ALP review: Labor Party had no plan to attack Scott Morrison

Labor failed to adjust when Scott Morrison succeeded Malcolm Turnbull.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Thursday. Picture: AAP

Labor failed to adjust to the Liberal leadership transition when Scott Morrison succeeded Malcolm Turnbull or link him to the ­Coalition’s civil war because it had “no coherent strategy” to begin with.

A damning review of Labor’s election campaign also found that Bill Shorten and his team persisted with its assault on the Coalition for being soft on the “big end of town”, despite the attack line being formulated for Mr Turnbull.

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While Mr Morrison was only “vaguely defined in voters’ minds” when he took over the top job, the review criticised Labor for allowing the new Prime Minister to “colour himself in favourably”.

While Labor continued to ­attack the government for its planned corporate tax cuts and prevarication over a banking royal commission, the review argued that Mr Morrison was able to neutralise these issues.

“Morrison had presented himself as a suburban dad,” it said. “He had presided over budgets that had reversed many of the Abbott government’s 2014 spending cuts and in the 2019 budget he had ­announced substantial personal income tax cuts.

“Overall, Labor entered the 2019 federal election campaign with the same approach it had ­developed before the change of Liberal leadership in August 2018 and the federal budget in 2019.”

The review said Labor had no response to Mr Morrison’s ­December reframing of the election contest around “an evaluation of him versus Bill Shorten”.

The serious risk posed by the new leader should have been “identified, any strategy reviewed and, if necessary, adjusted”.

“But there was no coherent strategy to review … there is no evidence of any serious evaluation of the threat the shift to Morrison posed or any awareness of the importance of Morrison’s publicly announced reframing of the election as being a showdown between himself and Shorten.”

The failure to assess the risk posed by Morrison was one of the key findings of the ALP review, which described the Liberal leadership change as a “fundamental shift in the strategic environment”.