Herculean effort needed if Labor is to rebound

THIS result reflects a structural change in Australian politics. The Labor Party has lost its heartland and its ruling rationale in NSW, traditionally its strongest state.

With Labor's primary vote reduced to 25 per cent against more than 50 per cent for the Liberal-National Coalition, a full recovery by the ALP down the track is not guaranteed.

The claims by senior Labor figures that there are no significant national ramifications in this result are ludicrous. It is more helpful at this point to recall Paul Keating's famous maxim that "where goes NSW, so goes federal Labor".

The NSW public is unlikely to forget or forgive for many years. This is a seismic shift. In many ways, it is Labor's most damaging NSW result for more than a century.

Labor has betrayed its base and the justification for its existence. The problem needs to be addressed with this gravity. While accentuated by the unforgivable behaviour of individual ministers, this is not its real cause.

This NSW election debacle reflects a deep malaise within the culture, structure and policy outlook of the state Labor Party - that once great institution that underwrote the Hawke-Keating economic reforms.

The public saw that Labor was governing for itself and the interests of its tribal, trade union and supporter networks. It was afflicted by a crisis of belief and a failure of delivery in public services, a deadly double.

Its ties to the community were governed by spin, not substance, and its machine grew addicted to focus group politics and leadership executions under pressure.

The nadir of this malaise was the crisis over electricity privatisation when the Labor organisation destroyed the Labor government of Morris Iemma. It is incredible that, with Kristina Keneally's resignation, the leadership candidate of the NSW machine is now former trade union leader John Robertson - architect of Iemma's fall.

Keating wrote to Robertson in 2008 saying: "If the Labor Party's stocks ever get so low as to require your services in its parliamentary leadership, it will itself have no future."

The chance that Labor can surmount the depth of its malaise cannot be discounted. But the task is herculean.

Any idea this malaise terminates abruptly at the NSW border is absurd. The problems penetrate party culture, structure and beliefs to varying degrees across the nation, with NSW merely being its ultimate manifestation. The truth is this disease was a factor in the decline and fall of the Rudd government and in the problems now faced by Julia Gillard.

For too long, Labor has seized excuses to deny political reality. The next excuse will be Barry O'Farrell as a potentially weak NSW premier. But O'Farrell is likely to be solid, consistent and diligent. He knows Labor is down and he won't be giving Labor any easy breaks. Meanwhile, watch for the Labor denialists.