Bankstown Sports Club, 13 March 1993. The poker machines are beeping and the beer is flowing. It is a normal Saturday night, according to one who was there, Paul Keating's speechwriter, Don Watson. Except that on this particular evening, Paul Keating, the punters' local MP, is about to claim victory for the Labor Party in one of the most bitterly fought elections in Australia's history. Keating's Labor Party had beaten John Hewson's Liberals and their cousins the National Party, despite the fact that the Australian economy was wallowing in a mire and that Labor had already been in office for a decade. To make matters worse for the Liberals, Keating had snatched a victory that seemed highly improbable when the opinion polls twelve months earlier had put Labor at up to fifteen points behind a united Liberal Party. Keating delivered a memorable line to the ALP faithful and the punters who left their pokies and beers to listen: ‘This is a victory for the true believers’. His words amounted to the catalyst for many Liberals, turning the resentment and anger they had harboured towards Keating into sheer hatred.

As Gerard Henderson put it, ‘some Liberals felt real political pain leading to obsession – when Keating won the so-called “unlosable election” in 1993’. The conservative magazine Quadrant devoted most of its post-election edition to questioning the long-term viability of the Liberal Party.