Paul's Blog: Dominance to Disaster in Eight Months – What Went Wrong?

When I entered Parliament at the Bradfield by-election in December 2009, Federal Labor was riding high. 

Kevin Rudd led a first term government with a strong majority. A favourable redistribution in Queensland and New South Wales had improved Labor’s prospects even further.

Some pundits said the Liberal Party was so weak that we would fail to get a majority of first preference votes in Bradfield – for the first time in the seat’s sixty year history.

In fact we held the seat comfortably – and eight months later the first preference vote has risen from 56.4% to 64.5%.

Nationally the turnaround has been even more dramatic: in just eight months Labor has gone from dominance to disaster.

What went wrong for Labor?

Even at Kevin Rudd’s peak, there were clear signposts that his was a brittle government – so that when the turn did come, it would come quickly.

The first signpost was Rudd’s style of government.  Rudd was cut off from many in caucus, with a small group making decisions and cabinet merely rubber stamping them.  His lack of deep personal support would be a critical factor a few months later.

A second signpost was Rudd’s handling of his emissions trading scheme.  He made little effort to sell this complex reform to the Australian people; his focus instead was using the issue to wedge the Coalition.

The Australian people began to wonder: was Rudd really committed to this issue?

The third signpost –during 2009 Labor increasingly exposed itself to criticisms of waste and mismanagement, through poor management of key programs. The Coalition was laying the foundations upon which we would later build our key election messages.

In the first half of 2010, under sustained political attack from the Coalition’s new leader Tony Abbott, Labor made a cascading series of strategic errors.

First, Labor underestimated the impact of Abbott’s attacks on Peter Garrett’s pink batts and Julia Gillard’s school halls.  Rudd should have moved much more quickly to cut Garrett loose and shut down the pink batts program.

Second, Labor’s decision to dump the ETS was a disaster.  After Rudd had linked himself so strongly to the promise of strong action on climate change, this decision fatally damaged him. 

It was toxic with those voters who ranked climate change as a high priority issue.  But it had a much wider import.  It gave every voter reason to doubt Rudd’s sincerity and commitment, if he would so readily abandon a policy about which he had been so vocal.

With the Coalition having successfully regrouped on the issue of climate change, announcing a position in February 2010 backed by $3.2 billion of funding, Labor now found itself with no clear policy – against an opponent which did have one.

Third, Labor mishandled two major new policy moves in the first half of 2010.  Labor’s mining tax struck many Australians as a very strange way to deal with a sector which is key to our prosperity.

And Rudd’s supposed ‘fix’ of the federal-state divide on hospital funding simply reminded Australians of his penchant for complex bureaucratic schemes – the pedestrian reality of which fell  miserably short of his sweeping promises.

The fourth mistake, in Labor’s accumulation of errors, was dumping Rudd.  As we now know, this directly contributed to the loss of up to ten seats – including Bennelong in Sydney and a raft of Queensland seats. 

The anger of Rudd supporters, especially in Queensland, was significant.  But just as significant was the shock caused to many Australians - that a Prime Minister chosen in a general election could be replaced on the whim of a handful of people, most of them unknown to the Australian public.

At one stroke, Labor’s strategists handed a powerful differentiator to the Coalition.  Under our system, authority rests with the leader of the Parliamentary Party.

If the people elect a Liberal Prime Minister, they can be sure who they are getting.

Mistake number five was Gillard’s decision to call an election almost immediately.  She made no attempt to establish herself in the public mind over a period of time as Prime Minister.

The sixth mistake was in the conduct of Labor’s campaign.  What did they stand for?  Why should people vote for them?

There was no clear narrative, other than “Julia Gillard is not Tony Abbott.”

Labor’s campaign was a mix of transparent gimmicks – such as outsourcing climate change policy to a group of 150 Australians chosen at random from the telephone directory – and potent reminders of Labor’s poor track record in delivery. 

Joining with the NSW Labor Premier to announce a rail link – one that NSW Labor had years before promised and then failed to build – was a critical error of judgement.

As we now know, this catalogue of disasters led to the most comprehensive repudiation of a first term federal government in eighty years.

The remarkable events of the last eight months hold clear lessons for all political parties. 

Perhaps the most important is this.  The people grant the power to form government; and they can take it away quickly if they do not think you are up to it.

Labor made a series of bad mistakes – but their biggest mistake was being a bad government, with no conviction, no courage and no clear direction.

If that is the message which the political class takes away from the 2010 election, then there will be a permanent positive legacy from this turbulent period in Australian politics.