After getting over its bewilderment about how it lost an election it was universally expected to win, Labor will undertake a detailed post-mortem about what went wrong that may never be made public, unless someone decides to leak it to settle an internal score.
There will also be a number of theories advanced by Labor people, some designed less to explain than obscure where responsibility might lie.
One current theory is that Clive Palmer badly undermined Labor by acting as, in Wayne Swan’s words “a preference-recycling scheme for the Liberal and National Party”. Palmer himself has backed that by claiming responsibility for Morrison’s win. It’s true that the significant fall in Labor’s vote appears to have at least partly gone to the LNP via first preference votes for Palmer. And Palmer’s constant advertising against Labor and Bill Shorten would have also hurt.
There are two big problems, though.
First, while spending barely a cent compared to Palmer’s tens of millions, Pauline Hanson managed to get more than twice Palmer’s vote in Queensland and three times his vote in Western Australia — not to mention a frightening 22% in the NSW seat of Hunter. Second, if Labor voters can be tempted away by some advertising to vote for a discredited figure like Palmer, then Labor has more serious problems than a rogue billionaire.
There is something profoundly wrong in a political system when right-wing fringe elements attract a growing share of votes, and suggests that the main opposition party has failed to exploit what is an evident disaffection within the electorate.
As Crikey noted last week, the Coalition was running hard on a last-minute scare campaign around Labor’s negative gearing changes, targeting both homeowners and renters despite the fact that neither would ever be affected by the changes. Strangely, this campaign has been overlooked in the immediate aftermath of the election, with the commentariat focusing instead on Labor’s proposal to end the franking credit rort and how Morrison’s campaign against the “retiree tax” was what delivered for him.
That in itself says something about Labor: when you can’t work out which scare campaign was the most effective, then your overall program might be the issue, not specific elements. Remember, too, the franking credits rort is enjoyed almost entirely by wealthy retirees who wouldn’t vote Labor at gunpoint, and it doesn’t explain why Labor did particularly badly in Queensland and Western Australia, or why wealthy retirees decided to vote for One Nation and Palmer rather than the Coalition.
If there is a consensus in the washup from Saturday, it’s that Labor’s reform agenda was too big and too scary. That perception is likely to cruel the immediate leadership hopes of Chris Bowen, who was hands-down Labor’s best performer in the campaign but who is closely associated with the reform package.
The issue may not have been the size and complexity of Labor’s reform agenda but the focussing of its message. US Democrat and union pollster Vic Fingerhut nailed this last week in a piece in Crikey: “with the exception of a few references to ‘a fair go’, there wasn’t a simple, compelling overriding message.” Fingerhut presciently compared this campaign to 2004 (people forget that many expected Mark Latham to win even late in that campaign), which he examined after he worked with Labor in 2005.
The electorate preferred the ALP on the overwhelming number of specific issues, but the Coalition was still winning — as it had won in the four previous elections. The problem today, as it was then, is that we are pushing too many issues for folks to absorb, particularly among the undecided swinging voters.
Labor needed to simplify the question for voters, Fingerhut argued. “Establish a basic question for the final days and final vote choice… Which party is more likely to stand up for regular working families in Australia, and not just the big corporations or the very rich?”
It’s clear that Labor didn’t do that. It spent much of the campaign bogged down in detail around the costing of its policies and how they would work and talking about its fiscal strategy. It also devoted about half of the campaign to talking virtually exclusively about health — an important issue, to be sure, but the sheer range of announcements and focus on cancer seemed to cloud the basic issue. People don’t plan to get cancer. They tell themselves they’ll never get it and hope they’re proven right. But everyone knows they’ll use a hospital or a doctor or some other health professional at some point.
A sharper, simpler, more effective message might have also headed off the government’s scare campaigns around specific policies. But then again, if Labor was getting the same polling data as we saw in the published polls, it’s possible it had no idea that voters were turning away in Queensland and WA.
It’s dead easy to make the wrong call when you’re getting wrong information.
Did Labor fail in its messaging to voters, or was there something else at play? Drop us a line at boss@crikey.com.au with your thoughts. Please include your full name if you would like to be considered for publication.
The question is: how many self-centred morons who care nothing for our nation’s welfare are there in the Australian voting public? The answer: about 77 out of every 151.
The campaign direction failed in as much as it greatly overestimated the capabilities of their traditional support base to inform itself and to make rational decisions.
Most people are too busy in their personal worlds to actually research and analyse what is actually happening in the wider environment and to understand just how the machinations of their “Elders and Betters” are purposefully affecting their lives in a negative manner.
Keeping their collective noses to the grindstone is just one of the more successful ploys.
Labor, Labor, Labor, Labor, Labor …. a government with an abysmal record of action tears itself to pieces 8 months before an election and the issue is, how well did the Opposition campaign? You are falling for the News Corp sucker punch – hardly a mention in the Murdoch media during the campaign about the carnage in the Govt with senior women being bullied and harassed out of the party, senior moderates jumping ship, all hope of coherent energy policy gone, no plan for flatlining wages, wonderful employment growth that has just got us back to where the Gillard govt had us before the Hockey-Abbot budget disaster, absolutely zip on climate policy and Joyce doling out platitudes to drought-stricken Australia that this wouldn’t have happened if the Coalition had been allowed to build more dams. It’s classic conjurer’s misdirection – look over here, while I escape through the trapdoor. Yes, Labor’s plan was overly broad and disconnected, and Bill ain’t no communicator, but those shortcomings pale into insignificance against the Coalition’s record.
When you cant work out which scare campaign was the most effective then you need to look to a too compliant media. Probably the most emblematic comment I heard during the campaign was from an ABC correspondent, surname McMillan…..travelling with the PM she pointed out that the travelling scribblers on Shortens bus were complaining about being bored….all he was doing was talking policy, Going from one place to another and talking about the policies he was releasing. While the PM was out meeting people and picking carrots, sitting in tractors…dynamic she implied, certainly she was entertained…..This is the press mind you, and the ABC . So when you scribblers sit down to analyse where Shorten went wrong and he undoubtedly did go wrong big time, perhaps a little reflection on the performance or otherwise of the press is in order?
There has been lots of talk about the impact of franking credits on Labor’s vote and the importance of climate change in blue ribbon Liberal seats. In my local seat of Goldstein, the swing to the ALP was 7 % and the swing away from the Greens was 2 %, with an overall 5 % gain gain to Labor on a two party preferred basis. Local wisdom had been that the so-called retiree tax would have the reverse effect. An enigma or just an anomaly. Anyway, we’re still standing down bayside.
The knee jerk reaction is in these wealthy, educated seats people could react to the climate change emergency, accept the long term view that the costs of inaction are higher and not sweat the risk of short term pain.
Whereas in regional Queensland, regional NSW, the short term cost could be your job (or you fear it will be) which makes it harder to take the long term view.
Even worse, you have these wealthy inner city southern states people, whose jobs aren’t at stake, telling these regional and outer suburban voters they have to risk sacrificing jobs and whatever pain they are scared of to stop climate change without any equivalent pain or sacrifice for the aforementioned inner city southern states people. Adani became the figurehead of this argument.
As I say, it’s knee jerk. It might not be the whole story. But at least it is plausible and hangs together.
Not that I noticed that labor mentioned it, but you would have thought that regional nsw would be pretty dark on the lnp because of their stuffing up the darling and Murray rivers. If I lived near them I would be really pissed off. Dead fish for heaven’s sake!
I’m in Hume. Regional NSW. Taylor FFS is our member. Despite the scandal and embarrassment he had a swing to him. I volunteered for the ALP 5 weeks ago, never heard back from them. Representation has become a game of numbers. Safe seats become entrenched over time.
Bonaparte quipped : Except in politics is stupidity an impediment.
In Australia a politician is almost enhanced by it.
Nailed it, Arky.
It may hang together for you Arky, but I ain’t buying it. Too simplistic and too logical. Voting decisions are made in the gut and rationalized in the mind.
Labor lost because it took a brainfart policy to an election, the franking credits issue was badly handled and should have been introduced after they were in office and then grandfathered, all it did was frighten every body with superannuation who then asked what change is next, peoples super should be left alone just like politicians leave their own super alone, all parties should be very careful what they say and do about national superannuation and especially labor who introduced it, grandfathering would have simply meant the changes they proposed would have come in painlessly and hurt no one and prevented Morrisons scare campaigns, shorten was a fool and run a fools campaign and so was their campaign directors, blind freddy could see this coming, they run a government campaign from opposition and scomo run an opposition campaign from goverrnment