When it came to election, ALP was nobbled by arrogant Shorten
The reasons for the ALP’s loss at this year’s federal election were clear, writes Piers Akerman: polices bound to a tried, discredited and failed ideology — and a leader voters didn’t trust.
Opinion
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‘On Saturday, 18 May 2019, the Australian Labor Party asked the Australian people to put their trust in it to govern the country. They chose not to do so.”
How wise were they! The opening sentence quoted begins the ALP’s folksy 90-plus page review of this year’s election written by Craig Emerson and Jay Weatherill, released on Thursday.
Dr Emerson (he’s an economist) held ministries under both Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard but had had enough by the time Rudd toppled Gillard in June 2013.
Mr Weatherill, a one-time boyfriend of Labor Senator Penny Wong, was premier of South Australia from 2011 to 2018.
They certainly know their way around the ALP, which makes one wonder why they were asked to dissect the latest defeat and not take a more active role in constructing a possible victory.
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As they write, the Liberal Party was still reeling following Malcolm Turnbull’s disastrous ego-driven betrayal and assassination of Tony Abbott followed by Scott Morrison’s timely election to the party leadership after an untidy but effective challenge from party stalwart Peter Dutton.
The Emerson-Weatherill team took their lead into the report of their investigation of Labor’s loss from Sportsbet’s particularly dumb attempt to garner a public relations hit on the Wednesday before the 2019 election.
Thinking, perhaps, that punters would favour the gambling giant over others if it made a grand gesture, Sportsbet announced via the idiotic social media form Twitter that it would pay out punters who had backed Labor to win — more than two days before the actual election.
“Punters rarely get it wrong”, the Sportsbet tweet continued, and declared the next day that the federal election had been “run and won, backing Labor into Winx-like odds of $1.16”.
According to the dynamic duo of political sleuths that’s an 86 per cent probability of a Labor victory.
Here’s the difference, though: Winx never lost a Saturday race and Labor did.
As Emerson and Weatherill pointed out, Labor has failed to win a majority in the House of Representatives in eight out of its last nine starts.
They posed the question: what went wrong this time? “Was Labor burdened with the weight of Clive Palmer’s advertising in its saddlebags? Was it nobbled by a dishonest social media scare campaign? Did News Corp cause Labor interference in running? Was it the jockey’s fault? Or had Labor become complacent in the lead-up to race day?”
Unfortunately, the answer is none of the above.
Racehorses don’t have ideologies. Political parties do, and when policies are constructed to the specifications of a thoroughly tried, discredited and abjectly failed ideology, the party is bound to fail.
There was another big problem. The Australian public didn’t trust former AWU boss Bill Shorten.
The combination of an arrogant leader who acted as if the election was a done deal, combined with a raft of policies which he was unwilling or unable to cost or explain, cruelled Labor’s chances.
This is the assumption that drives the tweets of the angry Millennials and underlies the contempt in which they are held by the average Aussie.
Tellingly, the report’s shortened version notes: “Higher-income urban Australians concerned about climate change swung to Labor, despite the effect Labor’s tax policies on negative gearing and franking credits might have had on them.”
Well, duh, as Homer Simpson might say.
Millennials who spend more time photographing their food for their Instagram pages than they do eating, would swing to a party that panders to vanity virtue signalling rather than a party that dedicated to ensuring that economic underpinnings of the nation are sound.
Where do those higher-income urban Australians live? Balmain and Fitzroy and their equivalents in the inner-city areas where Greens hold sway and tolerance and diversity are preached but not practised.
Anthony Albanese conceded on Friday that voters resented the Shorten agenda — he stopped short of declaring it stupid — and promised a renewal project to overhaul Labor’s policy platform. He could have quoted Groucho Marx’s great line: “If you don’t like my principles, I have others.”
The glaring primary lesson for both major parties is be faithful to your faithful and don’t flirt with the extremists on either side who will never shift their vote no matter how many concessions are made.
Appeasement is not a solution, it’s a useless attempt to buy time.
Labor and Liberal need to stand up for the core values or they will continue to founder.