ALP needs to start listening to the community and stop the bleating

The ALP has become a party appealing to grievance politics

In his first electoral test as Labor leader Anthony Albanese has done badly enough to embolden his critics demanding strategic changes to make the ALP competitive again, but not badly enough to empower them to ­remove him.

Labor is failing to speak to the majority of Australians about the real issues that ­affect them as it continues to lose primary vote support to the ­Coalition and minor parties who address the basic issues of job security and economic management.

The ALP has become a party appealing to grievance politics, victims and those who are “missing out” while failing to attract back its core traditional supporters who are interested in jobs and the price of milk, bread and eggs as well as iron ore and coal.

Again Labor has been misled and deluded by two-party preferred poll calculations into thinking there’s something unreal about previous losses or that they are explicable for reasons outside the ALP’s control.

At the last federal election, Labor, under Bill Shorten, ­became lulled into a false sense of security by two-party preferred predictions and didn’t address the growing cancer of a falling primary vote.

In 2019, Labor’s big-spending big-taxing agenda was divisively directed towards appealing to those who felt “left out” while making the “rich” pay for the compensation.

In the end it was “rich” workers earning overtime, higher pay and investing who felt “left out” by Labor and turned towards the Coalition or conservative minor parties in the ALP’s heartland.

The Eden-Monaro by-election likewise aimed to appeal to bushfire victims who were left out, those who didn’t receive recovery grants or didn’t qualify for the JobKeeper allowance.

But even Labor admitted there were more than 4000 people in the electorate getting JobKeeper and there were 4100 businesses that each got a $10,000 bushfire recovery grant, even allowing for duplication if you had two or three partners and family members to those beneficiaries you have almost a third of the electorate in direct receipt of Morrison government grants.

An echo chamber about ­Morrison’s bad PR in the bushfires and a pursuit of job cuts at the ABC was no way to measure or appeal to community-wide concerns.

While the Opposition Leader appears to have had a narrow victory in the Eden-Monaro by-election the margin of the win and the further erosion of the primary vote doesn’t save him from internal demands for change after the “ugly win” nor does it stop the destabilisation of his leadership that is under way.

Albanese’s great stroke in this by-election was the selection of candidate Kirsty McBain, who made the difference for a Labor win even as its primary vote continued to be peeled off. Labor has to talk to more Australians than just those with a grievance or a sense of entitlement.