor parties needed to achieve to win a place in the upper house.

As a set of tactics, it looks obviously and abjectly wrong in hindsight. Convention said don’t go for a mid-winter poll and don’t bore the pants off voters with an unwanted marathon campaign. Turnbull did both.

The likely preponderance of minor-party and independent members in both houses of parliament has put much of the post-election focus on how whichever major party that forms government will deal with the cross benches. Arguably the most unexpected result on Saturday was the One Nation vote, which has been enough to return Pauline Hanson to the parliament as a senator for Queensland, while her NSW running mate, Cessnock’s Brian Burston, is tipped to win a Senate spot in NSW. Burston’s brother Graham ran third in the Paterson contest, polling 12.89 per cent of the primary vote.

It’s tempting to draw a line from Pauline Hanson to Donald Trump and the Brexit vote to say that all three are the result of a wide working-class dissatisfaction with political elites.

The Liberals during the Howard years made an art form of declaring that ideology was dead. Class warfare – their description of Labor’s calls for a fairer share of the spoils – was a thing of the past. But the rise of One Nation, together with the protectionist streak that runs through the Greens, Katter’s Australian Party and the Nick Xenephon Team, reveals a slice of the electorate that is unhappy with the globalised, high-tech future that Turnbull and the Labor Party under Bill Shorten both present as the way forward, while clobbering each other whenever they can as political partisans.

I am heavily indebted here to former Reserve Bank of Australia board member Warwick McKibbin who suggested the idea on Tuesday in the Australian Financial Review, but if Labor and the Coalition truly believe in the politics that have delivered Australia 25 years of continuous economic growth, then there is an easy way around the cross benches in both houses.

Form a war-time style consensus government, with Turnbull and Shorten at its head. The party with the most votes picks the prime minister, the other leader becomes his deputy. A true way down the centre of politics, in other words.