Hayden fears Labor's time has passed

Former Labor leader Bill Hayden  has declared that Australia's oldest political party may have "had its time".

Former Governor of Australian, Bill Hayden

BILL Hayden was the last man standing when Labor crashed in Queensland at the 1975 federal election. Now the former ALP leader and governor-general has declared that Australia's oldest political party may have "had its time".

The message was rammed home to him this week when he climbed into a taxi and the driver spat out his disgust with the ALP over its shattering defeat at last Saturday's state election.

"He said, 'I thought you would have changed your name to Bill Smith at the weekend'," Mr Hayden said, revealing in a rare interview the depth of his despair for the ALP. "He gave me an earful."

Formerly life-long Labor supporters have stopped 79-year-old Mr Hayden in the street to say they could not bring themselves to vote ALP this time, and perhaps never again.

They told him what was all too apparent from the rollcall of state Labor casualties: 43 MPs, including 12 ministers, and the scalp of former premier Anna Bligh, who resigned in the wake of the defeat.

They said Labor had lost touch and was not fit to govern. "It may not be the case that it's time for Labor," Mr Hayden said, with a nod to the famous campaign slogan that brought Labor into office under Gough Whitlam in 1972 and launched his ministerial career.

Mr Hayden went on to lead the Labor Party and serve as foreign minister to prime minister Bob Hawke, who then appointed him as governor-general. "It may be that Labor has had its time."

The seeds of the Bligh government's destruction and the message it shouted to Canberra were sown in Mr Hayden's home town of Ipswich, on which his former seat of Oxley is based.

There, in the blue-collar heartland of a one-time coalmining town, where Wayne Swan's call to arms against the mining barons could have been expected to resonate, the swing smashed through the statewide mark of 16 per cent that delivered Campbell Newman the premiership and his Liberal National Party up to 78 of the 89 seats in state parliament.

In the once-safe Labor seat of Ipswich, former transport minister Rachel Nolan astonishingly lost nearly 30 per cent of her primary vote; in neighbouring Ipswich West, Wayne Wendt was thrown out on a 22 per cent swing.

Twelve-year veteran Jo-Ann Miller kept the swing below 20 per cent in Bundamba -- just -- and staggered across the line courtesy of the size of her margin and a very conscious decision to distance herself from brand Labor before and during the campaign.

A coalminer's daughter who worked as a fresh-faced volunteer to save Mr Hayden in 1975 in Oxley, she ripped the ALP logo off her campaign bunting, and makes no apology for it. "I was acutely concerned that the tide was running against us at this election," Ms Miller said yesterday.

"This has been a warning to all of us -- me, our federal MPs, everyone in the party -- that we have to get out there and reconnect."

Mr Hayden said he was worried that the electoral blows were raining down on Labor more often and with greater force. At the state level, Western Australia, Victoria, NSW and Queensland are gone, and Paul Henderson will struggle when his turn comes later this year at the Northern Territory election.

Federally, Julia Gillard is polling nearly as badly as Ms Bligh did last Saturday, when Labor's base vote in Queensland plunged to 26 per cent and returned only seven certain state MPs.

"The setbacks seem to be accumulating to ever-greater heights of reversal," Mr Hayden said. In relative terms, he rates Saturday's election defeat as the ALP's worst, surpassing the carnage of 1975 that he alone survived in Queensland. That was second only to the pain John Howard inflicted on the ALP in 1996 when it was reduced to two seats in Queensland, with the Treasurer and Kevin Rudd among the victims, albeit temporarily.

How bad will it be next year, assuming federal parliament runs full-term? "Unless this party gets out of this suffocating thing we have created, I fear we might have had it," Mr Hayden told The Weekend Australian.

He said the decline of Labor's branches and party conferences -- "manipulated by the factional barons" -- were symptoms of Labor's demise.

After Morris Iemma's leadership was blown up in NSW over electricity privatisation, he was at a loss to understand why Ms Bligh would go down the same path with asset sales. "They still blundered off," he said, referring to her decision to sell a raft of state enterprises, including the freight arm of Queensland Rail. "They just don't understand Labor culture."

The issue cut deep in Ipswich, 40 minutes' drive from downtown Brisbane but a world away from its shining office towers and pricey restaurants. The locals have raw memories of losing the railway workshops in a state government efficiency drive back in the 1990s, and this helps to explain why the backlash was so savage, especially against Ms Nolan.

Federal Labor MP Shayne Neumann, whose electorate of Blair covers most of the three state seats in Ipswich, was stunned when not one person wearing a union T-shirt or cap would take a how-to-vote card from him on Saturday: "They walked straight over to the LNP or Katter."

In its debut outing, Katter's Australian Party did surprisingly well at Labor's expense in Ipswich, and Mr Neumann sees this as ominous for the ALP federally.

While KAP's statewide vote came in at 11.4 per cent, it spiked to 18.5 per cent in Ipswich West and nearly 15 per cent in Ipswich.

Another factor in Ms Miller's survival in Bundamba was that the KAP candidate there, Bernard Gaynor, secured only 8.7 per cent of the vote.

Mr Neumann said the Katter pitch succeeded where Labor conspicuously failed in reaching the "people who count, who decide elections".

"They're people like tradesmen . . . who are a bit religious but not necessarily churchgoers, socially conservative, OK with unions but not necessarily a member, and who want money spent on the roads or local schools . . . they want to see that their local community is looked after," he warned.

They didn't have a lot of regard for Tony Abbott personally but they were the voters who had turned on Labor in Ipswich and the party needed a targeted strategy to woo them back.

"Elections are not won in Lygon Street, Carlton," Mr Neumann said, referring to inner-city Melbourne's fashionable cafe strip.

"They're won and lost in Brisbane Street, Ipswich."