You’ve got to hand it to Labor. The party whose leaders do concession speeches so well that you sometime suspect it is the true destination of the campaign has reflected on its 2019 effort and produced a review of that ghastly, disorganised, leaderless event that is — in argument, layout and presentation — a masterpiece of concision, directness and style.
There is something near-pathological about this: the crisp executive summary, the subheadings, the FAQs, the ice-blue colour of the headers font (how much time was spent choosing that, I wonder) all dedicated to a story that should make you angry enough if you merely voted for Labor, and incandescent with rage if you actually campaigned for them.
This review confirms everything one suspected — and either held one’s tongue over or expressed circumspectly — during those weeks, as Bill Shorten was pictured day after day giving a speech at a lectern like an undertaker recording his own video eulogy. Meanwhile Scomo shot down a Wet’n’Wild waterslide with an actual Weber barbecue, cooking snags as he went, singing the clean version of “Khe Sanh”. Or so it seemed.
To be fair, the review is as unsparing as Alcoholics Anonymous’ “full inventory of our failings” demands: Labor lost “because of a weak campaign that never found direction, a cluttered policy agenda, and an unpopular leader”. Ouch.
Bad times, but behind the scenes it was worse. Some of the revelations are extraordinary. As this writer noted repeatedly over past years, Shorten’s tendency to surround himself with cronies would put him in a situation where effective leadership was impossible. This came to pass exactly so. Here’s about half of the review’s key findings in two paragraphs:
Dear God, how is that level of disorganisation possible? Such chaos almost requires organisation and planning. And of course it has it: the party as a whole has simply taken on the form dictated by the collapse into microfactions which gave Shorten his path to power. Interlocking informal groups somehow move forward, their personnel chosen for loyalty and fealty rather than talent or application.
From that utterly unforgivable lack of basic organisation much of the rest followed, at least at a responsive, campaign level: absence of a simple narrative; failure to adjust to the change from Turnbull to Morrison; failure to attack the government’s failings hard enough; archaic imagery (the “top end of town”) unconvincing for a centre-left party. And on and on.
The review is honest enough to describe Shorten as an unpopular leader, but it ducks the fact that he should be blamed for not arresting organisational failure, nor acknowledge that by the end of the campaign he was not merely unpopular, but hated. People didn’t dislike Shorten at the start of the campaign, simply because they didn’t know him yet. The deadened style of his campaigning communicated not gravitas but presumption that the job was already his.
Beyond that, it’s the stuff everyone’s been talking about: Queensland, Adani, the UAP blitz, the declining primary among all but university graduates. Yet here the review wanders away from proximate causes of defeat, to the wider questions of its base and core purpose. Here it tries to do far too much — a social analysis of sorts that can never escape the marketing framework — and consequently decomposes into a set of imperatives as disconnected as the failed policy suite the review is supposed to be examining. Labor must retain its progressivism but appeal to the outer suburbs; it must stand for liberal rights, but reconnect to Christians, etc.
Thus, what looks courageous is actually still ducking the real challenge: that the progressive-mainstream split is not merely a division between two sets of ideas which must be synthesised — not wiggled a bit left. a bit right like a grab-the-furry-toy arcade game — but also runs neatly between the party elite and its voting base. Solving that (more of which we’ll look at later) will take more than a handsomely produced report.
But my it is beautiful. Labor do it so well, failure.
Next week: How does Labor solve its problems?
I just feel despair at the Labor Party. The only party wit a social conscience who could take government are in self destruct mode. Another election win by this current mob of “nasties” would be a disaster
Electing Casper to lead them made it easier to vote against them.
Did it give credit where due to those states where media competition is as good as dead – where the brain eating walking dead media campaigned on scaring the living crap out of those living near moribund mining plots, that they’ll loose what’s left of their living?
…… Why they suffer Murdoch?
Compare this to the Coalition in government (as opposed to running an election campaign). We don’t have a working cabinet. Ministers don’t trust the public service, which is anyway now effectively disfunctional through years of wrecking. We have policy advice and development through external a few commercial consultants and mining and other peak (really gutter) corporate lobby groups (whoops, forgot the exteme religious groups), Policy & government is now by sequential thought bubbles.
As voters we should have in mind how they will govern not how they perform and spin lies in election campaigns. Same as an employer should assess a potential job applicant on how they’ll perform in the job, not whether they aced the interview with spin.
Perhaps I’ve got much to learn from the PM that spin and appearance is much more important than substance.
Until the ALP stands for something more than winning an election it is unlikely to do any better than it has to date. Australians think with their hip pockets a lot of the time, especially when the lies come so thick and fast from the LNP that the reality is obscured (that tactic is called firehosing I believe), but in the past Australians have voted on principle.
Only someone who can’t see past the limits of their self imposed bubble would not be able to see that if you look like the LNP, as the ALP too often does, then you can only win an election if you spin more lies than the LNP does and that’s a tall order.
“Until the ALP stands for something more than winning an election”
Isn’t that all that the LNP stands for.
After all, in the last election the LNP went to the polls with virtually no policies, and still don’t have anything of significance.
The review completely overlooks the real reason labor lost ie:
Shorten declined Murdoch’s invitation to dine in NYC.
Zut – I think you have nailed it there.
But the campaign managers should have been in emergency mode years before the election – when the best poll you can get is only 53:47 against such a hopeless outfit as the LNP you know something is badly wrong.
I could never get my head around it, but the only conclusion you can really come to is that Murdoch has a stranglehold on the mental processes of a shipload of voters…..I personally blame commercial TV for endlessly dumbing down the national thinking, and the ABC for not doing enough to counter the relentless drivel.
Good point, especially if the polls were wrong anyway. History suggests that Labor needs to be around 55/56 2PP in the months before the poll, it then settles after the campaign to a win at 52/53.
Murdoch is not a mind controlling demon, FYI. Don’t know why I must point out this, or the sentience of rural voters, but here we are.