Election loss opens Keating, Shorten rift

Backers of Bill Shorten have rejected Paul Keating’s analysis that Labor lost the middle class.

Paul Keating, right, joins fellow former PM Julia Gillard in welcoming Bill Shorten to the Labor Party campaign launch for the 2019 Federal election in Brisbane in May. Picture: AAP

Backers of Bill Shorten have rejected Paul Keating’s analysis that Labor lost the election because it lost the middle class, saying they were “surprised and disappointed” that the former PM had made the claim after backing Mr Shorten so strongly during the campaign.

The Australian today contacted Bill Shorten to give him a chance to respond to the Keating critique, but he declined.

One party figure said Mr Shorten “doesn’t really want to get into an argument with a Labor legend.”

However sources within the party queried Mr Keating’s claims, saying Labor’s two-party preferred vote had held up better than Mr Keating’s did when he was defeated as prime minister by John Howard in 1996.

“It’s surprising and disappointing given how much he’d backed us in,” the source said.

“Particularly since Bill’s two-party preferred of 48.47 was higher than Kevin in 2013, Latham in 2004 and Keating in 1996.”

At the 1996 election Labor received a two-party preferred vote of 46.37, ending 13 years of Labor rule. Under Mark Latham it received two-party preferred vote of 47.26 at the 2004 loss and 46.51 at the 2013 election when two-time prime minister Kevin Rudd lost to Tony Abbott.

In his interview on Tuesday night Mr Keating pinned Mr Shorten’s failure on drifting too far from the centrist policies of the Hawke-Keating era.

”If you’re talking about the Labor Party and why it lost the election, it failed to understand the middle-class economy that Bob Hawke and I created for Australia,” he said.

“And so much of Labor Party’s policies were devoted to the bottom end of the workforce and the community paid for by cuts in tax expenditures.”