Labor must ‘win back the battlers’

Labor MPs say they must win back the support of blue-collar families in the outer suburbs and regions.

Labor MPs endorsed Jim Chalmers’ Light on the Hill speech, delivered in Bathurst on Saturday to honour Ben Chifley. Picture: AAP

Labor MPs say they must win back the support of blue-collar families in Australia’s outer suburbs and regions and develop an overarching message on economic ­security, after opposition Treasury spokesman Jim Chalmers declared the party lost the election among “middle-ground” voters.

Victorian Labor senator Kim Carr, a left powerbroker, warned that did not mean the ALP should “move to the right” and said it wasn’t the scale of the party’s policies — such as a crackdown on franking credits — but a lack of consistent messaging that led to the election defeat. Labor MPs endorsed Dr Chalmers’ Light on the Hill speech, delivered in Bathurst on Saturday to honour Ben Chifley, which was shown to senior colleagues ahead of time and said the party had lost its base.

“We mostly lost among middle-ground voters, not middle-income voters,” Dr Chalmers said.

“People in outer suburban communities like mine, around Australia.”

Opposition agriculture spokesman Joel Fitzgibbon, who held onto his regional NSW seat of Hunter despite suffering a 14.22 per cent swing against him, said talking about reclaiming the “sensible centre” was easy but achieving it would require cultural change.

“During the election campaign we found ourselves in no-man’s land,” Mr Fitzgibbon said.

“We satisfied too few. We equivocated on things like Adani. If you were a progressive observing us you were thinking ‘I’m not turned on by them because they’re backing Adani’.

“If you’re on the right you were likely to come to the conclusion we weren’t backing Adani. Game over.

“The real advantage we have — from a regional perspective — is that Anthony Albanese has spent an enormous amount of time in the bush over the course of the past 10 years and he absolutely understands the way regional people think.”

Senator Carr, a former cabinet minister, said Labor lost in blue-collar communities because the party failed to articulate a case for blue-collar families.

“We failed to develop an overall narrative as to why we needed a change in government because we concentrated too much on identity politics, inner-city politics,” Senator Carr said.

“We gave the impression we were not as concerned as we actually were. At a time when wages are stagnating, living standards for many people are falling and even people on higher incomes are ­anxious about the future in regard to technological change and are concerned about their industrial rights and have a belief the political and economic system does not represent them, it’s not appropriate for the Labor Party to abandon redistributive policies.”

The latest Newspoll, conducted exclusively for The Australian, shows Labor’s primary vote has dropped 0.3 per cent since the election to 33 per cent.

The party’s sweeping post-election ­review, which is likely to stoke divisions, is due early next month and Labor sources expected most of it would be made public.

West Australian Labor MP Anne Aly, who holds the seat of Cowan on a margin of 0.83 per cent, said the party needed to recalibrate while sticking to Labor values of “growth and distribution, that everybody benefits from the economy and nobody is left ­behind”.

“We had heaps of stuff for middle Australia (at the election). We had childcare, health benefits, it was all lost in the message,” Dr Aly said.

“We’re talking about people who are struggling with the cost of living and they are high-income as well as low-income. I know this. I’ve got low-income and high-income suburbs in my electorate. The most blatant example of that is the schools in the high-income areas have this year started running breakfast clubs for the first time ever.”