There's a surefire way for Labor to lose the next election

Five days before the 1974 election, Patrick White, recently awarded our country’s first Nobel Prize for literature, spoke at a rally at the Sydney Opera House. Gough Whitlam and Jorn Utzon, that building’s architect, he said, were both "men of vision who build for the future while not losing sight of the everyday details".

We are less likely these days to pay as much attention as we should to artists. That is a great pity, because to my mind the most incisive analysis of the last election was offered by our only other literary Nobel laureate, J.M. Coetzee. In a long piece in The New York Review of Books, focused on sharp criticism of the major parties’ refugee policies, Coetzee noted that the contest was "won and lost on arcane issues in the tax code".

Patrick White speaking at the Opera House in support of Gough Whitlam in 1974.Credit: Peter John Moxham/Fairfax Media

The Labor Party is currently engaged in a debate about what went wrong in that campaign. Everybody in the party has their opinions, and in two weeks we’ll get the official version, when Anthony Albanese responds to the party’s election review.

So far, we’ve had some potshots, some shadowboxing around individual legacies, but the only interesting feature is how limp the debate has been. It seems at times as though MPs are arguing only because they know they should.

No doubt the debaters would disagree. They’d say they hold their positions passionately. And sure, Mark Butler and Joel Fitzgibbon had a good dust-up on climate, and the devotion of many MPs to stamping out the franking credits boondoggle can’t be doubted.

The problem is the two levels at which the debate is taking place. One is too vague, concerned with words which mean almost nothing on their own. There is a race among MPs to declare they are for growth. That’s a strawman if ever I heard one. Where are the Labor figures arguing anything else? The other two words working overtime right now are "aspiration", which everybody agrees is good, and "neoliberalism", which everybody agrees is bad.

In two weeks, Anthony Albanese will respond to Labor's review of what went wrong in the election.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

The other level is too specific: the ongoing arguments about precisely which election policies should be tossed out. It’s not an utterly meaningless debate, but it’s close. I happen to think Labor’s franking credits policy was good, but whether it survives doesn’t tell me much on its own. Too much of Labor’s internal debate is just a repeat of the election, doggedly debating arcane issues in the tax code, free of broader context.

And yet despite the debate’s dampness, some MPs have been complaining that it’s distracting from the government’s woes. Well, perhaps it is, but if a party can’t have a discussion about its philosophy in the immediate aftermath of three consecutive election losses, then when? Is it a political party or a PR outfit?

But this, of course, is the whole problem. There have been, in the last months, some reasonable attempts to understand what went wrong, even to position the party historically. But rather than trying to work from there to an understanding of what sort of country a major progressive party might want to see come into being over the next two or three decades, what its approach to government might look like now it’s come face to face with the limitations of free markets, the conversation so often jumps straight to so how can we win the next election?

Now, this might seem forgivable: after all, Labor prides itself on being a party of government. In other words, it must win elections in order to fulfil its purpose. But that doesn’t mean its purpose is fulfilled by winning elections.

Illustration: Jim PavlidisCredit:

Even sticking to the pragmatic political calculus, I’m happy to go further and say that without a clear answer to those larger questions, Labor is less likely to win.

Labor will always scare voters. It represents change, and therefore risk. The fear can be minimised, but it can never be erased. For Labor to triumph, that fear must be overpowered by excitement. And that is a hard ask – partly because you won’t excite voters by just giving them what they say they want in focus groups. This might sound trite, but voters expect Labor to fight, even when they’re not completely on board with the cause. The party should have learned that in 2010, when it backed down on emissions trading, and bled support.

Before this year’s election, I thought Labor’s platform fairly left-wing. In certain respects, like tax, it was brave. But what if it wasn’t left-wing enough? Labor tried to have it each way on Adani. It would think about gender quotas on boards. On the central moral issues of our time – climate and refugees – it copied its opponents. If Labor is willing to admit it did not have a sufficiently inspiring vision last time, does it really think the answer lies in being just a little more innocuous?

One of the reasons artists have less sway these days is the concerted campaign by the right to paint them as elites, and the failure of the centre-left to fight back. It should be a reminder. There are many ways to lose a battle, but the only surefire method is not turning up.

Sean Kelly is a former adviser to Labor prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard.