Kevin07 campaign built on lessons from Whitlam and Keating

The prime minister-elect with Therese Rein and family.

We had gone into the election driving an economic, social and environmental policy juggernaut that had brought to the people the most comprehensive reform agenda of any party going into an Australian election since Gough Whitlam. Gough’s approach, on taking over the Labor leadership in 1967, five years before winning government, was that if Labor was to win it would be based on three pillars: the party, the platform and the people.

As leader, I had begun the first, by defying the factions in becoming leader in the first place, as Whitlam had done when he asserted his authority by staring down the faceless men of the party’s inner executive; by selecting my own frontbench rather than having the factions select it for me as they had done since time immemorial; by refusing to attend faction meetings from the day I was elected leader; and by demanding the expulsion of industrial leaders like Dean Mighell and Joe McDonald, who believed they had an open licence to bring the party into disrepute.

On policy, we had transformed the platform we took to the people by putting the economy first, as Paul Keating had done; formulating an integrated productivity agenda anchored in skills, infrastructure and the NBN; defining education as the central nervous system of both equity and the economy through an integrated education revolution from early childhood through to higher education, research and innovation; tackling the biggest health reform agenda since the introduction of Medicare and through it the broader reform of the Federation; and a climate change agenda ahead of the rest of the world.

As for the people, the Australian public had always been my first constituency, to the collective chagrin of the factions, and I would use every platform possible to engage them, including one of the first large-scale social media campaigns in Western politics, enabling me to outperform the most successful conservative prime minister since Menzies in every single opinion poll since parliament first convened in early February 2007, thereby adding momentum to momentum.

The Kevin07 campaign was not just about a brand, a personality or an individual; it was the beginning of a new movement of hope, reform and renewal across both the party and the country. This was why the organised forces of conservatism, both within the factional structures of the Labor Party and those who were “formally” conservatives across the ranks of the Liberal and National parties, felt so fundamentally threatened.

We were proposing a future in which the traditional political structures of the so-called left and the right would lose their stranglehold on power. We were advocating a more open politics based on core values, and translating these values into policies that brought about real change for the overwhelming plurality of people, and where leaders would be advanced through their own merits, rather than a smoke-filled room.

These were exciting times.