Letter from Sydney/Pádraig Collins:Ulysses S Grant, in his inaugural address upon becoming the 18th president of the US in 1869, said: "I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent application."
His dictum came about 140 years too soon, but he could have been talking about WorkChoices, the draconian, anti-union industrial relations (IR) laws that contributed more than anything to the Australian government being so spectacularly dumped in a 6.3 per cent swing last weekend.
There were other factors, including climate change, a tightening of welfare rules and rising inflation and interest rates, but WorkChoices was the obnoxious policy that blew up in the face of the Liberal-National coalition.
Australia's economy has been expanding for 17 years, 11½ of them under the coalition. Since 2004 it has been booming due to China and India's voracious thirst for Australia's vast mineral resources. Unemployment is at a 33-year low of 4.3 per cent.
These are not the conditions you expect to lead to a government losing power and the prime minister being humiliated by losing his own seat.
WorkChoices neutered Australia's industrial arbitration court, sought to destroy unions through making individual rather than collective agreements the norm, exempted companies with 100 or fewer staff from unfair dismissals cases, and allowed employers to average out hours worked over a year so they need never pay overtime.
Unless you had a skill in short supply, WorkChoices meant there was always someone who could do your job cheaper.
At the 2004 election, the coalition made no mention of WorkChoices. It was returned for a fourth term and, armed with an unexpected senate majority, made the grave mistake of introducing the most retrograde IR laws in the western world.
To understand why it would do this you need to understand that the Liberal Party is not a liberal party. It is conservative in the tradition of Britain's Tories. There are a few "small l" liberals in the Liberal Party, but they mostly kept their mouths wired shut under prime minister John Howard.
Even before WorkChoices was introduced, the Australian Congress of Trade Unions (Actu) was mobilising against it with mass rallies, television advertising and, most importantly, public information sessions.
It spent millions on the campaign, much of it funded through unions asking members to pay a dollar a week extra in their dues.
The Labor Party was also involved but getting little traction because of its internal feuding. That all changed last December with the elevation of Kevin Rudd to party leadership. The Australian public saw him as a safe pair of hands, someone who listened to them and understood their concerns.
The very word WorkChoices became electoral poison and government ministers had to be goaded by journalists into even uttering it. Last May they removed some of its worst excesses by introducing the so-called "Fairness Test".
This was a stupidly tacit admission that it had previously been unfair. The Actu and Labor spent the rest of the year convincing people it was still unfair. They were helped along by John Howard saying in parliament: "Working families in Australia have never been better off." There were 103 polls between Kevin Rudd becoming leader and the election last weekend. Labor won them all.
Winning the election was the only poll that counted, though, and Labor has done that with what is likely to be a 22-seat majority. The prime minister losing his seat was the icing on the cake.
When former television journalist Maxine McKew announced last February she would run against the prime minister, the best Labor hoped for was she would lose but win the byelection when Howard resigned after losing the election.
By mid-year, she was polling ahead of Howard, but fell behind again in October. Then there was extraordinary news on election eve. Labor's internal overnight tracking poll revealed the swing was on, a landslide loomed and Howard would lose his own seat of Bennelong.
As with many great Australian Labor Party stories over the years, this one has an Irish connection.
Something tipped the electorate in McKew's favour and that something was a bogus leaflet purporting to come from the (non-existent) Islamic Australia Federation and seeking to link Labor to the Bali bombings terrorists.
The deputy secretary of the NSW Labor Party, Luke Foley, led a group that intercepted and photographed a Liberal state executive member and others while they were putting the leaflets into post boxes late at night in western Sydney.
The effect was compounded when outgoing Liberal MP, Jackie Kelly, whose husband had been one of those caught, gave radio and television interviews laughingly dismissing the racist smear as "a prank".
This did not play well in Bennelong, which has a huge Chinese and Korean-born population. The Australian Chinese Daily helpfully translated the story and made it front-page news.
Foley's intervention had made a crucial difference. He is very proud of his Irish roots. He is an O'Brien on his mother's side and is married to Tyrone woman Edel McKenna. They were married and their daughter Aoife christened there, in Augher. After pulling off the sting that helped unseat a prime minister, he's looking forward to a break and his next trip to Tyrone.
Meanwhile, the Liberals just do not get it. The party are still saying there was no anger towards it in the electorate. It is now out of power in every Australian state, territory and federally. How much more anger does it want before it wakes up to the disaster meted out to them?