Labor preparing to scale heights of indifference

Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Damian Shaw

The more days that pass lessens the time to the next election. Bill Shorten and Chris Bowen went out of their way to scare the electorate with big new taxes for the elderly last time. They frightened the horses and almost overnight lost momentum. Once lost, momentum in politics is hard to regain.

As Labor prepares for the next election, there is one obvious problem: there is no sense that the electorate wants change. If you want to create a mood for change you have to latch on to a government failing and hammer away at it for months so your message can get through.

Anthony Albanese has the hammer but there are slim pickings as he looks for government failures. Scott Morrison doesn’t do all that much but he knows how to make the troops feel relaxed and comfortable. The mob has found a safe, calm, reliable leader and shows no sign of tiring of him.

Not every prime minister has been a good bloke. On a personal level a few of them have been very ordinary human beings. Morrison is naturally cautious, but isn’t that what conservatives are supposed to be? Don’t people vote for the Liberal Party because they believe they are doing well in their wages and lifestyle? The electorate has taken the view that if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

The danger for Labor is that when that view hardens, the gap in support can only widen. The Opposition Leader has a huge mountain to climb and, without an international crisis intervening, he will remain the underdog at long odds.

Joel Fitzgibbon.

Labor frontbencher Joel Fitzgibbon made a very salient point to me this week. He said that Australia elects a Labor government only when we produce a star such as Bob Hawke or when a Liberal government gets into real strife.

Because the conservatives in general, with the notable exception of John Howard, don’t harbour a great desire for big reform programs, they promise so little that it would be very difficult to fail to deliver. The classic example of this was Malcolm Fraser, who had a Senate majority for a couple of years and did nothing with it. That is why he is unchallenged as the worst prime minister we ever had.

Post Fraser, we saw the era of the prime minister-treasurer combinations that served our country so well. Howard and Peter Costello may have had a testy relationship but it never showed when they were governing. Such was the aura around Howard that when his cabinet had decided it was time for him to go it wasn’t easy to deputise a minister to go tell him. The short straw finished up with Alexander Downer, a ballot he would have preferred to lose.

In my experience there is not much point in telling leaders it is time to go. You are better off warming up the tank engines and turning the turret so the big gun is pointing at the prime minister you seek to dislodge. Most have to be blasted out.

John Howard and Peter Costello in 2007.

The turmoil and the bitterness engendered by challenges to a leader are hard to understate. When Hawke was defeated there were tears in the eyes of many caucus members. I just walked back to my office and had a cup of tea. A victorious Paul Keating and Laurie Brereton joined me a few minutes later. There was no time for tears, just time to begin planning on how to win in 1993.

Graham Richardson and Paul Keating in 1994.

Now, I was the campaign director of the most unsuccessful campaign in Labor’s history. In 1973, as a young party organiser, I was sent to Darwin to manage Labor’s campaign for the first Northern Territory election. I’d seen nothing like it. I had candidates come into the Don Hotel to meet each other. Within an hour one threw another one through the window at the front. We produced a paper called the Northern Territory Times, written at the house of a former editor of the NT’s daily. He drank a flagon of white wine while we were writing it.

Being a Labor supporter can be hard. I would be sent to the bush to start or revive branches to ensure we had reliable people organising booths and pamphlet drops. The post office and the schools were always my first port of call. My father had been secretary of the postal workers’ union so name recognition was a big help. Teachers were good value and you could always count on a few of them.

As Australia has ceased to be a nation of joiners, it is worth remembering that when I came into politics in the late 1960s unions represented half the workforce and the Labor Party had almost 500 branches in NSW alone.

The decline of the trade union movement is most assuredly related to its success. Why be in a union if your job is stable, your working conditions are good and your wages give you a reasonable lifestyle? Decades ago it was normal to join a trade union. Many no longer see a point in so doing. Recruitment is difficult, time consuming and frustrating. Union membership isn’t cheap. Membership is at a historical low. This fall is permanent and I don’t believe can be arrested.