Labor election review: party post mortem doesn’t outline a path to victory

Anthony Albanese will have to wrestle with the findings of the poll post mortem as he looks to lead a Labor revival. Picture: AAP

Bill Shorten has not escaped culpability for Labor’s election loss.

But his was only a contribution.

A cursory reading of the 60 findings and 24 recommendations of Labor’s 92-page cathartic tome, released on Thursday, blames a dud campaign and a stuff-up in its social media and digital messaging strategy.

In doing so, the review has failed to address fundamental and structural weakness within the Labor movement.

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“It wasn’t Labor’s tax policies that cost the Party the election,” the report says.

And while it admits Shorten was unpopular, for six years, it wasn’t entirely his fault either.

So who, and what, was to blame?

Apparently, it was Labor’s spending announcements that exposed it to a successful Coalition attack on the credibility of its leader and the economic vandalism of its policies which in turn created anxiety among voters.

This may be true but it also suggests that voters, who clearly didn’t contribute to an insider’s study of electoral failure, are stupid.

This review confirms that few of the lessons of history will be learned, other than Labor needs more money to fend off third-party campaigners like Clive Palmer and sharpen up its campaign strategies.

The report is at least honest about several things. Its anti-coal message, “derogatory” class-war rhetoric and lack of a coherent reason to vote for Labor are obvious admissions.

It concedes that “economically insecure, low-income voters in outer-urban and regional Australia swung against Labor”.

It also points to Christians and Chinese swinging against Labor.

It claims as a success, its ability to win inner-urban young people and affluent “older” voters, with its climate-change policies.

This sums up the problem but provides little in the way of the fundamentals required to address it.

Bill Shorten’s response to the election review:

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Of this the report says: “Labor should position itself as a party of economic growth and reform, job creation and rising living standards, drawing upon and expanding on its past economic reforms.”

Presumably those past reforms allude to a wistful embrace of Hawke and Keating.

This would appear to clash violently with the key recommendation that the party stick to its core values.

Many right wing Labor MPs would no longer be able to articulate what they are.

While the review recognises that Labor can no longer be a “grievance”-driven activist club, it cannot deny that the party is now demonstrably and ideologically a party of the left.

The question that the report fails to answer, which is a question that Anthony Albanese now must address, is how to appeal to those voters it admits it lost, but who clearly don’t share those values that the left are determined to maintain.