Labor’s review fit to burn

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

I’m Jewish, so ordinarily the thought of burning books and literature is unsettling. But when it comes to a good chunk of Labor’s 2019 election review it might not be a bad idea. The “review” sums up everything wrong with modern Labor. It’s a Seinfeld review, a review of nothing, the type of review you publish when you don’t really want to ruthlessly review the broken-down, grand old party of Australian politics.

Where to start? Perhaps with the odd comparisons with the career of champion racehorse Winx in the review’s introduction. Federal Labor is at a tipping point, facing an existential crisis three decades in the making; its primary vote has landed between 33 and 34 per cent three elections in a row. These results are effectively its worst since 1906, when Labor was only 15 years old and politics was a three-cornered, not a two-cornered, fight. Labor doesn’t have a minute to waste; not a word to waste.

READ MORE: Paul Kelly: A tale of two Labors | Voters resented Shorten: Albo | Key findings from Labor’s review | Labor leader must quicken pace of resurrection

Most damning is the document itself. The review makes several sound, often cutting observations, not least the implicit admission that scare campaigns work when a party scares voters. Unlike other parties, Labor is brave enough to subject its workings to public scrutiny. The review scolds the party’s “complex” and “cluttered” policy offerings in several places, then produces 60 findings and another 26 complex recommendations. This was precisely the problem with Labor’s campaign. It has been the party’s major problem for decades: the review is designed to be all things to all people, to tick “progressive” boxes and to say “correct” things.

The review delivers little of substance or ideas for internal reform aside from “it’s not Bill Shorten’s fault … then again, it is Bill’s fault”. This is akin to Labor’s position on the Adani coalmine — impossibly half-pregnant. The same is true of Labor’s tax-and-spend agenda. It did “not cost the party the election”, we are told, but the review says its “size and complexity … exposed Labor to a Coalition attack that fuelled anxieties among insecure, low-income couples in outer-urban and regional Australia that Labor would crash the economy and risk their jobs”. So it was Labor’s tax-and-spend agenda after all!

The review doesn’t understand why Labor lost because it cannot comprehend that modern Labor is the problem — its language, culture, personnel and organisation. When you refuse to discuss the economy and instead wage a referendum on cancer (who would vote against it?) instead of a promised referendum on wages, shock, horror, people tend not to trust your party with managing the national economy.

“Labor didn’t craft a message on jobs” is the startling revelation produced by finding 36. That’s because too many Labor people don’t start with, or don’t understand, outer-suburban and regional voters’ primary concerns: family, work (jobs and wages) and place. The review boasts of the efficacy of Labor’s climate policies among young voters, ignoring the great mass who are alienated by the moralising tone of climate activists and who aren’t yet convinced by the real economic case for acting.

The review tells us: “Working people experiencing economic dislocation caused by technological change will lose faith in Labor if they do not believe the party is responding to their needs, instead being preoccupied with issues not concerning them.”

They’ve already lost their faith. It began when they were told, by none other than a Labor treasurer, that the early 1990s recession was one “we had to have”. “Labor should adopt the language of inclusion,” we are told. It has been talking the progressive language of inclusion and diversity for years: it is alienating, empty rhetoric. Normal people hate it. They don’t think of the world in these terms.

The zaniest idea is the argument around gender diversity in Labor’s campaign team. This is not why Labor lost in 2019, facing, as it did, a Liberal Party led by two blokes, Nationals led by a bloke and a Liberal Party HQ headed up by a bloke.

Startling, too, are the omissions. No mention of tradies, contractors or small and medium business owners, and winning them over to the Labor side. There is no grappling with the pressing need to make Labor — its MPs and rank and file — more reflective of the diversity of working Australia. No admittance that Labor has become, in the eyes of the electorate, dominated by an inner-city, middle-class, progressive elite.

Finally, it is alarming and revealing that the review singled out Bill Shorten. Granted, it did not lay sole blame at the former Labor leader’s feet.

Nonetheless, it is unprecedented for a review to publish an entire section on the leader. But, mark my words, the review has set an important precedent. Whoever leads the ALP to future elections should be subjected to precisely the same fate. No ifs or buts.

The review is signal evidence of federal Labor’s morbid state. The review allowed only three weeks for submissions to be received. It was then workshopped for months afterwards. It dodged inconvenient facts. It dodged the hard work Labor must undertake to reform, renew and reconnect with mainstream Australian life.

The review, its conclusions, omissions, malapportionment of blame and language, potentially signals the end of Australian Labor aspiring to national government.

Burn it down, I say, and start again.

Nick Dyrenfurth is the author of Getting the Blues: The Future of Australian Labor (Connor Court).