Albanese knows what’s wrong, but will he fix it?

Much of the review has been aired before. The test is whether Labor will learn the lessons.

Labor leader Anthony Albanese speaks at the National Press Club in Canberra on Friday.

I didn’t mind reading the review of Labor’s 2019 federal election campaign. It was pretty honest, really, considering the target audience was the party faithful, not always noted for rewarding honest criticism. But the challenge here, as ­always with these things, is will Anthony Albanese have the ticker to act on it?

The narrative bits in the review were reasonably coherent and the post-election statistical analysis was well organised — it was, after all, based on the stats profiling pioneered for the ALP 1983 campaign by your humble correspondent. I even got a nod in the review for a piece published in Inquirer the week after the election and many of the demographic themes in the review were consistent with my findings.

While the foundations of the review were reasonably solid, nailing the jelly to the wall for the rest of it was more difficult for review authors Craig Emerson and Jay Weatherill. I had to feel some sympathy for them for trying to find out who was actually responsible for the loss. As any political operator can tell you: victory has a thousand fathers, defeat is an orphan.

This meant that when they asked who was the person or committee responsible for the campaign strategy, an endearing modesty overcame the national secretary, the state ALP secretaries, the party leadership group, the senior shadow ministers, senior party officials, even the Opposition Leader, his office, the ­shadow expenditure review committee and an augmented leadership group. Not just me, sir. I couldn’t possibly claim the credit. We all did it, sir.

No wonder they all hid under their desks. It was a campaign without a coherent strategy, with far too many tax-and-spend policies released far too late to be understood, and all of it masterminded by Bill Shorten, who wasn’t just unpopular but was viewed as disloyal and shifty by many voters, not least of all in Queensland for knifing their elected prime minister Kevin Rudd.

And, frankly, the bloke sounded like Whinging Wendy from Labor’s 1987 campaign, whining through the nose. “Where’s the munny cuming frum, Meester Howard?” Across the nation, mute buttons got a going over whenever Shifty Shorten appeared on the telly. Forget the money he spent: Clive Palmer’s negative Shifty adds worked only because they had plenty to work with.

Working-class men and women with kids in state schools didn’t believe Shorten’s education spending promises, churchgoers resented his attempt to smear Scott Morrison about his faith, retirees didn’t trust him with their retirement incomes and coal­mining families resented him for trying to take away their jobs to suck up to green voters in the inner city.

The review didn’t quite put it like this, but its statistical evidence certainly pointed in that direction, as did ours. The evidence from our research concurred that while Scott Morrison had a superior strategy to win votes in marginal seats, Labor’s local candidates out-boxed the Coalition on the ground with some strong personal vote campaigns.

We also agreed that the voting blocs that stood to gain the most from the spending policies of the Labor campaign — think parents of kids in public schools who stood to get a large slice of an extra $14bn in spending on schools — simply did not think more spending solved their problems, or didn’t believe it would be delivered.

And many higher-income voters Labor said would pay higher taxes to fund these spending increases swung their votes to Labor. I suspect they didn’t believe the tax increases would get through the Senate and they supported Labor’s policy on climate change.

I’m not so sure about the Chinese per se swinging against Labor. Political parties dominated by WASPs invariably see an ethnic Chinese vote motivated by their ethnicity rather than the fact they tend to be agnostic and well-­educated professionals.

I liked the review’s recommendation for spending caps and truth in political advertising and I share the concerns for the erosion of trust in politicians and political institutions, not just in Australia but around the world. In Australia, this erosion of trust has caused the primary votes for all major parties to wither over the past 25 years and led to the election of increasing numbers of independents.

When the major parties see their primary votes drop below 40 per cent, they start to lose their safer seats to independents, as rusted-on voters are the first to break loose from traditional loyalties. Labor under Shorten lost the election with 33.3 per cent of the primary vote, its lowest since 1903.

The Liberal Party won the election with 28 per cent of the primary vote, its lowest since the Liberal Party was formed in 1946. The ­Nationals party won 4.5 per cent of the primary vote — its third-­lowest primary vote since it contested a national election as the Country Party in 1922.

The only group keeping the Coalition afloat in 2019, with 8.7 per cent of the primary vote, was the Liberal National Party in Queensland, an oddball combination of Nats and Liberals whose constituents basically represent everybody in Queensland who hates Canberra and shiny-bummed political carpetbaggers from down south.

The review touched on the ­arrival of online disinformation as a decisive factor in Australia’s democratic processes and quoted the joint standing committee on electoral matters: “Hostile strategic actors have a greater ability to sow division in society by weaponising controversial or misleading information; and the self-selection of news has contributed to the rise of echo chambers and filter bubbles in which misinformation spreads … unchallenged.”

So why shouldn’t Labor and the Coalition ban political ads on ­social media, as Twitter has done independently? And why not legislate to treat social media “news” the same way we treat “news” in print or radio or television or cable — in other words, make social media legally responsible for the material it publishes?

Social media junkies can become totally absorbed by the re­inforcing tricks used to maintain their interest and shepherd them into group-think networks.

After a time, some become more extreme and more prone to extremist views.

I talked about this recently with a retired friend of mine who dis­agreed with my assessment of the dangers of social media and then proceeded to explain how the Twin Towers were blown up on September 11 not by Middle East terrorists but by an Israeli hit squad. He’d read it on social media where he got the “real news”.

To wrap up, I’ve written a few of these ALP reviews myself, but nothing as “strategic” as this one — it was so strategic that the word “strategy” in its various forms ­appeared no fewer than 76 times in the review’s 91 pages.
But, like all these reviews, most of it has been said before and is meaningless unless the relevant party leadership can bludgeon the factional vested interests into implementing the key recommendations. From what we’ve seen so far, Albanese doesn’t seem the bludgeoning type.

Take the case of miners in Queensland and NSW’s Hunter Valley. The review lamented Labor’s “ambiguous” language when it said one thing about Adani and coalmining to Melbourne greens and another to Queensland miners. The review inferred this was instrumental in the decline in the Labor vote across coalmining seats. Well, this was true enough for 2019, but the rot started with Labor’s vote among miners in 1966. I know this because I wrote the review for Labor’s 1983 campaign. Labor knew the problem ­existed in 1983 and did nothing to fix it because it wanted to win Greens preferences in urban seats. Nothing had changed in 2019.

As a political leader, knowing what you need to do is easy. Doing it can be a lot harder.

John Black pioneered election profiling in Australia in the 1970s and is a former Labor senator for Queensland. He is executive chairman of Australian Development Strategies.

www.elaborate.net.au/category/election-profiles/